Niche Marketing - not all it's cracked up to be

Maybe you don't have a web site yet, maybe you don't even have a business yet, but somehow thanks to the wonder of the internet you have found this web site. If you fall into the latter category you may have found this blog because you are interested in starting an online business. I mean why not? After all, you could be lying on a beach in Bora Bora just posting away to your online empire, raking in the dough.

I hope you haven't come across the plethora of niche market sites out there and become sold on the fact that there is easy money to be made on the web, if you just pay a mere $97 NOW.

Niche marketing is a real buzz term at the moment, and yes you can make money at it. But you need a lot of time and energy if you want to do it right.

Do not believe 'them' when they tell you it is easy.

As I have a couple of market niche sites myself I can tell you that it is very time consuming to maintain these projects - IF YOU WANT TO DO IT RIGHT. And what I mean by that is not fill up the internet and blogosphere with nonsensical articles, or even downright non-truths about subjects.

I started out a site called 'know about martial arts'. I wanted to write about martial arts, it's history as well as general info. I am an avid kickboxer so it sounded like a good niche to get into. But after a while the articles that came my way were so appallingly bad that I had to re-write them myself so that I could sleep at night!

I am not lying.

I read articles that were so blatantly wrong in their information that I could not, with good conscience, publish them to the web. I wrote this article, which I am proud of, about African martial arts. You should have seen the original that I purchased in a niche pack to get my web site off to a 'flying start'. It was basically another article in the pack with all the terms for 'martial arts' replaced with 'African martial arts'. It was therefore totally incorrect.

This made me mad and so I did research on the subject myself to come up with my article. This obviously takes a lot of time. Now multiply that work by tens of other sites and you will see there just aren't enough hours in the day. See how long it has taken me on this rant already?!

I haven't updated my martial arts site for 3 months now. It's a shame as I really believed it would be a fun ongoing project.

Bottom line - if you want to purchase niche articles packs to start an online empire know what you are getting into. If you don't care what you are publishing - just publishing for the sake of getting content online - then go ahead. But just know that a lot of people believe what they read. Someone whose mother tongue is not English and writes nonsense so they can earn a crust on the other side of the world should not have their 'pearls of wisdom' immortalized just so that someone might make a few cents with their Google Adsense account.