I was recently interviewed by a print magazine about how I started my business. In it, I offered several tips and ideas on how to carve a niche in the marketplace that I personally applied.

And I realized that some of these tips were particularly powerful. So I wanted to reprint some of my answers here for you.

If you know my personal story, you know how niche marketing played an important role in my career.

Long story short, I feared rejection immensely, which led to a reclusive childhood. I wanted to overcome my fears and decided to dive into the world of sales in order to fight them. Years passed and many failures ensued until I finally became the top producing salesperson in Canada for a Fortune 500 company.

How did I accomplish that?

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In the competitive marketplace of the new millennium, the demand for specialized products or services will increase. If your site sells everything or to everyone, chances are that your audience will not perceive any greater value in shopping from you than anyone else.

The more generic you become, the greater your competition will be, since you’ve placed your offering in the same ring as the Wal-Marts, Targets and eBays of the world.

In other words, cast a wider net, and the likelihood that more competitors who are trying to go after the same “fish” will occupy the same marketspace.

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In John Reese’s Marketing Secrets Forum, a forum in which I am the senior moderator, member John Jarowski posted a really important question. He asked, and I’m paraphrasing John for the sake of brevity:

“When a new strategy is taught by some ‘guru’, everybody seems to copy it without tweaking it. This dilutes their effectiveness and puts me off tremendously. I would think that using any ‘new’ marketing strategy is a lot less effective once it gets diluted by lazy marketers who want to do cookie cutter style marketing.”

I agree. And let me tell you why this is true, and share with you important tips on how to avoid this.

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