Following on from my blog ‘The internet isn’t even a sperm’ I thought I’d write a blog regarding where I believe the internet will go and how to make the most from it.
As the internet grows and takes more and more control of our lives there are two things I can see happening. 1. The internet will become awash with more and more information and therefore finding the information you require will become more and more problematic. 2. As we have already seen with the growth of social media the customer will become more and more choosy about what he/she accepts coming into their lives. Creating a situation where people will only subscribe to things that have strong personal attachment.
This leads me to look at a simple process that will become ever more apparent. Niche sites supplying ALL the information a small community from the global market could be one way forward. For instance one of the simplest analogies I always use is a kite flyers website. Let’s have a rough guess that there are 1 million people around the world that fly kites as a hobby or for recreational activities every year. This would include parents and children who do it at weekends for fun. If you could produce a website with the best places in the world to fly kites both for the wind and the scenery, invite the community to add to it, provide all the tips to flying, create videos from the best kite flyers of special tricks and how to do them and build an ecommerce backend onto the site where you tried to stock (through other stockists) every kite in the world, why would any kite flyer go anywhere else? Going forward (once you have built that community) you could then move into kite surfing, snow kiting, kite landboarding and expand both your community and the value of goods and hence your turnover. From there once you have built the community you may offer them travel insurance, hotels etc through third parties. All the time however you are creating highly valuable content to a small defined market.
So lets fast forward and say that we have launched the site and we get a 500,000 unique visitors every year. To be cautious let’s say that 10% become buyers through the site (50,000). You would only need to get £10 sales from each purchase to make me a tidy little business. With the average kite selling at around £20 you can see that creating a £1 million turnover business through a single online instance can be achieved.
Now I have made this very simple and of course building a website, delivering content that is worth £100, £1000 attracting and building the community etc isn’t easy but you can see my point. If you create something of high value for a small amount of people that is highly targeted then they will return time and again and potentially purchase time and time again. They will also know others who share the interest and word of mouth will spread your idea. They will come to you as you will have something of high value to them. You can also use social media sites to spread the word simply and efficiently.
The maths for sites such as these is simple. If your target market is only 5000 then maybe you need to create something with a perceived value of £1000 and charge them £100 each to access it giving you a £500,000 turnover. If your target market has 20,000 then maybe you’ll need to get £20 from each one. When you think that your global market is 8 billion finding something that 100,000, 20,000 or just 5000 people who share an interest ‘should’ be quite easy.
Yes the days of creating a monolith the likes of amazon, ebay etc are probably gone however I think that even these sites are open to smaller and more niche sites taking their custom.
The main thing to remember when and if trying this as a method is to create a site that meets all of the needs of the visitor so they feel that they are getting well looked after, that you meet all of their needs and that they are getting value for money. Never stop up dating and adding new initiatives. Most important make sure that the technology platform you start with allows you to grow and expand without a re-build as this can be very expensive.
I hope this blog has given you food for thought. Go get em!
Happy Hunting!
