Internet marketing can be profitable with incredibly small numbers. A handful of people per day can pay a nice amount of money.

When print or direct mail were the main ways of finding small, profitable, niches you’d need to find a publication or a mailing list that you hoped might be interested in your topic.

Now, so long as there are a few people in the world who could be interested, you put up a web page and let them find you.

Even if it’s something as obscure as pawology!

Not that I’m suggesting that as a niche.

But it does show just how obscure you can go and still get occasional sales.

There are various ways to do niche research.

One way that’s often suggested is to use the Google Keyword Tool. But that’s designed to persuade advertisers to buy more clicks and the numbers are based on a computer doing an inspired guess. So I don’t recommend that – it gives you a false sense of security as we all tend to assume that numbers on screen presented by big organisations like Google are the truth.

In practice, there’s no way that Google could or would store precise searches for an almost unlimited number of keyword combinations.

And even if that was feasible, why would you give commercially sensitive information to all and sundry, including your competitors?

Amazon is quite a good test of small numbers

Going back to the pawology example, there’s only one book on it and that’s by Jonathan Royle, a UK hypnotist who invented it.

Maybe by the time you read this there wil be a Kindle book as well.

If Amazon has more than a couple of pages of books and if most of the first page have more than one review then the market is probably big enough to monetise.

Most people don’t review their purchase on Amazon.

I don’t know the exact proportion but I’d guess that less than 10% of buyers (probably a lot less) leave a review.

If the list of items on Amazon seems to go on forever then there’s almost certainly a market for that niche.

And if there’s a printed magazine even partially devoted to the topic, even better.

Printed magazines as a category are in near enough terminal decline.

Talk to anyone under about the age of 25 and you’ll find that a majority of them have never bought or read a printed magazine. They look at you as though you’re an alien if you ask them why and, if they deign to reply, it’s along the lines of “isn’t it obvious why not?”

The younger generation uses the web for information. Usually free content, “paid for” with adverts that they probably don’t click.

If a market is big enough to allow a printed magazine, that’s a good sign as it means people are still buying copies and advertisers are still advertising. Although if you actually leaf through, chances are you’ll find less and less adverts. Especially direct response ones – a magazine I read until recently always used to have a full page memory improvement advert. But in recent issues that’s stopped – almost certainly because response has dropped too far.

Which gives another clue why small numbers can work well

Small niches often can’t afford full page adverts or even small “classified” ads on Google or Facebook.

Either the advert doesn’t pay or it doesn’t show often enough to make it worth writing in the first place.

Back when I ran pay per click ads (before Google decided they didn’t want my cash), it wouldn’t be unusual for an ad to get 30 to 50 displays per month. Barely enough to register and certainly not enough to be able to run a split test to improve response.

That doesn’t make sense to run as an ad.

But it makes sense to create a web page about it.

Maybe 30 minutes writing, once off.

A link or two in the page.

Next.

You could create two of those per day if you just spent an hour a day on your internet marketing.

In a month’s time, you’d have between 40 and 60 pages on your site.

If each was only getting one or two views per week, you’d have about 200 highly targeted visitors to your site per month.

And their click through rate to your affiliate links would be well above average because they’d be so precisely targeted.

Go on!

Try it!

Prove to yourself that small numbers work very nicely in internet marketing.

And if you want to monetise that trickle of traffic profitably, affiliate marketing is almost certainly the best way to do that.