In this installment of niche marketing examples, we're going to tackle the niche of stock photos. For those into Internet marketing, you know that this is big business because many people get their stock photos from sites that specialize in this sort of thing. I know right away that the main niche will be very competitive but I am hoping to find a sub niche that I can work with. I expect this to be my toughest challenge yet.
I went to Wordtracker and came up with 1479 searches, which is very good. Unfortunately, going to Google and doing the search there brought up a total of 1,420,000 sites. Not as many as I thought, but still way to many for our purpose. So, it was time to check out the sub niches and hope for the best.
I saw a phrase that looked like it had potential because it was a long phrase. The phrase was royalty free high resolution stock photos and had a decent, if not great, number of searches at 52. The good news was that Google came up with only 599 competing sites and quite a few paid ads. So there is definitely a market. However, with this market, we're probably going to have to settle for a very little piece of it. I'll show you how.
First thing we have to do is get a domain name. I thought of highresstockphotos.com and believe it or not, this domain was available. Great! Now, the question is, what are we going to do with it?
Well, I don't think we want to go for a full blown high resolution photo site because we can't possibly compete with the big boys. But we can do one of two things.
First of all, with only 599 competing sites, this is a great phrase for Bum Marketing. So, what we can do is write articles on the subject of stock photos as a start. After we've done that, we have to decide what we're going to have at our site to monetize this.
If you don't want to go through the trouble of trying to get your own stock photos to sell to people, what you could do is set up your site to review OTHER sites that sell stock photos. You'd report on the quality of the photos, the price and other details that potential buyers would find helpful.
The next thing you would do is find out if any of these stock photo sites have affiliate programs. If they do, you can join one of them and recommend it as part of your unbiased review. This may be a way for you to make some commissions.
If none of these sites have affiliate programs, the next thing you can do is simply put Adsense ads up on your site to make some money off of all those advertisers. If you're going to do this, you may want to target other keywords related to this one in order to maximize your income potential.
Granted, this isn't the easiest niche to break into, but with a little imagination and so few competing sites, there is no reason why you can't make something off of this wide open sub niche.