Choosing a profitable niche market is the first step to making money on the web.
But how early can you tell whether this will happen?
After all, if you’ve not entered a niche before now, is there any way to figure out whether people are spending money in it, how much they are spending and whether or not you’re likely to be able to share in the market?
There are more shades of internet marketing than there are shades of grey in a certain high profile novel.
But which should you use?
And what are all these different hat colours anyway?
Artificial scarcity doesn’t just apply to digital products.
It’s been around for quite some time and even has its own Wikipedia entry (no big surprise there I suppose).
You can see it used everywhere when you start looking – limited edition whatevers (crisp/chip flavours, even Marmite), price reductions, the perception of scarcity with things like diamonds, the list goes on.
Is artificial scarcity good, bad or just something we’re becoming immune to?
A quick search on Google for secret traffic sources reveals over 4 million results.
That in itself suggests that they’re not particularly secret traffic sources if anyone can find them by searching.
Let’s have a look at some of the so-called “secret” traffic sources I found when I did that search:
We’re so used to ignoring things that it’s difficult to get people to stop and take notice of your offers.
Think about all the things you routinely ignore:
Bright shiny objects are designed to attract us.
Maybe it’s because precious metals are bright and shiny.
Maybe it’s some other reason.
But if you’re forever chasing them, you probably suffer from bright shiny object syndrome.
Which almost certainly means you’re spending more time chasing rainbows than you are actually doing things.
Internet marketing gets accused of a lot of things.
Often correctly – not every motive is pure and a lot of products that are sold are the modern day equivalent of snake oil.
But that statement alone should tell you that this isn’t a new phenomenon.
Snake oil (or similar) has been promoted as a miracle cure for all sorts of things for several hundred years.
And – thanks to the placebo effect – it’s probably worked more often than the salesmen ever hoped it would.
But that’s been overtaken by internet marketing – you can reach more people more quickly and a lot cheaper than trekking around the country in a horse and cart.
The numbers in the Google Keyword Planner are about as real as the tooth fairy.
Sure, they’re convincing enough: 2,900. 33,100, 590, 170, that kind of thing. Rather than “about 3,000” or “a few hundred”.
And certainly not “we really haven’t got a clue because the storage space and processing power we’d need is too much – even if we were prepared to share our secrets” which is more like that actual reason.
As you almost certainly know already (even if it’s only a suspicion you hold), there’s no “single right answer” to internet marketing.
So often, it really depends on what grabs you because then you’ll put your energy behind it and make it work, even if almost everyone else can’t.
One of the things that’s been bothering me about internet marketing for some time now is the seemingly relentless downhill spiral on pricing.
YouTube have recently introduced cards as an extra option for their videos.
You won’t see the link to add cards when you first upload a video – like most of these things on YouTube it’s not available until the video has been processed.
But you’ll see it when you click the Edit option that appears next to each video when you select Video Manager:
