Hi  I’m keen to cover possibly one of the most important aspects of internet marketing and certainly information publishing and that is researching a niche properly, now there’s many ways to research a niche, too many to cover all here today, but I thought we’ll start with some pretty straight forward ones now and over the coming weeks there’ll be other posts covering other research techniques, so here goes..

Don’t Make Newbie Mistakes as We Did

The mistake made by a lot of newbie Internet marketers is that they jump into a niche without properly researching about it to find out if it is profitable or not. Now I know there will be some reading this thinking “Oh he’s talking about me” well listen up I’m actually talking about me because yes we’ve done it and paid the price in terms of huge amount of lost time, bit of marketing money but also huge frustration so don’t beat yourself up just move on, because the frustration is the worst – it causes this …

Listen Up to True Life Situations We’ve All Seen

How many times do you walk past a new shop that just opened or being kitted out and think to yourself “that’s strange I can’t see that business lasting surely there’s not enough demand for that?” Come on I bet you have, and sure enough you see it open and then sometimes a few months down the road unfortunately you’re initial thoughts are proved right, you see a closing down sales sign followed by the inevitable ‘To let’ sign going up outside.

Its really depressing especially as many of those people have sunk their own money/lifesavings into their dream just to see it dashed before their very eyes.

But here’s the real moral – it’s all about effective market research and doing the numbers. Here’s a story for you Sam & I live in a fairly small town, there’s already 5 ladies hairdressers (most of which also cut men’s hair as well) plus there’s a barber as well. Suddenly an empty shop gets kitted out and it’s a new barbers shop, price list is in the window – now I’d noted when the shop was empty & being advertised what the rent was so it was a simple mathematical exercise to work out how many haircuts the guy needed to do just to open the shop in the morning & cover his costs, let alone pay himself – do you know what he needed to be doing a men’s haircut every 40 minutes each & every day to cover costs and make take a small income.

Was he going to do that? Especially with remember 6 other hair cutting establishments to compete with – absolutely no way. He lasted 2 months then sadly closed. Bottom line do your research properly – is there a need, can you satisfy that need and at what cost, will people pay for the solution and in what numbers – bottom line can you make money from it??

Here’s What You Need To Do

If you can’t answer all of those questions positively – walk away and start again, that’s my view.

You spend some time with an unprofitable niche and when it looks as if you are not making any money, you become discouraged and conclude that the whole Internet marketing thing is just mere hype. As Ive owned up to some of us that know better now also made that same mistake initially. I remember the first niche I ventured into, I did not do a single bit of research on it because I felt it was something I was passionate about and so I was applying the advice of some “guru”. I did not make a single cent from that niche because of my failure to follow principles.

Researching a niche is a fundamental principle of Internet marketing. Get it right & you have every chance of online success get it wrong and you’ll end up going nowhere apart from becoming frustrated.

Ok  in a future post I’ll cover some other research points

Don’t be shy – leave a comment – Tell us how we can help you! Do it now.

Tony