Want to know what the real secret to Bum Marketing is? Want to know how you can finally start making money with affiliate marketing? Well, you just have to know how far you must narrow down the niche you want to try and sell to…and the rest is gravy!

Okay, I’m assuming you know what a niche is. You know, a small targeted section of a larger market. Take weight loss for example…big market, and saturated with competition. And even if it wasn’t, you have too many people with different needs in that big of a market so your message would have to be way too broad to try and reach everyone and would therefore be ineffective.

So, you would want to maybe look at diet plans that focused on perhaps just women. And maybe narrow it down a little further to women who are getting married soon and need a plan that gives them super quick results and targets the right areas of the body that need to be thinned out a bit to accommodate their wedding dress.

Here is another example. I was at an air show this weekend that focused on War Word II airplanes and memorabilia. They had all these old planes that had been reconditioned and were operational as well as tanks, motorcycles, jeeps and weapons of the same time period…pretty cool.

They also had people dressed up like soldiers and were kind of doing little re-enactment scenes…no simulated wars or anything, more like how a camp would look, or a bunker or weapons area, etc.

I started to do a little niche research and went over to the vendor tents that were selling items from the time period. Theses were authentic pieces, not replicas… and not cheap. I noticed something unusual that I had not realized until I saw it with my own eyes.

Folks just like me came to the show to see the airplanes…I wasn’t really interested in the actual weapons or uniforms or other such memorabilia, as interesting as it was. Then you had folks who were interested in that kind of stuff and I figured you would probably have two types of those kinds of people who would make a purchase at the vendor tents.

The first type of person was someone older, a retired vet who had seen some type of military combat before. Then you had the kind of person who was active duty, most likely an officer type really into the history of the military.

I stood around and watched for a while and came to the conclusion that I still have a lot to learn about marketing and figuring out exactly who my market is in a particular niche because I totally missed the mark.

You know who was actually buying all the old stuff? It was the guys who were actually a part of the reenactment. The guys who gave up their weekend to dress as soldiers and walk around like they were actually living during WWII and talking to each other in German and saluting higher ranking officers and eating realistic rations and so on and so on.

It was these guys who broke role only long enough to go hunting in the vendor tents for that one piece of their collection they were missing, or to buy a new medal or ribbon for their uniforms.

I also realized that I never would have even considered this niche before because it would be too small…I mean how many WWII buffs are there really out there? Thing is, I would not be opening an expensive brick and mortar store to sell to these people, and as you might imagine, there is no such store anywhere in the large city in which I live.

These people acquire most of their “stuff” online, which is exactly where I work. So, this would probably be a very targeted, highly motivated, ready to buy group of people that most marketers would overlook…don’t you think? Or at least get their actual market wrong like I did when I made a guess as to who would buy the stuff the vendors were selling.

Goes to show that you must do your research and understand who your market is, what they are passionate about, if they have the money necessary to buy what you are selling and how much competition there is out there and if you can position yourself in front of the market better than they have.