Niche marketing: music
I have been a rock music fan for ages. I remember my pre-teens age and my parents unhappy with my habit to enjoy Iron Maiden, Accept, Judas Priest and other bands’ music to the full capacity of my music stereo system.
No surprise once I have found internet marketing interesting and started my search for a niche one of the first ideas that occurred to my mind was to make a website on rock music. The website is online and slowly grows.
But now I have more experience than a year back when I started this project. I realize that it takes much time and effort, that I am short of some great concept and, most important, it is a low paid niche. I have that feeling for weeks now. Recently there was a sale of an established music website on sitepoint.com. The website with 728,000 unique visitors generates $790.00 in profit per month. It should take a few full and part time employees to run a website of this scale – moderate forum, update miscellaneous website sections, manage adv issues, etc.
Obviously, you need a team of great volunteers who agree to work hard and properly and for free. And I have a feeling that this sort of stats applies to all music websites online. It is fun to run this kind of project, to discuss recent news, read interviews with your favorite bands. It is easy to get traffic, to build ‘sticky’ community members, but it is not good for a commercial project.
Affiliate stores (CD’s, DVD’s, digital music) do not make any considerable amount of money for these websites. Adsense makes pennies. I am still to try Chitika. The only type of adv that is likely to work is CPM (banner impression).
Below are some stats facts about the music website I refer to. Imagine that web traffic for some other sort of niche – 722,000 uniques, 5,616,000 page views…
URL: truepunk.com
Established: 15 Oct 1998
Uniques/Month: 721,776
Page views/month: 5,615,706
Monthly Revenue: 786.18
Statistics and Facts
Message Board Posts
518,930+
Message Board Members
26,515+
Product Reviews
1,282+
News Postings
1,085+
Mailing List Members
5,516+
Band Interviews (Ramones, Misfits, No Doubt, etc.)
150+
Summary: This revelation proves me that niche is of great importance if you are trying to earn your living online.
And this relatively little amount of money ($790.00) for that enormous amount of traffic makes me doubt my own belief that traffic = money. Here we add one more variable: niche (high paying) + traffic = money.
[eminimall]
[tags]niche, search marketing, networking, online communities, forums, traffic, link bait, social bookmarking, web 2.0, domain names, text-link-ads, links buying, myspace, seo, internet marketing, affiliate marketing, blogs, content generation, google, make money online, work from home, home based job, duplicate content, links, earn your living online[/tags]