Establish your product in a niche or vertical market.

If you already have product in a competitive market and you are not yet getting any results maybe you need to specialise.

The biggest mistake many companies make is trying to be everything to everybody.

Find an obvious void in the marketplace and fill it. Adjust your company or product to meet a specific need and then specialise.

A niche market is a focused, targetable portion of a market frequently not addressed by mainstream providers.

Why should you bother to establish a niche market?

Think of the great advantage of being alone there.

Other small businesses may not be aware of your particular niche market, and large businesses won’t want to bother with it.

The trick to capitalising on a niche market is to find or develop a market niche that has customers who are accessible, that is growing fast enough, and that is not already owned by one established vendor.

The biggest mistake an online business can make is being everything to everyone.

Look at the pet category.
Why bother competing with pets.com when you could focus on and attract every parakeet owner in the world with parakeets.com.

The truth is, running two or three websites that each target a specific niche market is the easiest way to make money on the internet.

Everyone is looking for the big money maker.
So, all too often, niche markets are ignored.

So the objective then is to:

• Find a niche market.

• Figure out what they want.

• Develop the product.

• Offer it to them.

• Automate the business.

• Then start another and diversify.

There is a lot of money to be made this way. Focusing on a distinct, well-defined niche market is a powerful key to online success.

A unique niche reduces competition and provides your online business with a clearlydefined market.

Bookstores on the internet are common – many, like Amazon.com, already dominate a major online consumer share.
However, focusing on a niche means you can isolate and spotlight a single book category - a specialised discipline - and exploit the exclusivity and uniqueness of that vertical market.

What happens when you move into a niche market and specialise?

First, you immediately turn a commodity into an oddity - a unique, differentiated product with a defined target demographic.

Instead of just ‘books’, you now become the online authority for, say, ‘dieting books’ - with a defined audience and clear picture on where that audience gravitates. (health news groups, body and fitness related sites and portals, weight loss magazines, content sites, newsletters, and so forth).
Also, you are now a manager and supplier of rare or specialty products that may be difficult to locate offline through traditional brick-and-mortar outlets.

With a specialised product, your broad-spectrum competition is no longer directly competing for your target market - and having ‘the lowest price’ is less of an issue.

Understanding what makes your customers tick because you know exactly who they are and what they want, also enables you to communicate with them in a way they will respond to.

Regardless of whatever marketing technique you employ, you’ve already leveraged your opportunities for generating meaningful traffic by narrowing in on a qualitatively distinct audience with predictable consumer needs.

In a niche market, you can achieve higher search rankings by optimising URL’s, titles, tags and content with the niche keywords unique to your business. With your keyword competition greatly reduced, your customers will have no difficulty finding you at the top of search queries.

The bottom line question is this: can your business sell more by specialising, differentiating, and locking onto various niche markets?

However, beware, concentrating too closely on an isolated niche can also be a liability if the market for your product is quite small or there is little online demand for such a limited item.

This is what a business plan and market analysis is for.

Once you have discovered a lucrative niche market, you can build around a core product vertically - and enhance overall value. B&BD