The easiest way to make money is to have no competitor.
That’s so obvious it’s hardly worth stating.
The easiest way to improve your chances of having no competitor, or very few competitors, is to identify a small market niche that you can dominate. It’s better to be a big fish in a small pond than a small, struggling fish in a big pond. In the big pond, you will likely be eaten alive very quickly.
In a small pond, you will live a very happy, nearly stress-free, comfortable life.
Let’s look again at my very first enterprise, The Dartmouth Review. This small conservative renegade and independent student paper was the only source of reporting and commentary on events at Dartmouth, written and produced entirely by students. Talk about a refined and narrow product!
So not only was The Dartmouth Review different, it had staked out a monopoly. The truth is, the Review could have raised $500,000 a year, $1,000,000 a year or even $10,000,000 a year.
There was almost no limit to the amount of money we, as mere students, could have brought in if we had run the paper like a business instead of as a part-time hobby.
But we were just students. We did not need more than about $150,000 or 200,000 a year to publish the paper and have some money left over for parties. So we just stopped there, sending out a fundraising letter whenever we ran out of money, about four times a year.
So when you think about your product and marketing strategy, think of ways you can give your customers something they can’t get anywhere else. And it’s best if your market is small and highly specialized, because then the big boys are not as likely to come in and crush you.
Highly specialized information for a niche audience is always great, especially if your niche audience is relatively easy to find. The more specialized, the smaller your potential audience — but also the more committed your audience, and the more you can charge for you newsletter or magazine.
A newsletter with just one editor can do well with 1,000 or even a few hundred subscribers . . . if the cost of a subscription is $95 a month. SEMICONDUCTOR NEWS would be a good candidate for such a business model, or maybe get even more specialized than that. Maybe your publication would do best by focusing on a specific kind of semiconductor. Of course, it’s critically important for the information to be really good, essential insider news that semiconductor manufacturers and developers cannot get anywhere else.
The big mistake businesses make is to . . .
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Happy Improved Marketing,
Ben Hart
