Some months ago, John Reese posted an interesting article on his blog, where he asked the question, ”can you make more money by marketing to fewer people?”  He goes on to explain why this is the best way to market your products and services online.

I won’t repeat his full post here because you can read it at his blog.

The logic behind what he says will still be ignored by the majority who market online

Why?  Because in their view, the bigger the market, the more sales they are likely to make.  But, when I see this kind of marketing, it signals “ameteur” all over the site and sadly, this same mistake is made by experienced marketers as well as newbies too.

You take the weight loss industry, a target market John Reese mentions in his blog post, in 2007, Marketdata, Inc., stated that the annual total spent on weight-loss products and services reached $58 billion, a clear indication that this is a big and growing market.  If you read some of the articles about starting up a new business online, you’ll probably read things like “weight-loss is not a target market and neither is Internet Marketing.”

Well, I say these writers have a point, especially if you want to focus on organic traffic to get more sales.  But, by targeting a smaller segment of that marketing, you could have yourself a winning online business.

Take Lisa over at Flat Stomach Exercises, whilst her site isn’t strictly about weight-loss, she has captured a segment of the weight-loss market … those who want to get rid of the tummy bulge.  Most people understand that to lose tummy bulge, you need a combination of a sensible diet (eating habit rather than rabit food and low fat nonsense!) and exercise.  Lisa combines the two and has a #1 spot in Google for the term “flat stomach exercies.”  Now she can talk weight loss to these people!

I hope you’re getting a picture of what I’m trying to hightlight here.

Had Lisa attempted to go for the weight loss market, her site is unlikely to have made it to the #1 position in Google or anywhere near the first page.

When newbies and experienced marketers alike get less than satisfactory results in the search results, they give up.  Fortunately for some of us, we listened to the likes of John Reese and instead of running from a particular market, we simply targeted a smaller segment within that market and by doing this, we can now shout “Bingo!”  Wow, and I didn’t even gamble.

Seriously now, if you identify yourself in this or John Reese’s post, dare to be different than 95% of the market and go for a smaller niche or segment.  This might be all you need to recession-proof your business and save it from ruin.

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