First Steps To Getting Started In An Internet Business – Part 3
Through your research, you must get to know your niche very, very closely. What do the people (i.e. your potential customers) in it want, expect, and actually get? How are the other players in the niche marketing “to” them?
Are you listening to what your market is saying? (This is an excellent post by Terry Dean on becoming a market mind reader)
How are YOU going to respond to it?
Focus on what you can do to help people in your niche easily reach their goals!
Step Four – What Is Your Niche Trying To Tell You?
Remember your objective… to rise above the noise in your niche. So that means you’ve got to find out what’s going on there.
For example…
When looking at the Internet Marketing niche, here’s what my “research” has revealed…
And to form these opinions, I’ve looked at hundreds of websites, sales letters, forums and blogs, and I’ve subscribed to countless “newsletters” which have resulted in thousands of emails. I’ve downloaded truckloads of both free and paid for reports, software, PLR material, etc. etc. etc.
In case you were not already aware of it… The Internet Marketing niche is extremely competitive!
I would be very reluctant to enter that niche – i.e. the “how to make money online” niche – if I didn’t already have some significant skills and knowledge of marketing and/or web design.
The thing that attracts people to this niche is the large number of people willing to spend money in it! There’s a very hungry market here, with lots of people willing to spend lots of money to chase a “dream”.
The sad fact that most of those people seem to fail in their endeavours doesn’t seem to worry some of the marketers in this niche… There are always plenty more new people coming into the niche looking for information to replace them!
And while there is plenty of information available, a large portion of it is total crap! Often it is re-hashed material passed off as new, and way out-of-date! With hundreds of people having access to products, which they often resell without even re-writing or even changing the e-cover… it’s a junkyard out there!
GOOD PLR (Private Label Rights) material does have a place in the market. I strongly suggest people use it mainly for inspiration when stuck for ideas, and/or totally rewrite it and bring it up-to-date to make it uniquely yours!
While “looking” into the niche, trying to work out what I could do here, the plethora of garbage product available had me totally bamboozled for quite some time.
This is the “information overload” symptom a LOT of people experience in this market… Actually, I think it’s part of some insidious, deliberate plot designed to get you to part with your money 🙂
But there was just “something” that didn’t sit right with me with the vast majority of what I was seeing! Something that I just couldn’t see “me” doing.
For example (apart from the junk talked about earlier)
- the constant “lifestyle” promises being made
- all the get-rich-quick stuff which requires “no work” – yeah… right!
- “secrets” for sale which can freely be found in a million other places on the ‘net
- the hype used to flog product which fails to live up to it’s promise, and keep your fingers crossed about getting a refund (I’m waiting for one right now)
- sneaky tactics to get you to sign up, only to find what you “thought” you were getting is only in the “Platinum” level up sell. (people… that’s called “misleading advertising” and it’s illegal in most countries – and it just happened to me as I was writing this article!)
- pre-sale and after-sale support questions that go unanswered
- turnkey sites, which are nothing more than empty shopping malls for junk products
- constant (almost daily) email marketing from some people (where DO they find the time???)
- some products priced at more than a decent second hand car…
A very large number of people who purchase products in the IM field… are not happy!
I’ve seen their comments – lots of them – in lots of forums, their responses in blogs, and in a variety of surveys that have recently been published.
And it’s really not looking all that good for some of the people who are “flogging” product to the Internet Marketing niche!
So there’s your challenge if you want to get into the Internet Marketing niche…
Or for that matter… ANY NICHE you might be looking to get into…
Your challenge is to “do” something in that market that is better than most of what is currently available, which meets the needs of the market!
But what?
We’ll leave that till Part 4 of this series…
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