Would Bluegrass make a good PDF?
This post is a contribution from Alan Stewart, co-host of The Marketer”s Podcast, where you”ll hear tips, tools and tactics for marketing your business both online and offline. Comments are enabled for Alan’s post so please feel free to share your reactions.
When Brance asked me to write a post about “niche marketing online” for The Bluegrass Blog, I must confess I was just a tad concerned.
Why?
Because I would have to be the most musically challenged person I know. I can barely tell the difference between one genre and the next.
Brance explained that “Bluegrass is a niche inside a niche on the internet. It”s a small piece of the music business, but not as small as some people might think. In my experience the consumers are very loyal.”
As a marketer, my livelihood depends upon successful marketing campaigns. I want to be sure to back a winner, so I normally conduct some fairly thorough due diligence before I market any concept, product or service. So it was at this point I wanted to know if Bluegrass would at least meet my initial criteria for potentially being a profitable niche online.
In short, would Bluegrass make a good PDF?
Now, I”m going to take a little bit of poetic license with Adobe”s acronym of PDF being Portable Document Format and change it to Passion Demand Find.
Passion
To discover a profitable niche, you firstly need to determine if the chosen market (made up of both sellers and buyers) are passionate about their subject. Do they have their own unique language patterns, behaviors, forums, blogs, podcasts, magazines, shows, conventions and events? Are they obsessive and evangelistic about their passion?
Hmmm, now let me think” would true Bluegrass Fans meet the above criteria?
Demand
Are there enough people searching for Bluegrass stuff to make the niche profitable? Go to Digital Point”s Keyword Suggestion Tool and type in Bluegrass to check out the number of searches. You need a minimum of 5,000 total searches per month with 30,000 to 100,000 being ideal.
If the niche is too small it will take forever to make any money out of it, and if it is too large it may prove to be so saturated with competition that it would be very difficult to get a foot in the door.
Find (where they spend)
Now go to Google and type in Bluegrass. Can you “find” evidence or examples of purchases being made online? Is there competition? No competition is often a warning sign that the particular target market does not want to buy online.
The target market may have passion and demand but no desire to make purchases online. Little old ladies may have a passion for a particular niche but not the computer savvy to make purchases online. Just because millions of people use toilet paper (high demand) that does not mean millions of people go online to purchase it.
Of course all of the above are just the initial questions to ask and more thorough due diligence would need to be done. Do you think Bluegrass would meet the PDF criteria? Talking strictly business and marketing, do you think Bluegrass can be a profitable niche online?
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Alan Stewart is a name that won't be familiar to most (if any) bluegrass fans. He's not a player, he's...
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Bluegrass is already a profitable niche on-line, especially for those who were perspicacious enough to borrow from the real-time model we’re all familiar with: the personally-attended “record table” (yes, I’m THAT old…).
You see, bluegrass fans have always been able to interact with the performers during breaks and after the show. The media table is the gathering point. Sales at said table yield a much greater profit, so it’s a win-win situation. In terms of e-commerce, figure out a way to “warm up” the ubiquitous shopping cart, and you’ve got it knocked!
Bill Evans’ site is a perfect example of how to keep the personal element in an on-line experience. Likewise, Murphy and Red Henry offer a “down-home” approach. Heck, Red and I have traded bridges and we’ve never met!
At First Quality Music, I can e-mail them a heads-up that a new banjo student will be stopping by – make sure he gets the right stuff.
I know I can always stop by the Hayseed/Dixe website to see how Dale & Don Wayne Reno are doing (very well).
Does it seem like there’s a pattern here? It’s not the internet, per se, it’s the people. Even if I had two tin cans and a very long string, I know I’d be able to get sound advice from Kyle K. Smith.
So, the marketing lesson here is to make your services available to well-thought-of performers and businesses; if you build a website, they will come…
Bob Peelstrom
Meredith, NH
pickin’ for 45 years
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