Basically, a niche market is a very specific market within a group. A target audience within a target audience so to speak.
Let's say you sell running shoes. To niche that down, maybe you sell running shoes specifically for marathoners and triathletes. Or maybe you choose to have running shoes for people with foot problems like bunions or other charming foot abnormalities.
The trouble is people are putting up things like kitchen websites that are so generic, they speak to everyone therefore they speak to no one. They are so proud of themselves for publishing a functioning website, they've totally overlooked one of the single most important steps in creating any business. Finding that target market who will PAY, CALL, CLICK or JOIN and creating a site to cater to them.
What, pray tell, is going to lure me from amazon.com to come to your generic puny, unknown pie-in-the-sky bookstore simply because you got your shopping cart to work? Give me a reason to come. Do you sell highly reviewed how-to books? Do you have the best business marketing books? Fantasy books? Rare books? Comic books? The general store is not going to compete. You will get lost in the big black wormhole of the internet also known as the limp and lame, solitary server for misplaced website owners.
It's one thing to say you have a niche but does your site know this?
Don't create a niche and then do really general advertising and create a mundane, generic, boiler-plate website. If you do, I'll send my highly targeted bloodhounds to hunt you down and hold your favorite pet hostage until you comply with the time-tested, proven track record, age-old target market positioning strategies.
Let's say you've chosen a niche. You have chosen to start a rare comic book site. And you have the merchandise. So far it's a vessel that holds niche merchandise. It's not a niche site until you fashion it as the ideal sales and marketing tool for this target market.
It has to speak to your target in both design and content. It needs to clearly state what you have, how this benefits your target and inspire the target to take action whatever you define that to be. This takes work and effort. If you were a salesman, how would you sell this site to your target.
You don't know your target until you can stand in their shoes and chew their freaking gum.
Are you familiar with their age and gender, other interests, their language and what's important to them? Do most of them have myspace websites? Do they like retro clothing? Are they introverts, extroverts or people hoping to be abducted by aliens? People who like comic books is not a definition of a target audience. It's a label. You need to REALLY know them if you want to build a foundation for internet success.
You need to do research to find out likes and dislikes and any number of personality traits that this group shares. That is the portion of the target audience who values this enough to pay for it. The dropout rate for creating a site that caters to a target market is high. People are just too lazy or too lost. And this is pretty much the place that separates the entrepreneurs from the rainbow chasers. So which one are you?
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