Hunting for Niches

Niche marketing is latest craze in 2004. Some Internet marketing experts would have you sort through keyword search data at Overture to find an underserved audience, but you can jumpstart your research by a significant margin when you pay attention to offline media.

On any given day, there are thousands of special interest television shows and radio programs broadcast to a devoted, core audience. When you tune in to these programs regularly, you begin to get a feel for common goals, needs and desires of this audience. In other words, niche defines itself before your eyes through consistent themes in program content.

You will often find that listeners are pointed back online for additional information. For example, a guest speaker on a radio program usually provides a web site address on air (or has it linked for a time from radio station’s web site).

This is where things get exciting for you as a niche hunter. This is where offline media can open up to you a portion of your niche’s favorite “hiding places” online, thus giving you instant data on potential link partners and advertising venues. All you need is a spare afternoon and latest release of Alexa Toolbar running in your browser to start mining for gold.

Niche Hunting In Action

In illustration of process, we will take an example from radio broadcasting. For over 10 years now, AM radio stations across North America have syndicated a unique program called “After Dark” (also informally referred to as “Coast to Coast with George Noory).

There is a nuclear-strength “secret” weapon that 90% of self-employed professionals are missing out on as they try to build their businesses. It’s amazingly simple, amazingly powerful – and – amazingly overlooked!

It’s called “Situational Marketing,” and it can revolutionize your business.

As professionals in service industries, we live, eat, and breathe ideas. We live flying in stratosphere, soaring with angels, shooting with stars. We think in terms of big ideas and processes. When we talk about what we do, we love to describe how things work in our field and theoretical explanations of how to fix problems.

The trouble is that vast majority of our potential clients don’t live in world of ideas. They live on ground. They think about getting their kids to school. They worry about being laid off from work. They struggle with getting their own businesses to work better.

People have very short attention spans. Most people are aware of a very small number of acute, practical problems that are driving them crazy. They want solutions, they want them to be quick, and they want them now. They don’t have bandwidth for a lot of exposition.

Self-employed professionals like coaches who try to sell “realizing your potential,” “getting where you want to go,” or “creating life you want to live” really have a problem. Most people might think those are nice ideas, but they have to think so hard to figure out what that means for them that they’d rather go home and balance their checkbook. Even if they might be intrigued, they are thinking something like, “It would be nice to work on that right after I deal with my employee turnover problem.”

Other professionals who try to sell “accurate accounting services” or “high-quality graphic design” face a different but related problem. Those are commodities in minds of their potential clients. Such language goes in one ear (or eye) and out other. Ten minutes after finding out about you they have forgotten all about it.