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NICHE MARKETING

Niche Marketing. I guess if you’re in Canada you can say, “Neesh” Marketing, but Niche
Marketing simply means that you are taking a particular segment and you’re marketing to
that segment. Most people (especially authors) think that everybody should read their
product or their book. Well, who is your target market? “Oh, everybody needs this
product!” It’s almost like selling a multi-level vitamin. “Everybody breathes, so
everybody should take this vitamin.” Well, clue phone ringing. Not everyone is your
target market. Not everyone gives a damn about your product or your book, or is likely to
read your book if they had a gun to their head and had a million dollars in front of them.
It’s not interesting to everybody, no matter what you are doing. There are those books
that do cross into the general self-help. Well, general self-help will be a particular market.
You know, there’s only 10% - 15% of the people that would read a self-help book. The
rest of them are watching football games and drinking beer on Friday night and don’t
think that they need any help. Not that it is bad. I’ve watched football games myself and
had a few beers. The point is - you have to pick a particular market. Unless you are
promoted by Simon & Schuster (which is not always a guaranteed success) and unless
you have an “in” with Oprah Winfrey and can be on the show every week, it’s unlikely
you are going to be able to get everyone breathing the same interest. Now that doesn’t
mean that you can’t aim for that, and you should. With my career, I started out with a
very tight niche market and I began to expand to include other areas because I wasn’t
able to compete in the general market. Even for me, the market of handwriting analysis
was rather vague when I started. I had one product: one little deck of flashcards. I didn’t
have any depth of information of products to really compete with, for example, the other
schools with four or five different books or home-study courses. I built to that over the
next 10 years and once I got there, now I can compete in a broader market. However, I’m
under no illusion that everyone that walks and breathes and reads cares about handwriting
analysis. It’s simply not realistic, but what I do find is that it helps to work with a small
market. For example, I can market my relationship and love book to dating online
services or to singles organizations, because I have a specific book about a specific
market: being single and using handwriting analysis to solve problems in dating. I can
take the same information and package it for human resources saying, “Hey, if you are
hiring an employee, you need to listen to this tape or watch this book or hire one of our
students because we can save you money and we can hire the right employee.” It’s the
same information, but it’s targeted to a particular niche market. One of the things that you
can’t do is “everything.”

So, when you first start marketing your book or your product, you need to pick which
market is most important, which market is most accessible and, more importantly, which
market is going to buy the most of that. The reason it’s important to know your niche up
front, and you can like I said, “have multiple niches, but pick one that you know well” is
because immediately, you want to do some kind of joint venture with someone in the
niche market. Back in the early 90’s and the last 200 years, it wasn’t as easy to get a joint
venture and to do a mailing to somebody’s mailing list. Say for example, you have a
cookbook. You would have to then send that entire mailing which could cost hundreds of
thousands of dollars to this mailing list. Well, now it’s a phone call, it’s an e-mail and it’s
an e-mail to their list.