Initially, domains and websites were bought either to create an online presence for a business already established offline, or to provide various sectors of the online community with a place to find a variety of information or online activities.
If you are an established business going online for the first time, you will probably outsource your website building and maintenance as you will already know who your market is and what you have to offer. Your domain name is likely to reflect your offline business name and your hosting service will most likely be affiliated to your webmaster (the builder of your site).
As mentioned in the previous article, if your website is to contribute to your marketing initiatives, you will need to choose your webmaster with this in mind. Content and the ability to change that content quickly is all important.
As well as commercial websites serving existing businesses, more recently a new kind of website has emerged where individuals wanting to create a personal online income have built their own eBiz sites around a wide range of interests and opportunities. This kind of site is often referred to as a niche marketing site, meaning a website that focuses on creating, sourcing and selling products, services and information directly related to specific interest groups.
Examples of niche marketing sites range from needlecraft and fly fishing to financial trading and astrology. In fact, you would be hard pressed to find any hobby or activity that someone somewhere is not making money from on the internet - and more often than not that someone is just one individual with a computer, an internet connection and their own personal website.
That said, the process leading to that website becoming financially profitable does not happen overnight, despite what much of the hype surrounding niche marketing would have you believe. The successful niche marketer would have first carried out extensive research into the niche they opted to trade in and then gone to considerable lengths to create a site that not only attracted the right visitors, but gave them good reason to make a purchase.
Once you have a clear idea of the niche area that you want to enter, you can easily identify the kind of domain name, which would be appropriate for your business. Before you set up an internet based niche business, you need to have a clear idea of the kind of business area you want to trade in. Generally, it is far easier and more enjoyable to focus on something, in which you have a keen interest and, preferably, some specialist knowledge.
Many people setting up a niche marketing website do so by first choosing an area that appears to be financially very fruitful. Examples of this are sites devoted to golf equipment, financial services, time saving software, health products and any number of how to books and courses about ways to make money on and off line.
All these niche markets are potentially very lucrative, but with so many businesses already selling online in these areas, you really need an experienced seller's knowledge, or a buyer's understanding of the products and services to profitably compete with them.
What you need at the outset is a little brainstorming. Based on past experience and present interests, list up to six internet niche marketing areas where you would feel at home. For the sake of simplicity, print out this article and add your list right here;
Niche Options:
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2 >
3 >
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6 >
The options you have listed are a good guide to the kind of niche marketing areas that could be successful to you.
Now you need to find out which among them have enough commercial potential to be worth pursuing. If the websites you have listed here look like the kind of places where people go to buy something, you could be on the right track.
To find out the commercial potential of any internet niche marketing area, you need to see who else is already trading there. Go to Google, Yahoo or MSN and type the word or phrases listed in your Niche Options into the search panel and click search. Take a look at the sites that come up, including those that appear on the right of the screen. Some sites will be purely information based. You need to find some websites that are actively trading and make a note of them. This provides you with invaluable market research.
The sites on the left of the search screen have generally gained that position over time by having an established following, though the top two are often there by virtue of having paid for that position. The sites on the right of the screen will tend to be more sales oriented as they always have to pay advertising money to be in this position.
The longer you spend with this process, the clearer your picture of the relative commercial merits of each niche market will become. Once you have gone through all of your six niche options, you're ready to make a decision.
Whatever the list you have drawn up contains, you'll eventually need to hone it down to one specific area. This will give you a starting point for choosing your domain name.
This is where narrow your list down to a single niche area. This process gives you a gut sense of where you really want to go. What you need here is a single word or short phrase that describes your chosen niche. Once you have this, write it down here;
Domain name prompt; ---------------------------------------------------------
Your domain name is your internet business name and establishes your position in the online marketplace. In niche marketing, a general business name like Brown's Books will not work as well as something more specific like Military Books. The whole essence of niche marketing is to specialize in your chosen area. Someone searching for information about your products and services would need to type into the search panel the word or phrase written here and find that information.
The name you have chosen should be seen as the working title of your eventual domain name. Depending on its availability, it could even become your domain name, but with so many domain names already registered, your ideal name may have already been taken. The important issue here is to have an idea of what your online business could be called.
You should now have a good idea for the area of internet niche marketing you want to research, the kind of domain name that would give you an appropriate identity within that market and the potential profitability of trading there.
Owning a good domain name is only part of the process, you also need a website to house it. Think of the domain as your business name and the website as your business premises and you start to get the picture. Before your website can be built; you need something to build it on. This is called a web hosting service. If you can picture your website as a virtual building, your web host provides the internet equivalent of the plot of land, on which it is built.
Although you could hire someone to build your website for you, as many businesses do, this can be costly if you're just starting out. You would also need to know in advance exactly what you wanted from the website and to have already identified a domain name you are happy with. Unless you are in this position and can afford the fees involved in having it constantly updated, doing it yourself is a more viable option.
| Mike Haye publishes a course on eBiz, which can be freely accessed at http://www.ebizcode.com This course has been designed and structured specifically for people new to doing business online. The eBizCode Course takes you step by step through each stage of setting up an eBiz site from initial planning and research to growing your site and maximizing its potential profitability. |
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