Small Business Ideas

Growing Your Internet Business By Looking Across Your Niche

A few months ago I was browsing through a small business forum for some reason. It happened to have a pay per click advertising section which caught my attention. Someone asked a question about tracking sales on their website that were generated from pay per click traffic. The first thing I thought was “duh, use the free tracking code from Google AdWords or Yahoo Search Marketing or where ever you’re running those campaigns.” Actually, I take that back because that’s second thing I thought. The first thing was “oh man, oh man, you’d probably double your ROI if you tracked anything.”

Anyway, at least a dozen people commented on that thread and one or two people mentioned using a form of subids. Not a single person even went down the tracking pixel and tracking code route. That’s something pretty basic to me and I only dabble in pay per click advertising now. Besides the obvious “maybe I have learned a thing or three” it got me thinking about other opportunities to expand.

Most of the time I tend to gravitate toward a few forums that are full of other internet business people when thinking about internet marketing. This experience, and others like it, keep reminding me that there’s a lot of opportunity with a lot less competition outside of that space. I don’t have any desire to sell pay per click advertising services or search engine optimization services, it’s hard enough finding time to work on my own projects, but forums outside of the internet marketing niche are ripe for the picking.

I’m sure most people already do this, but don’t forget to look horizontally into related niches. Maybe even set aside time each week or month or quarter for it. Maybe your niche is dog training for pet owners. Maybe you’ve already targeted dog training for the family beagle and dog training for lap dogs. Well, some of the same principles would apply to other types of dog training. What about training police dogs? Or search and rescue dogs? Or seeing eye dogs? It might take a bit of research to educate yourself on those markets but doing that opens up a whole new set of potential customers.

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Trying to peek around the corner more often.