1) Go and read this book titled ‘The Long Tail’ by Chris Anderson. This book details how there are profitable niches for a lot of people to exploit. A lot of people has the misconception that you need to have lots and lots of potential customers in a niche before you can compete in it profitably. Do you really want to plunge into a category with lots of existing big competitors, and get yourself pummeled silly?
There are actually a lot of smaller niches that are still profitable to compete it, with less fierce and big competitors. E.g. the music industry is a big industry. However, there’s a niche for Norwegian Folk Music, and there are loyalists there who are constantly on the lookout for new CD’s in this niche.
Another book that you should read is the ‘Blue Ocean Strategy’ by Chan Kim. Play in a newly created niche, like what Cirque du Soleil did. They combined theater and circus performance into one.
2) Go to a supermarket, and you can see the proliferation of choices and brands for consumers to choose. It can be quite perplexing to choose the right products with so many choices, and worse, a lot of them seems similar in performance. What you need to do is to differentiate vs. them, be better, faster, or cheaper.
3) The external competitive environment is always changing. New competitors enter, old competitors leave. You need to keep yourself updated with the landscape constantly, and online competitors are easy to analyze and spy on. Be one step ahead of your targeted competitors, and do things better than them. This can be for both the product offerings and the marketing strategies. Learn from your competitors’ mistakes.
The whole internet marketing game takes time to master, so learn from those who have been there to shorten your learning time, and avoid painful mistakes.
