Telegraphik

Warning: In my opinion “General Blog Networks”, those with tech blogs, gadgets blogs, news blogs, political blogs, and the like are vast red oceans that are flooded. So is the entertainment niche. Not that you can’t still run a successful site in these niches. But who really wants to try and mount an attack against these guys when you can OWN smaller niches. When I mean OWN I really mean that. I know of 10 niches that traditional blog networks haven’t tapped yet. I’d sell them but instead I think someone smart should really focus in on them and build something that is smarter than a blog network. Let’s talk about some untapped markets. Any market is untapped if, and only if you really believe you can live up to your best performance in the past, and you can network with other site owners in similar niches to find success.

In today’s world it seems traditional business owners are content to put up a ‘brochure’ online but not take advantage of building a website that converts customers into evangelists. Back in the early 90’s I worked for a company that did a good job of ‘owning’ their niche. In today’s market they fall way short of owning their niche or many sub niches. However the key thing is they are still a major presence online. Just about any site that is still around from the 1990’s is a major force today so I’m sure revenue wise they are doing quite well. Longevity is the key to any success in any niche but its far more important in microniches like the one’s I’m referring to.

Let’s take for example a website I’m giving some advice to. It’s called Chocolate Chipped. It’s a website about chocolate, chocolate chips, and anything else having to do with chocolate.

First thing I do when recommending a niche is I look at the first page of search results. Let’s do a search for Chocolate. The first page is pretty heaviy dominated by what I call weak leaders. Site’s like Wikipedia,Answers.com, and Amazon.com. You might think these guys are the big dogs but truthfully they can’t really compete against good web standards and a devoted person. It’s true trust me.

In any given month there are over 500,000 searches for the word chocolate on major search engines according to Aaron Wall’s SEOBook Keyword Tool. That’s a lot. That tell’s me there is a lot of activity in this chocolate subniche. There are a number of other things I look at including the first two pages of major searches pagerank and backlinks. But overall chocolate is a fairly good Blue Ocean.

A good question when beginning your new site is Are you mounting an attack against a vast red ocean, or are your swimming pleasantly in your own Blue Ocean?