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Micro Niche Idea.

The pet's business is pretty big, and if you tried to launch a generic pet's website you would be up against a bunch of big dogs (pardon the pun). You could narrow it down by a type of pet though and start to have some better results. Let's say birds. That's a little more specific, but still pretty general. What would really do you well is if you went into a specific type of bird. Say African Grey's, or Racing Pigeons.
Or let's look at Dogs. Again your not going to have very much luck with "dogs" as a general subject. Even a specific type of dog is rather broad and hard to get much notice with. However, you can become even more specific and do very well. For example my friend sells dog training courses online and he market's them each towards a specific type of dog. That means he will have one site on "Training my Poodle" another on "Training by Beagle" and another on "Training my Yorkie" and so on and so forth.
By really honing in on a very specific target you stand a much better chance of getting noticed.
In the financial world this is very obvious too. Stock market in and of itself is pretty broad and hard to stack up in. So if you work your way down a little bit your going to start doing better. For example let's just take daytrading. Now even this niche is very crowded and can be hard to stand out in. I think that in some ways I got lucky because I happened to come in early and lot of my contacts from then remain very helpful when I want to do a project in that world. However it can still be done. I've just recently been working with a fellow on launching his own site geared towards recently retired babyboomers who would like to daytrade. We have created a very detailed demographic of that person and know the hot bottons to work on. So far the site is only a few months old but is already close to bringing in five figures per month. Another very niche'd example in finance might be something like "I am the ETF guy (Think Deron Wagner..and as Deron will tell you I'm the person who suggested he head in that direction, and it's worked out very nicely for him). The more narrowed down you can get, the more of an expert you can become.
 
Quote from Brandonf:

Micro Niche Idea.

The pet's business is pretty big, and if you tried to launch a generic pet's website you would be up against a bunch of big dogs (pardon the pun). You could narrow it down by a type of pet though and start to have some better results. Let's say birds. That's a little more specific, but still pretty general. What would really do you well is if you went into a specific type of bird. Say African Grey's, or Racing Pigeons.
Or let's look at Dogs. Again your not going to have very much luck with "dogs" as a general subject. Even a specific type of dog is rather broad and hard to get much notice with. However, you can become even more specific and do very well. For example my friend sells dog training courses online and he market's them each towards a specific type of dog. That means he will have one site on "Training my Poodle" another on "Training by Beagle" and another on "Training my Yorkie" and so on and so forth.
By really honing in on a very specific target you stand a much better chance of getting noticed.
In the financial world this is very obvious too. Stock market in and of itself is pretty broad and hard to stack up in. So if you work your way down a little bit your going to start doing better. For example let's just take daytrading. Now even this niche is very crowded and can be hard to stand out in. I think that in some ways I got lucky because I happened to come in early and lot of my contacts from then remain very helpful when I want to do a project in that world. However it can still be done. I've just recently been working with a fellow on launching his own site geared towards recently retired babyboomers who would like to daytrade. We have created a very detailed demographic of that person and know the hot bottons to work on. So far the site is only a few months old but is already close to bringing in five figures per month. Another very niche'd example in finance might be something like "I am the ETF guy (Think Deron Wagner..and as Deron will tell you I'm the person who suggested he head in that direction, and it's worked out very nicely for him). The more narrowed down you can get, the more of an expert you can become.
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You make some great points and since we're in the spirit of sharing, I'll share some of my pet product knowledge. I'm working on a couple if ideas myself.
During the late 80's, early 90's I owned a full line retail pet store. The days before the so-called "pet super store" came to be. (Damn them all to hell in my best Charlton Heston voice).
Anyway here's some tips. The dog market is nice, but cat products outsell dog products at a 3/1 pace. Cat people are also more likely to own multiple cats. Cats also live longer than dogs.
A niche market for cats and dogs is making their elder years more comfortable. You might also want to look at the pet memorial lines.
Another item is fish. Aquatics is where the money is in a pet store, particularly the fish themselves. Mark ups range from 300-500%, and more. High mortality rates during shipping causes some of that mark up.
You'll never make any real money trying to sell the hardware. You won't be able to purchase enough in bulk to be competitive, and shipping will kill you. A nice little business if you're in to it is breeding fish and selling them to your local pet stores. If you can deliver and keep the mortality rate down, they'll buy. Will you get rich? No! But this leads to the on-line opportunity.
The fish hobby is an expensive one. A way for the hobbyist to offset the cost would be to start their own little business breeding fish. I'll be selling the "how to's" of that business to the hobbyist. It's a bigger market than you think.
I won't give away the keys to the kingdom on this one, but it ain't all that hard to learn. Just some ideas thrown out for your perusal.
 
Quote from CaptainObvious:

You make some great points and since we're in the spirit of sharing, I'll share some of my pet product knowledge. I'm working on a couple if ideas myself.
During the late 80's, early 90's I owned a full line retail pet store. The days before the so-called "pet super store" came to be. (Damn them all to hell in my best Charlton Heston voice).
Anyway here's some tips. The dog market is nice, but cat products outsell dog products at a 3/1 pace. Cat people are also more likely to own multiple cats. Cats also live longer than dogs.
A niche market for cats and dogs is making their elder years more comfortable. You might also want to look at the pet memorial lines.
Another item is fish. Aquatics is where the money is in a pet store, particularly the fish themselves. Mark ups range from 300-500%, and more. High mortality rates during shipping causes some of that mark up.
You'll never make any real money trying to sell the hardware. You won't be able to purchase enough in bulk to be competitive, and shipping will kill you. A nice little business if you're in to it is breeding fish and selling them to your local pet stores. If you can deliver and keep the mortality rate down, they'll buy. Will you get rich? No! But this leads to the on-line opportunity.
The fish hobby is an expensive one. A way for the hobbyist to offset the cost would be to start their own little business breeding fish. I'll be selling the "how to's" of that business to the hobbyist. It's a bigger market than you think.
I won't give away the keys to the kingdom on this one, but it ain't all that hard to learn. Just some ideas thrown out for your perusal.
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The secret to getting organic traffic and to being an expert, and also to not pissing off the Google gods with your PPC campaigns and landing pages is to really nail it down. If your going to do the fish site, for example, what I would do is create several landing pages and e-books,each on a different type of fish. How to get rid of this disease or that disease on this type of fish. (I doint know any type of fish other then goldfish and those ones that fight with each other). Or How to make your goldfish live longer. How to make your goldfish bone the other goldfish..all that stuff. You create something very very targeted and a unique page for each one of those things, a unique free offer and a unique paid offer as well. Something that works very well as an entry level paid offer is the digital version of your free e-book. You basically write a 30 to 50 page e-book that you give away, or sell very cheap (like $7 to $17) and then offer as an upgraded product the video showing some of the steps and a powerpoint presentation maybe for $49 to $79. Then you offer the super course later for about double to triple that price. In this way you have trained your customers to buy from you right from the start and you've got some pretty easy to create products.
 
My biggest motivation in creating this product and giving this info on ET has been to have a test group. As I've said a number of time's I'm not planning on selling anything to ET members. Rather, what I would like to do is have a demographically similar group look at products I plan to sell to other people and then give me feedback. One bit of feedback I am getting is that people are a hell of a lot more interested in having their own products then in having a clickbank product. That is fine, and as I've said the true purpose of the clickbank account is simply to find area's where there are buyers spending money on products. Once you find an affiliate market you can be profitable in, you can save the money to have the money to launch your own competing site and you know it should work. You also get to keep all the money as opposed to only 25 to 60%. So anyway, with that bit of feedback the focus has shifted, and my mistake was that I should have shared that information with all of you earlier rather then just shifting it a bit. You are all helping me a lot, and I hope your getting useful info as well. Take care.
Brandon
 
One more very specific example here for you and then I've already given you information that in the past I've charged people a healthy chunk of change to get from me. Micr-niche yourself like I said above. You really want to drill down with laser tight focus on your TARGET GROUP. I'll give another real life example from a site I had. It cost me about $2500 to start this site and I ran it for 7 1/2 months. During that time I pulled a profit of $18,000 from it and then I sold it to a lady in New Hampshire for $35,000 cash and 25% of future Net. Well it turns out she's an idiot when it comes to running a business, I think my six year old would do a better job then here. So sadly for me, and her too I guess, all I ever got was the $35,000, plus the $18,000 I'd already made.

I wanted to create a photography site. But, there is no way in this lifetime that I'm going to be getting much traffic for photography. I mean if I lived and breathed photography 24/7 and spit articles out like crazy maybe after a few years..but I'm not that crazy about photography, I just want to make some money here. So, I research photography, what types of things do people like to take pictures of. One little niche out there is people who enjoy taking pictures of butterflies. So, I went out and found myself someone who is a butterfly picture taking buff, paid them $1500 and let them write and talk till the end of the world. But, we didnt just do butterflies. No, No, No, No..that's still kinda general....we went very specific and created a bunch of sites on each time of butterfly and taking pictures of them. So, I had little sites and ebooks and landing pages for taking pictures of Monarch Butterfly's that I also filled with a bunch of fun facts about monarchs. I had an e-book, landing page, site and courses about taking pictures of Firetip Skippers and on and on and on. Now none of these sites by themselves got too much traffic, in fact a few only got 10/15 hits a day..but...and this is key, it was all very targeted traffic. You didnt find your way to my site unless you wanted to know how to take a great picture of a Firetip Skipper, and while firetip skippers in and of themselves would have hardly been a remarkable business, having 19 different types of butterfly picture taking books was. It also made for a great upsale for me. If someone bought the Monarch Butterly book, which I sold for $27 and tjhen Id say hey listen, I've also got 19 other books (and then name them all) on taking pictures of butterlies. I know you love your butterfly picture taking, and here is what other people just like you said. Now, if you are to buy all 19 of my popular butterly books it would cost you over $513! However, as a special offer today I am willing to sell all of them to you for $79. Not only will I offer you a steep discount on them, I'll let you keep them free for one month. That's right, you won't even get a billed by me until your sure you have loved every butterfly book you bought from me. Then I had a digital product made that actually showed a person "out in the field" doing stuff with the camera and taking pictures of butterflies. I sold that for $147. If they said no to that (and most did) I would downsell them. Ok, I understand that $147 is a lot of money, but I really want you to have this course. Here is what your compatriots said about it. Here is what I'm willing to do for you today. Since it costs me a lot of money to print and package my digital butterfly course I will let you have the digital downloadable version of it right now for only $97. Now, if you get the digital version I can't send you the physcial CD's and books, but you can download them right now and be taking gorgeous butterly pictures with in just a few hours. A huge number of people will take you up on downsales, in fact I have no idea why more people don't use them (most likely cos most business owners don't know smack about selling stuff) because they are one of the most effective tactics you have. As a final back end area for this site I'd send them offers for this camera or that camera that i had an affiliate with.
I really have no idea how the lady managed to lose money with the site (well actually I do....I just don't know how she could have been so stupid as to have run it how she did, it must have something to do with the fact that she had been an accounting executive with a Fortune 100 company for 25 years and that seems to create stupidity like nothing else).
 
<b>But my business is offline Brandon</b>

So what! Well, first of all get a god damn website and start collecting e-mails, but second off...so friggin what!

Here is an offline example of selling the shit out of yourself and making it work. My cousin Justin is 8 months younger then me. His mom was only 14 when she had him, and she had a lot of problems in her life until just recently. Because of that Justin pretty much grew up in my house, and he is more like my brother then my cousin. And he's lucky that he has a cousin who loves him and knows how to sell shit!

Just went into the Navy after HS and served for six years. He did boilers and whatnot on big ass ships. When he got out of the Navy he got a job at a local Plumbing, Heating and Cooling place, but he always wanted to go into business for himself. The owner of the place was pretty decent and let Justin build up a bit of a side business doing A/C's because for whatever reason he didnt do them. Eventually Justin really wanted to go out on his own, but he was scared. He'd saved up $3000, but he'd just gotten married, had one kid and another on the way.

His plan was to spend the $3000 on A)a yellow pages ad, and B) getting his truck painted up with his logo and number. Thank God we talk nearly every day and I was able to slap some god damn sense into him.

I managed to convince Justin that we could start the business right for around $5000, and if it didnt work out he didnt have to pay me the $2000, and if it did he would. He's a smart guy so he agreed.

The first thing we did was I wrote him probably the second best sales letter I've ever written in my life. We had to have it spelled checked and grammer checked, but it was a sweet ass letter. We then went out and bought a mailing list from a list broker (You know, Junk Mail) and send it out to 2500 people and sat back to see what would happen. What was the offer you say? (or you do if your or the ball)

Very simply this. It was coming up on summer and in Iowa it gets hot. We have to use our A/C's here. He cent out a certificate to each of those 2500 people that entitled them to have a complete checking over of their A/C for only $29.00 if they used the coupon. This is a service that normally costs about $100 from most other places, but since it only costs labor he was not giving away anything but his time. The profit though come from the fact that about 20% of those people ended up needing extra work done that would end up costing anything from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars. That of course was a nice profit for him, both in terms of mark up on material and labor that he was able to bill out at full cost. So, we ended up spending around $5800 to do the mailing and as a result of that mailing he ended up getting 130 people to take him up on the $29 offer (which is an amazing 5.4% reply rate, which in the junk mail business is pretty god damn good...people become amazingly rich on anything over 2%) Even though only about 25 of those people ended up needing extra work he still did very well, and a good number of them became lifelong customers, which was worth way more then any one time sale. He ended up as I recall having a Gross of about $34,500 off the offer and total costs (including the mailing) of about $19,000. Profit of about $5500. But again the most important thing was that he got customers as the new guy in town. We did another similar offer for people's water heaters, another similar offer to check the furnace before winter hit and on and on. I've also had him put into place a loyalty program for his long term customers and for those who refer a new customer to him. We have figured out that the lifetime value of a customer (so far, we don't actually have the "real" data since the people tend to stay with him and still have to this point) for him is about $1500 right now in profit. You think it's worth a few bucks for him to bribe his happy customers to refer a friend? Damn right it is! If you refer a friend you will get a $250 thank you package from Justin from Allen Brothers. If you've been a long time customer he will send you a gift certificate to a popular local resturaunt around the time of your aniversary each yera.

Now, you can't just use gifts and gimics. You have to provide excellent service..but if you combine the two your going to make a shit load of money. In fact Justin is now the second largest company of his kind in a city of about 25,000 people and makes more money then he ever could have dreamed of. The eonomy might be going to shit, but he just hired three more employees in the last few months.

Now, before you go thinking I'm some kind of genious (I'm a Jenious remember!) I must admit that I pretty much stole this idea. I bought a fancy $2000 course (I've spent tens of thousand's of dollars on marketing training) from either Jay Abraham, Clayton Makepeace or Gary Halbert and adjusted an idea they had (they used a version of this to help a dentist grow his practice...so think outside the box and it will work for you too) in that course.

This summer when my insurance ran out the hospital was going to send me to the county hospital (where I probably would have died). I had cash in the bank, but most of my assets are just that, cash and a few websites and they wanted something a hell of a lot more secure then cash. Since Toni and I divorced right near the top of the real estate market I have not bothered to buy a house yet etc. Lucky for me Justin has a good reputation now in the community and a lot of assets, because they kept me when he put his ass on the line for me. So, probably the best $2000 I ever spent in my life was helping him out.
 
Specials work like crazy too btw if you collect your data. Here is something I did with a local deli. We tracked the data for customers. When are they busy, meaning what time of the day and what days, and when are they dead, meaning what times of the day and what days.

Well what I had them do was start to collect email addresses and send special offers. We would send out offers during the time that normally had been dead and unproductive to try to bring people in during that period of time. Result: 18% increase in profits and a nice fee for me.
 
I have a couple questions about e-books. Would you say that a PDF file is preferable over a word doc? If so, why?
Secondly, do you write your e-books with a lot of fluff, or use a "just the facts ma'am" approach?
 
Quote from CaptainObvious:

I have a couple questions about e-books. Would you say that a PDF file is preferable over a word doc? If so, why?
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A PDF file should be the only way to distribute an E book. The same PDF file can be read and printed from a Mac, Window and Linux computer without having to buy any additional software. Always output your documents as a PDF if you are going to send it to someone.

The free OpenOffice 3.0 may or may not open a Word doc.
 
Quote from CaptainObvious:

I have a couple questions about e-books. Would you say that a PDF file is preferable over a word doc? If so, why?
Secondly, do you write your e-books with a lot of fluff, or use a "just the facts ma'am" approach?
More...

I tend to distribute it as both at the same time. It does not cost me anything extra and it adds value to the product in the mind of the customer. If I could only go with one thought I would go with the PDF for all the reasons that forex-forex mentioned, plus the fact that you can get them professionally designed. I can not believe how many people forget this step and send out shitty looking e-books with no cover design. I have tested it both ways, with and without a fancy ass cover, and trust me it's more then worth the $250 to $500 it costs it get a nice design for your e-book. You more then make up for it in the reduction in refunds and the increase in sales.
 
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