What Must You Do To Create A Market Niche And Dominate It?
Author: David Hurley

Chris Anderson, executive editor of Wired magazine, coined
the phrase The Long Tail in 2004 to describe the key
principle behind niche marketing that companies like
Amazon.com use to create a market niche and build sales on
the Internet. One Amazon employee described Amazon's long
tail marketing strategy like this:

"We sold more books today that didn't sell at all yesterday
than we sold today of all the books that did sell
yesterday."

Yesterday's marketing strategy was to focus on selling a
narrow range of bestsellers. Today's strategy is to sell a
much wider range of books to a much larger number of
specialized niche markets, each with a smaller potential
market than the bestseller lists. The total sales of books
sold to all the niche markets outnumbers the total number
of generalized bestseller sales.

While Amazon leads the way when it comes to selling books
to a wide range of market niches, anybody can build a
successful business focusing on just one or two niche
markets on the Internet. You can create a market niche for
yourself by choosing just one section, or sub-section, of
the tail and then "dominate your niche" by focusing all
your marketing effort on it.

By focusing on creating a single market niche you will also
quickly build up a reputation for yourself as an expert in
your chosen field.

So, what must you do to create a market niche and dominate
it?

First of all, find something you know a lot about,
something that interests you and that you would enjoy
talking to others about. Remember, if you are looking to
build a successful niche business you need to work with
something your feel passionate about. Belief in the product
is not only good for you, it conveys a strong message to
potential customers as well and will help you to relate to
your market base and communicate more easily and
effectively.

Once you have found an area of interest it is time to drill
down to specifics. Being specific is one of the keys to
niche marketing. The long tail is long precisely because it
extends over a huge range of specific interests. Your aim
should be to find a specific niche that is small enough for
you to dominate, but large enough for you to establish
yourself as an expert and make a good living in.

Let's say you are interested in games. "Games" is a huge
category so you opt for the niche you are most familiar
with, "board games," but you are still faced with a huge
amount of choice, so you could narrow it down further to
something more specific such as "German board games". This
would serve as your primary niche and if possible should be
incorporated into the name of your website, i.e.,
German-Board-Games.com or germanboardgames.com.

You now have the exciting choice of deciding whether to buy
and sell physical games, or whether to make your own
product such as an ebook about the German gaming scene, or
a series of ebooks each dealing with a particular German
board game.

Trading in physical products from your niche site is a good
thing to do if you have time to deal with purchasing,
packing and shipping as well as customer enquiries. Selling
physical products to a niche also opens up sites like eBay
for your business.

However, there are only so many units of product that a
single person can turn around, so if you go down this route
you will either have to stay small or begin hiring staff at
a certain stage as your business develops.

Making your own information product will require a lot of
research and writing for no immediate return. However, once
you have your information product up on your site you can
sell it again and again without having to worry about
handling stock. This gives your business more scope to
expand without your having to employ any more staff.

In addition to these two options, you may want to find some
niche-relevant affiliate programs to promote in order to
generate extra revenue. If you sell an ebook, having a
related affiliate product to sell on the back end is an
excellent profit-boosting strategy.

Your aim is now to make your site the top destination for
people looking for online information and about "German
board games" or whatever your chosen niche happens to be.
As a niche marketer you don't have to compete with the
marketing giants and sell to the whole world. All you want
is to attract a few hundred people to your site each week
and work on turning those visitors into customers and those
customers into fans.

By setting up a website that pitches to a well defined
market niche somewhere on Chris Anderson's "Long Tail" you
stand a much better chance of succeeding online and
dominating your chosen market.


About the Author:

David Hurley is an Internet marketer based in Hiroshima,
Japan. His website focuses on affiliate marketing program
business opportunities and features a FREE Internet
start-up course for your home based business success. No
sign up required! Check it out at:
http://grasp-the-nettle.com