There’s an interesting article on MarketingSherpa touting the benefits of “nano-niche” marketing. Just about everyone involved with online marketing is well aware of the need to market products to well-targeted niches, but this idea takes things one step further and states that if you really want to stay recession-proof and get ahead of your competitors, you need to get laser-focused.

Tapping in to a highly motivated audience with little competition, and taking steps to gear your message towards them, can result in extraordinarily high returns on your investment. We talk a lot about the Long Tail here at ClickBank, and this idea is a perfect example of making the Long Tail work for you. You don’t need to drive a lot of traffic or spend a lot on advertising if you can achieve much higher conversion rates on the small amount of traffic you do have.

Nano-niche marketing is a perfect fit for affiliate marketing, since all that matters is how many visitors you convert into a sale, not your overall number of visits. Needing to drive huge amounts of untargeted traffic to your site is the old way of making money online. It used to be the case that using impression-based ad networks or programs like Google Adsense was the only way to make money, but that model doesn’t make sense for the vast majority of Internet marketers out there. In fact, at the recent BlogWorld conference I attended, these old monetization strategies were referred to several times as “webmaster welfare,” and the same experts instead recommended affiliate marketing and creating and selling your own products as the best ways to monetize a blog. The same holds true for just about any other type of website.

My recommendation is to take MarketingSherpa’s advice and start spending time identifying and targeting “nano-niches” in your area of expertise. The time you spend marketing to people in these ultra-focused niches will bring a much higher return on your efforts, giving you more time and resources to dedicate to finding other profitable niches. It’s time to think small!

Take a look at these related posts:

1. New Affiliate Marketing Today Podcast: Niche Marketing with Adam Short
2. The Ultimate Internet Marketing Shortcut
3. New Affiliate Marketing Today Podcast: Membership Site Success with Ryan Lee