Let’s recap on lessons learnt over the past few months endeavours. In what I will only attribute to my “youthful exuberance”, I have come to learn two rather expensive and ultimately fatal (amateur) mistakes of niche internet marketing.
Referring (in the below example) to the niche of Bonsai tree care – which I discovered using Google Products which provides insights into what products people are searching for right now; I did my competitor analysis to discover 393,000 competitors / pages were returned in Google, most of which not well Search Engine Optimised, with not many paid
advertisers. Using Google trends, I also learnt which demographics were searching for information on this, from where, and when they were searching for this through the course of a year – overall, things looked fairly promising!
And so then it began. I jumped immediately onto oDesk to log jobs for the creation of the ultimate ebook on Bonsai tree care, along with 7 unique articles which I could later use for article marketing. Total cost, $120USD.
I purchased a domain name (approx $15USD) and set out on creating a high quality score website, templating the layout and content structure from established IM gurus’ sites such as Frank Kern’s Email Tricks site – for which I logged another job for this website design ($50USD). With the jobs logged, I set off to research what information my niche would want to know about – this later formed the outline to my ebook.
So things were progressing very well, or so I had thought. As it turned out, my Internet Marketing friend who had also been pursuing a number of different niches at the same time (he was doing this full time whereas I was only doing this part-time around my full time job), discovered that of the 5 information products developed and launched using this same methodology, 4 of these had failed to commercialize – even though the initial online competitor analysis proved favourable!
So we had to go back to the drawing board. Where did we go so wrong? Discovering niche markets was fairly easy. Assessing the number and quality of competitors was also fairly straight forward, especially when using such tools as Market Samurai which provides insights into not only competition on differing keyword terms but also adwords advertisers (I highly recommend this application to anyone interested in Internet Marketing)! So conditions appeared favourable, but then why weren’t we rich yet??
This brings us to current day and a couple of very unfortunate realisations that ultimately led to us kulling 95% of our niche marketing ideas as potential (viable) candidates. We ended up developing a niche marketing checklist, or flowchart rather, including a fairly comprehensive test plan that we’re expecting will drastically reduce our strike out rate.
Referring specifically to my Bonsai tree care niche specifically, this failed on 2 criteria;
1. it doesn’t solve any immediate problems,
2. alternatives were too readily available, and worse yet, FREE!
… we had failed on two aspects of classical marketing which we had overlooked while we had our Internet Marketing blinkers on. The following isn’t a comprehensive listing, but for those who don’t want to sign up for the full checklist, I’d STRONGLY RECOMMEND asking yourself the following 3 questions before throwing yourself into a prospective niche market to attack;
1. Is my prospect experiencing pain & urgency or irrational passion?
2. Is my prospect proactively searching for a solution?
3. Does my prospect have no or few perceived options?
So in conclusion, my Online Marketing income is now officially in the red, but valuable lessons have been learnt along the way. It will be interesting to see how these new discoveries will translate into profitable niches for our future endevours.
Those on my mailing list will receive the complete Niche Marketing Checklist / Flowchart shortly 
As a final BONUS for my readers, I found the following two video posts very informative on the subject of Niche Marketing. The first is a post by Frank Kern on the subject of “Finding something to sell” – Frank Kern is definitely one of the industry’s experts in Niche Internet Marketing. He’s also got a lot of very informative other posts on his site which may also be of interest to you.
The 2nd bonus video is by Steven Clayton and Mark Ling, who talk in depth about keyword research and competitor analysis. They go into a great deal of details, however the important things to note here is the information on the money word matrix – the video’s quite long, so it may take a little while to load. Enjoy!
And so the quest continues! All the best till next time! 
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