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In the world of niche marketing, you’ll quickly learn to identify the different kinds of people that you run into at conferences, in your every day research, and while visiting blogs. Generally speaking there are 9 different types of niche marketers:

1. The Empire Builder. This guy is diversified. He’s created web sites and products in dozens of niches, most of them not connected to one another. He’s constantly testing out new ads, new channels, new affiliates. He does more mixing and matching in 30 days then you will do in a year. He’s either honed that process to a sharp edge, or he’s scattered himself to the wind.
2. The Warrior. This guy is Rommel or Patton. He’s too busy kicking your ass to listen to the nay-saying. He’s got a plan, he’s got resources, and at every level of the game (strategic, operational, tactical) he’s winning. One day, he might make breathtaking and unexpected moves that reap huge rewards, but on most days, he grinds out his objectives with grim efficiency.
3. The Monogamist. This gal picks one topic and runs with it. She may have multiple sites (a blog, a wiki, various sales letter sites, some forums) but they’re all on the same topic. She might hit it from different angles (for women, for Hispanics, for young professionals, for newlyweds) but it’s all about this one thing. It’s a good thing, too, because she really really loves that one topic. With any luck, that thing loves them back.
4. The Serial Monogamist. This guy loves one thing at a time, but when the oxygen has left the room, he  has moved on to the next thing. He’s got a great process in place for finding a new niche, building a site, seeding it with content, and driving enormous amounts of traffic, thus fanning the flames of affiliate, ad network, and info product sales.
5. The Songwriter-Never-The-Singer. This gal is adept at creating mind-boggling information products, which she then offers to a network of eagerly awaiting affiliates, who then proceed to spread the gospel far and wide, with everyone making mo’ money. She is the epitome of the hit factory.
6. The Adventurer. This is the moonlighting amateur who just revels in the love of the game. Niche marketing is more of a hobby. He or she loves to tinker with ideas, connect with people, build sites, and watch something grow. Are they making any money? Who knows? But they’ve built a blog with 20 contributors, 10,000 daily page views and a FeedBurner list to die for.
7. The Crusader. This is the guy with a cause, and a burning need to spread the gospel. It might be a “miracle” drug, or a cure for a medical problem (like diabetes or heart disease) or just an incredible passion to help people overcome financial difficulties. Doesn’t matter, because they’re easy to spot. If they hit the right notes, they become very very rich. If they don’t, they come off as screeching soapbox-mounting fools.
8. The Cleaner. He’s the mythical guy you keep hearing about. He sets up a site and starts cleaning up. $10,000 a day. $30,000 a day. They’re probably using some black magic ninja tricks to fool the search engines, or they’ve got some kind of underground brotherhood of werewolves driving traffic to his domain. Blink and he’s gone, moving on to the next thing, but unlike the Serial Monogamist, you won’t ever know where he’ll end up. Just that he’ll make yet another killing when he does.
9. The Consigliere. This is the gal who makes the other guys rich. She’s forgotten more than you’ll ever know about pay-per-click campaigns, web hosting, PHP frameworks, database caching, landing page optimization, and defeating email blacklists. She’s such a bad ass that she’s stopped being on anyone’s payroll years ago, because frankly, nobody can afford her for very long. Unfortunately, she’s also never put a single bit of her own skin in the game, but one day, she might, and then you’ll have a new Cleaner on your hands.

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I’ll be speaking on March 14, from 11:30 to 12:30 on the topic of my book From Geek to Peak: Your First 365 Days as a Technical Consultant.

I hope to see you there! My talk will be one of the Core Conversations held at SxSW 2009. Here’s a little preview of what these are about:

The informal discussions that pop up in the hallways between, during and after panel sessions have traditionally been one of the most productive parts of the SXSW Interactive Festival. In 2008, we formalized this process with the Core Conversation program — thereby making it easier for more attendees to participate in these hallway-type exchanges of information by letting them know what kind of discussion is happening when and where. For 2009, each of these hour-long Core Conversation sessions will have its own room, which should eliminate most of the noise problems from last year.

We anticipate about 75 total Core Conversations for 2009, so check back to this page frequently for updates on additional sessions. A day-by-day schedule of when these Core Conversations will occur should be posted on this page in mid-December.

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In an earlier post on ways to conquer the world via blogging I made one or two (or a dozen) passing references to my love of wargames as a kid. I want to touch on that little patch of my life again and talk about something you learned very quickly in that world.

The thing you learned was the value of the “force multiplier.” The force multiplier was a thing (and it could be any number of things) that evened up the odds a bit. For example, you might only have a squad of ten guys to defend a huge area, but you might have any number of force multipliers to help you fight off overwhelming odds:

• Two light machine guns could help you cover a wider area
• Your guys might all be Navy SEALs with expert training and high morale
• Your position might include broken ground or high elevation to provide impediment to the enemy
• If the simulation were complex enough, you could employ deception (a la Beau Geste) or treachery or traps

From a practical standpoint, you learned how to use force multipliers or you got your butt whooped. You avoided attacking entrenched positions in hilly or mountainous terrain. Or if you were insistently dumb, you only did it once and watched your best units get mauled. You kept your mobile units free out on the plains, but made sure your infantry was dug in. You knew that one air strike in the right place could take out a bridge and cause the enemy to have to go the long way around, thus stretching his supply lines to the breaking point.

The same thing is true with niche marketing. As a niche marketer, your job is to apply laser focus on to a group of buyers. All your content, product offerings, messaging, and services are all tightly bundled to appeal to that little group. Normally, your loving attention and focus gives you a huge advantage, because there’s no way that the other guy (usually the behemoth) can afford to be so involved with any one niche.

In other words, you aren’t trying to be king of the mountain by going up against all the giant owners of some impossibly large macroniche. You’re not trying to own the world of women’s fashion, say, you’re dialing things down to accessories for women aged 21-25 who are keenly involved in the clubbing scene (you get the idea).

This laser focus is precisely like sending in five Navy SEALs to sneak into the heavily-guarded fortress instead of throwing away an entire division of green recruits in a frontal daylight assault. It’s about using the right tools for the job, the right timing, the right message, and an offer that is so ridiculously on target that your market would have to be out of their minds not to sign up.

The concept of force multipliers really scales, too. Let’s say that you own a variety of niches, each of which is centered around different aspects of young women’s fashion. You might have the aforementioned accessories niche, and many more besides (like outrageous shoes, the latest clubwear, purses to match, cell phone covers, you name it).

Because you’ve got super-sharp focus in each niche, you’re making each of those niches as efficient as possible. If you’ve got an equally efficient operation to back you up (ie, you can fulfill products in each channel) then suddenly, you’ve just lowered a whole bunch of operating costs. And this of course leads to higher profits that you can either reinvest in the business or pay out as a reward for your hard work.

Meanwhile, the other guy, the enemy, well, he’s thrashing around trying to figure out how he’s losing all those customers that used to be under his control. But by that point, you’ve won hearts and minds, and are making inroads somewhere else. Isn’t this fun?

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If you’re of a certain age group, and by certain age group I mean “impossibly hip and tragically cool people who were entering adolescence around 1982 or 1983 or 1984 and were therefore steeping in the pop culture offerings of Duran Duran, Van Halen, time-traveling De Loreans, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Steven Spielberg generally, and mucho mas” then the headline of this blog post is pretty self evident.

Seriously, how many posers did you meet in junior and senior high? How many of us were accused by our peers of being posers of one kind or another? Right? Right? You know what I’m talking about, oh members of my ungreatest generation.

There was always that klutzy kid, par example, who couldn’t stay on a skateboard to save his life dressing up as a skate rat, complete with the haircut and the anarchist symbol around his neck.

Oh, the scorn heaped upon this kid’s head by the real skate rats. Until, that is, the kid learned how to skate, maybe starting with kickflips and moving on to vert ramps, et cetera, et cetera. But even after that, it may have taken a while for the scorn levels to descend to non-lethal levels.

Same thing happens when you, the running dog capitalist, enter a niche that isn’t inside your normal sphere of knowledge or influence. Think computerphobe trying to market to the enterprise software space. You have to really really really really work your butt off to get there. Not so much if you’re marketing to other computerphobes. If you’re a computerphobe trying to market to other computerphobes, suddenly you’re no longer a poser.

You’re the real deal! You can talk about your frustration with this or that, your common hatred for technology, your workarounds for stalled software or junky hardware. You’re able to make sound and useful recommendations for this or that product, nudging people towards microsites or affiliate products that will help them.

In fact, you’re not really marketing any more, not really, right? You’re helping. You’re informing. You’re educating. You’re empowering. And if you do it right, you’re making some money in the bargain, and there isn’t anything wrong with that.

Bottom line is, there are millions of opportunities out there for the niche marketer. Why spend time and energy in places where you’ll lose all credibility? Why be that kid with the clothes and haircut but no actual skills or props?

Now, there is a way to actually become a viable part of any community, but I’ll talk about that a little later. But only if you promise to use your knowledge for good and not evil.

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Trellian is now offering a free keyword/search term discovery tool over at http://www.keyworddiscovery.com/search.html

All of you who were impossibly hooked on the now-defunct Overture keyword tool can now rejoice! Onward and upward!

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