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I sometimes get asked by would-be online marketers: should I focus on one niche or have many niches? My answer is always the same: rethink your definition of niche.

Listen, it’s really easy to sit inside your business and think, “Okay I’m in the pet care business. That is my niche.” Or, “I’m in the leisure gambling business. That is my niche.”

The reality is though, that all niches can be chopped into smaller bits, moved around into different categories (or what my people call “branding”), whipped out only during certain parts of the year, transmitted one way to one group as opposed to a different way to another group, made extremely accessible or esoteric depending on the tastes of your audience, or what have you. Let me give you a few examples (and I won’t even have to rip them from the headlines!) so you’ll know what I’m talking about.

You’re in the pet care business. You can specialize by species. Yeah, yeah, everyone grooms dogs and cats, but how many folks offer lizard spas? Eh, eh? (The right answer is, “I don’t know, let me do some research on demand!”).

Let’s go deeper. If you only do dogs, do you do those tiny little dogs (you know, the nervous ones that look like they’ve drunk too much expresso) or do you do the big galooph Marmaduke dogs? They each present their own set of problems, and each subniche contains owners who are either sick of bathing their own giant dogs or not patient enough to properly brush out a Yorkie.

Time to go deeper. Maybe you want to niche-ify by type of customer. Busy executives who own big dogs? Busy single female business owners who own big dogs?

Or how about geography? Only big dog owners in North Austin. (Inside joke about North vs. South Austin…oh, never mind.) Big dog owners in Manhattan. Big dog owners west of the Mississippi.

Or you might try linking it to some other activity, which could uncover gold mines of affiliate and affinity traffic. Say, single Hispanic women with big dogs who love to jog with their dogs. (I count at least four possible interrelations there: singles, Hispanic/Latino, joggers, big dog owners.)

What about temporal niches? Maybe you slide from niche to niche as you go through the year. Maybe you talk about puppy training and puppy grooming during the Holidays, because you know that most of your target market acquires a puppy during Christmas. Or you focus on the outdoor fitness dog person niche during summer, offering products like doggie life vests for the “my dog and me” kayakers out there.

You might decide, after all this is done, that you really need to inhabit multiple niches, and that each niche is a way to draw traffic and customers to you. If that’s the case, then what’s happened inside your brain is an important thing: you’ve learned to reframe what niche marketing is about.

Niche marketing isn’t about picking one thing and toiling away. It’s also not about picking 100 things out of the air and blasting away at them until you hit the vein of customer gold. It’s about segmenting your offerings and audiences so that customers can make sense of what you’re doing and saying. And, oh yeah, by segmenting you’re also making it much easier to see where you’re succeeding and failing, by any metric you care to use (money, traffic, conversions, etc).

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A while ago, I wrote a little WordPress plugin that lets you integrate your tagging efforts with Amazon’s SimpleDB. Why would anyone want to do that? Well, it turns out that if you’re running various blogs, SimpleDB provides a really easy way to organize the tags for all of them.

simpledb-tag (ZIP archive)

Here’s a PDF of the article I wrote for Amazon.

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It seems everyone wants to be in the “green” space. If you’re in the data storage business, then you’re touting the power savings of your new devices. If you’re a car maker, then you’re talking about your vaporware electric vehicle line (catty, huh?). If you’re in the construction business, you’re busy talking up green home standards and solar PVC and all that.

Joel Makover over at GreenBiz.com talks about how tiring and uninspiring most Green marketing messages are, but with an acronym-based approach: a marketing framework called CRED (Credibility, Relevance, Effective Messaging, and Differentiation). Of course, on first blush it appears that this would be a good approach to any marketing effort directed at any niche.

Here’s a sample from the piece:

In other cases, companies simply seem uninspired. (How many more times can we stand yet another takeoff on Kermit the Frog’s plaintive proclamation, “It’s not easy being green.” Kermit first crooned that song lyric in — Would you believe? — 1970, and nearly four decades later it still seems to be the best copywriters can come up with. (In mid-2008, I conducted a Google search of the phrase “easy being green,” which yielded 1,570,000 returns. By contrast “til death do we part” yielded only 17,500 returns, while “check is in the mail” garnered 20,500 returns.) Moreover, each new slogan or press release quoting or paraphrasing Kermit seems to revel in its cleverness, as if its creators were the first to have thought it up.) Is it any wonder that the public is skeptical about companies’ environmental commitments?

It’s not just Kermit, of course. Too many green strategies, and the messages behind them, are variously vague, vapid, or vacuous.

How do you avoid this fate? To answer this, I turned to my colleague Andrew Shapiro, founder and CEO of GreenOrder, the sustainable business strategy firm with which I am affiliated. I’ve learned a lot hanging around Shapiro, managing principal Nicholas Eisenberger and their team for the better part of a decade, but what sticks most is GreenOrder’s framework for crafting green strategies and messaging that work. It’s called CRED.

Read the whole piece here.

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By now most of you know that you can go to https://adwords.google.com/select/TrafficEstimatorSandbox and figure out how much certain keywords will cost you if you’re going to put together an SEM or PPC campaign. (And if you didn’t, then the link above will surely point the way!)

What I really like about this tool, though, is that it comes in rather handy when it comes time to complete my research. You see, my process for brainstorming niche ideas usually starts out pretty right-brained. I might do a free-association exercise (check out wordassociation.org if you need help here), listing out 100 or 200 subtopics or words that I think relate to a certain niche.

Once that’s done, I take a little breather and then come back to it with categorization in mind. I usually follow the bucket sort algorithm (kinda) by just shoving even generally associated terms into fairly large groups or buckets. For example, if 10-12 terms are all about fashion, they all go into the fashion bucket. Same goes for water sports, pet care, etc.

The next step is to dig in to each bucket to figure out where all the sub-buckets are, and then to see how they relate to each other inside a bucket and then across buckets. It’s this last step where you make some pretty ingenious connections. For example, you might have some travel-related scuba stuff connecting with some other water sports or women’s fitness vacations or what not.

The last big heuristic is to look at this magical mind map and wipe out anything that you just don’t have a heart to support. You might think that topics arrayed around the idea of all-women’s fitness vacations to Mexico and Central America might be fun, but you have no desire to actually crawl up inside that niche and get to know it with further research. Or you might look at that and your entire world might spin around because that’s exactly the key to the success of your niche marketing efforts!

At some point, you’re left with a much tighter mind map of associated topics, all of them in their little buckets. Some of you are smiling, because you know about the campaign -> ad group -> ad hierarchy in Google AdWords. That’s right, your main topic, whatever that is, but let’s call it women’s vacations, that becomes the campaign. All the buckets (women’s fitness vacations, women’s vacations in the mediterranean, women’s vacations in australia, and so on) become ad groups, and each of your topics become different ads.

Now it’s time to figure out the left-brain side of the equation. You have a mind-map of sorts, and you’ve got lots of juicy stuff, so now its time to figure out what it’s gonna cost you. So you enter your keywords into the traffic estimator to see how much this will cost you.

As you can see from the screen shot above, you’ll be paying about a dollar a click for the more general term “women’s vacation” but there isn’t enough data out there to estimate your costs on some of the more long tail terms. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing, and in a later post I’ll talk about getting more data.

For now though, you know one thing for sure: it’s relatively cheap to get into this PPC market, which again, may not be a good thing. I like to see a bit of competition. There may be other data to consider, of course–you may have been closely watching travel magazines and travel shows and seen an uptick in the advertising devoted to women’s vacation. There may be an upward trend in pop culture offerings on the subject, or articles in the press.

Bottom line: don’t let keyword estimation tools be the end-all, be-all of your decision making process. They exist only to help you with the “spreadsheet logic” and shouldn’t totally overwhelm all of your thinking.

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In part I of this series, I talked about using mind maps and spreadsheets as tools to help clarify your thinking about a niche. Here’s part II.

The List of Nouns

Now that you have some of the business/marketing stuff on paper, it’s time to consider the web site (really, its a web application, don’t kid yourself). This is where too many people get tangled up, mostly because everyone has this obsession about functionality.

Let me tell you something right now, people, and please please please listen up. A web site or piece of software isn’t about functionality, not really. It’s about the person using said web site or software to accomplish a goal or activity. Period, end of story, move on.

But you just can’t move on, can’t you? Lots of people talk to me about their ideas for such and such a site and they have these lists of functions. It always make me laugh. Why? Because there’s no better way to shut the door on your dreams than to focus on functions.

Let me give you an example. Had a young man approach me last month about a site he wanted me to build. It had to allow publishing of certain kinds of content with certain kinds of database fields on such and such mobile devices. Most users were contributors who would submit their content via a certain process to a group of editors, each of which would have certain specific tools at their disposal to mark up the content and flow it to a site manager, who would press certain buttons to get content on the site.

My comment to him was, “Why build this application? Why not go with WordPress?” WordPress is free, supports most of what he wanted (in generic ways) and helped his organization achieve its goal: publishing and managing content from a variety of contributors.

No deal. WordPress wasn’t good enough. Oh, but wait, the price tag for something custom was just too much. Another business bites the dust. Grrrr.

Here’s how to avoid this problem. Develop a list of nouns and verbs that describe who your users are (nouns) and what they want to do on the site (verbs). Very simple, very tidy, and expressed in a way that will help you make a really important decision….

Do I build? Do I buy? Or do I buy and then modify? (See, it kinda rhymes: build…buy…modify!)

The list of nouns is plain and simple a list of users. Identify as many users as you can:

• Contributors
• Editors
• Authors
• Supervisors
• Judges
• Moderators

You get the idea. Your list of nouns/users might also be segmented by level of expertise (newbie, intermediate, wizard, demigod) or type of topic (if you have a hiking site, you’ll have recreational hikers, mountain hikers, urban hikers, et cetera).

Once you have a list of nouns, you’re ready for ze verbs.

List of Verbs

If your list of nouns is all about users, then your list of verbs is all about actions and behaviors for each user. You might want want all your contributors to create content but not be able to post it, or see other contributions. Those who moderate only get to see articles or postings that violate certain rules or policies, or they may see everything that comes by.

Here are some examples:

• Create content
• Edit content
• Rate content
• Moderate content
• Comment
• Subscribe to a feed
• Subscribe to a newsletter
• Provide feedback
• Bookmark a page
• Share with a friend

See how non-specific this list is? These verbs don’t imply any details. Yes, you want users to “share with a friend” but at this point you don’t care if its got a CAPTCHA device to kill spambots, or if it posts to a database and blind copies you on the sent email, or if it uses AJAX to regex confirm valid emails. Down that path leads madness! Madness, I say!

This list of verbs is crucial because it will communicate to your web site team a list of things that you want to see come out of their work, things they will either have to build or buy in order to support your overall objective.

For example, your team might look at your nouns and verbs and say, “Listen, this looks like a community site to us, so we recommend using XYZ framework. It’s free, it’s fast, and it handles 90% of what you’re talking about, but it doesn’t do ratings. It looks like ratings are pretty important to you, so we’ll need to either find a ratings module (which might cost some money) or build it ourselves (which will take 100 man hours).”

Two light bulbs should be going off in your head right now:

• I’ve just made the job of working with my web geeks much easier!
• Gee, my business idea isn’t as unique as I thought!

The first light bulb should make both you and your team happy. So spontaneously happy that someone over there should just cough up a check or something and send it my way. (Seriously. I can’t tell you how much unrighteous crap and inefficiency goes on because business stakeholders have no friggin’ clue how to communicate with a web development team.)

The second light bulb is equally important, and should by no means cause you despair. After all, we live in a world where competition is healthy and desired. Otherwise, we’d only have one airline, one auto maker, one ice cream maker, and so on. What you need to take away from this realization, though, is that there’s no need for you to reinvent the wheel.

For example, if you want to allow your users to rate articles, there’s no need to have some kind of ultra-specific way to do it that will take your developers 1800 hours to develop and delay your offering by three months. There are 800 or so free or low-cost modules for blogs, wikis, forums and what have you that let you implement a rating system right now without hassle and allows your team to focus on something that really matters (like making sure the server won’t crash when you get a million visitors) and lets you focus on something even more important (like actually getting those million visitors).

So there you have it, four tools that will help you take some meaningful action. To summarize, these tools are:

1. The mind map, which will help you ideate and brainstorm in an intuitive way.
2. The spreadsheet, which will help you associate some hard facts or numbers to your idea.
3. The list of nouns, which identify your users.
4. The list of verbs, which identify activities and behaviors on your site.

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