If you want your marketing to work, you have to focus.
You have to understand who your message is for, then speak to that person.
And you have to craft your offers to serve that person. Present options that appeal to her, that are in line with what she’s willing to spend, and that will benefit her in ways she cares about.
In other words … you need to specialize. You don’t have the budget to blanket the earth in ads that appeal to everyone, and neither do I.
One of the first things people do when thinking about building a business online is rush to identify their “niche.” And that isn’t wrong … but it’s more complicated than it might seem at first.
The word niche doesn’t just mean a focused topic. In biology, niche refers to how each type of organism interacts with all the other organisms in its ecosystem.
It’s how a plant or animal fits into the larger context.
Your topic is part of your niche, of course. But so is your audience. And your positioning. Not to mention your potential partners. And the folks who share your content. And the content platforms you publish on.
A conversation in the comments here on Copyblogger got me thinking about some of the different ways that business owners inhabit their niches.
Early niche sites
Back in the day, creating a “niche website” meant building a compact site around an under-served keyword phrase, pulling out all the SEO stops to