Tuesday, June 19, 2007

Finding a Niche

A woman in Ontario made an obscene amount of money during the early days of the Pokemon craze importing merchandise from Japan and selling it online. Another stumbled onto a niche market as a graphic designer producing t-shirts, mugs, mouse pads, tea towels, et cetera with stylized drawings of a particular dog breed - I think it was a bulldog of some sort.

The point? If you can find your own niche market online, you can make big bucks. In their article, “Niche Marketing Secrets” Rufina James and Bart Baggett state that to find this kind of group you need three criteria:

1. They have a crazy, passionate level of interest in a problem, topic or hobby. Hopefully, they will be willing to spend any amount of money on their desire or obsession. For my mother it’s cookbooks. She has a few thousand already, but always finds room and money for that next one that promises something new.

2. They have money to purchase your product. I’d love to buy a house, but until I get that precious down payment together, a real estate agent would only be wasting her time trying to sell to me.

3. They must be large in number and easy to reach. Few leads and hard to reach ones at that means you’ll just be spinning your wheels before your business goes under.

Find a group like this, offer them what they want and making sales should be relatively easy.