So today’s post is about niche markets. This is a continuation from my recent post about picking the right Internet marketing affiliate program, I wanted to further address my disdain for all of the guru’s and hacks who tell you to chase a niche.

I was opening my email this morning and I found a link to yet another pontificator telling me how much money I could make if I just exploited niches like he was. “Finding –and exploiting, a small niche, or a series of small niches as I do, is the single biggest key to success…”

That’s really too bad. I mean I hope that it works out for you but like I showed you in my last post, I am not hiding my “niches”. I am not afraid of you coming into my markets. I welcome the competition…why??

Because it means that:

a. you are bringing more attention to my market which is always a good thing

b. you give me the opportunity to eat your lunch in public…accordingly I give you the same opportunity to do me in as well…that’s called competition. It’s the essence of business. I guess some Internet marketers don’t realize that.

I’m going to start featuring a “Exploitable Market Of The Day” feature here on the Massive Profits by Real Estate Radio USA blog. I figure that there are some really ambitious people out there who want to treat their sojourn to make money on the Internet as a business and understand that if you treat it as such then you can really make a ton of money.

Then once you have the spare coin available you can begin to leverage your efforts with advertising and media buys etc…in the interim however let’s talk about some so called niche markets.

Let’s look at the Panic Attack treatment and cure market. Prior to reading about competing in major markets I thought about playing in niches too. We created a site to work the panic attack market and we created a really nice site.

The problem is we listened to the gurus and stayed away from the big numbers in the market. We took really “nichey” keywords because they were supposedly easier to rank for. It was true…problem is the reason they were easy to rank for is because they didn’t spin off any friggin traffic! Man, I was an idiot.

Our site used to be optimized for Stop Panic Attacks and Panic Cure. Two keywords that were supposedly great niche market keywords.

When you look those keywords up in Google you find that the phrase match of those two keywords supposedly had great search volume. One had 100 searches per day and the other had 400 or so per day. So we figured there were 500 or so clicks up for grabs each day and if we worked really hard we could exploit this niche and even with a crappy conversion rate we could still make over a hundred bucks per day off this one niche site.

What a crock! Even after at one point ranking as high as number 2 for Stop Panic Attacks the traffic sucked and so did our conversions. It seems that the gurus who talk about niches forget to speak to you about the commerciality of the “niche keyword” that you choose.

So we didtched the BS niche keywords and decided to go after the Money Keywords. You know, the ones the gurus tell you to avoid. It’s funny what they teach, they tell you to…”make sure you find a keyword that has about 1000 searches per month and only about 10,000 competing websites“. Huh???

For just one moment think about this and apply it to real business principles. Here’s what I want you to do. I want you to imagine seeing a really crowded pizza parlor in mid-town Manhattan. A pizza parlor right in Times Square with literally tens of thousands of people coming and going right by the pizza parlor every day.

Now I want you to imagine having a discussion with a business consultant and you telling him that although there is a vacant storefront on the north side of Broadway to open your pizza parlor, you’d much rather open up your pizza parlor on this quiet street in Pasippany. What do you think he’d say to you?

Then why are so many people listening to gurus telling them to open up stores where the people “ain’t”? Make any sense to you.

I want my pizza parlor right where the big ball drops! I want my pizza parlor right in the middle of Time Square. I don’t need some worn out old diner in Parsippany to be where I’m trying to get my share of Intenet money. No I want to be where the bright lights are. I know if I can make it there I can make it anywhere….excuse me..I digress but you obviously get the point.

And puhleeeze…..don’t waste my time with bS analogies about the “long-tail” keywords. Sure I believe in the longtail! However I believe in the longtail to support an otherwise well built platform wherein you use the longtail to clearly dominate your market. We have nearly 5,000 posts on this blog and we get a boatload of traffic from thousands of longtail keywords…but we know the importance and value of optimizing for the money words as well.

We don’t use the longtail strategy as an option …it’s not an “or” decision. It is intentionally an “and” decision. We don’t want to rank for longtail keywords because the money words are too tough to rank for. No, we want to rank for longtail AND money keywords. It only makes good business sense.

So back to my foray into the panic attack market. We decided to chuck the niche markets idea and jump right into the big money keywords. We’ve re-optimized the site and decided to go after Panic Attacks as our main keyword.

Did it matter much…hmmm…here’s a keyword where all the big boys play. People like WebMD and the MayoClinic. Now we’re talking. I want to take on the real players in the market. The keyword Panic Attacks gets nearly 20,000 searches per day.

So let me get this right…the gurus say go after niches so that you can get in front of a few dozen people per day…or I can do some work and go after the big money. I can play in the big leagues with a little concerted effort.

Seems like a pretty obvious choice doesn’t it? Of course it does. If you want to create an ongoing stable business that allows you to make money on the Internet then you are going to have to roll up your sleeves and do what’s necessary to compete in the market wherein people actually are.

The last guy who made money where there were no people was Bugsy Siegel and I doubt you have the bankroll to create a gambling mecca in the desert. So I believe you’re alternative for making money on the Internet lies in having the moxie to compete in real markets.

If you take nothing else from what I say take this and it’s cardinal rule number 1. That is you need to sell your product to a market that wants your product, needs your product and can pay for your product on an ongoing basis so that your business can be a sustainable enterprise. That’s niche marketing baby!

Can a business in one of the so called niche markets be profitable? Sure it can. Can you make more money…a lot more money…doing a bit more to compete in Times Square…you bet your…

By the way…just to finish the story about the panic attack site, as of tonight we are number 39 after just two weeks of optimization out of 15 Million competing websites. I bet we’re number 20 by the end of the week and pushing the top 10 in 14 days or so.

Again, it’s some work but be honest and ask yourself where you’d want to be and what market you’d want to be laying claim to…be honest.