The Advantage of Going After A Nook On The Web



When we talk about a nook, we are merely focusing on a specific area of a service or product sector. Think of nooks and crannies in a room. A simple, but clear, example of a nook would be Lasik eye surgery. It is a nook within the larger field of eye care and much larger field of medical services. The key to making money in your particular area is to focus on a specific nook that provides either a large volume of business or small volume with lucrative profit margins.

One of the biggest nook advantages is the ability to quickly become a dominant player in the area in question. By definition, there is almost always a limited pool of competitors in the market area, either for the area itself or the geographic limitation. Assume you are offering Lasik eye services. There are a limited number of medical professionals in your area offering the same thing. This means you have an outstanding opportunity to become the dominant personality. You can go get appearances on the local television and radio shows, publish articles in the paper and so on. News outlets are desperate for such quality content.

On the web, the same concept applies with a slightly different orientation. You want to focus on your nook to the exclusion of everything else. This sounds simple, but can be difficult to implement. There is an incredible temptation to expand a site beyond the nook in question. The motivation, of course, is greed. We all tend to think that if we offer tour services to London, our clientele would obviously be interested in buying soccer shirts for the professional teams in London. Wrong. Define your nook and stick to it. Even if you sell a few shirts, you risk distracting your prospects from purchasing a tour.

The web also provides unique advantages found in no other business medium. One of the dominant ways to market any business is to write content for periodicals. I am talking about informative articles, not advertisements. If you wrote an article for the local paper and they included it in their Sunday edition, how would you be viewed? It would be a lot more effective than an advertisement and, over time, you would become a trusted source for most readers. Whenever they thought of your area of expertise, they would come to you or your business. Talk about a goldmine!

On the web, you can take this example to the extreme. There are numerous sites known as article directories. These sites collect articles for an interesting audience. Websites, blogs and online newsletters need content all of the time. They use article directories to find the content. You should submit articles to the directories under the category applicable to your business. If you make the articles informative, you will quickly become a credible source and they will use your articles again and again. It is like being published in your local paper and a few hundred papers in other cities.

In summary, find your nook or cranny and stick to it.