If you want to learn how effective Niche Marketing can be,

I suggest you "don't" take the route I did. Back in 1983 I started a company offering general

Electronics Subcontract Assembly services to just about

anyone who made Electronic products. By 1985 my company was teetering on the brink of bankruptcy

and I was perilously close to losing my home because of a

large overdraft pledged against it. Why did this happen?Well Electronics Subcontract Assembly is a huge, highly

competitive market place with lots of heavy hitters. Being

a little naive at the time, I thought that my little three

man company could carve out a big enough slice from such a

huge market to make a very comfortable living - I was dead

wrong. We did get work, but only the jobs the big boys didn't

want. The work was labour intensive and even with our tiny

overhead we couldn't make enough profit to sustain the

business adequately. We could never get the big, lucrative

contracts because we weren't considered big enough to

handle them. By December '84 I was desperate. Sales for the previous

four months had been abysmal and cashflow almost non-

existent. My Bank Manager was on my back demanding that I

reduce the business overdraft or he would call it in. My

suppliers were baying at my door to be paid. As if that

wasn't bad enough, during the first week of 1985 my biggest

customer suspended production for six months on a games

gizmo we were making for him. Things were so bad I was seriously considering bankruptcy

to get out from under this financial nightmare. Fortunately

I'm a bit pig headed about giving in too easily so despite

all the problems I hung on, and I'm glad I did because

fortune suddenly smiled on me. What happened?A couple of weeks into 1985 a business acquaintance came to

see us with a sample cable and asked if we could make 5 up

for him. The cable was for an IBM PC. At the time I knew

nothing about making cables and even less about PCs, but I

had his sample to work from so I took the job. When our now customer came to collect his finished order,

he mentioned that there were a few other Dealers in the PC

market who would probably be interested in having us supply

them with these cables - he even gave us a mailing list. I was more than a little sceptical, I have to admit, but I

had nothing to lose so I went for it. I wrote a short,

snappy sales letter, scraped together the money, mailed out

to the 100+ dealers on the list and crossed my fingers. 48 hours later we had our first order for 10 cables, within

7 days we had 11 more orders for 10 cables each. That one small mailing brought us an amazing 12% initial

response - and it just kept going from there with week

after week of repeat orders. Pretty soon after that, my wife Maxine joined the business

and set up a telephone sales desk and customer service

system. By that time we were averaging about? 000 a week

and that was from just the one cable type. At that point I dumped the subcontract work and focussed on

the cable business. Once Maxine took over the sales function she immediately

followed up with the companies who hadn't responded to our

initial mailing. That brought in another 26 new customers.

Within six months we were supplying most of the major

Dealers and Distributors in the then burgeoning PC market

and our cable sales had quadrupled. Inside a year in this niche business we were selling

thousands of computer cables of all descriptions, including

highly lucrative custom formats, and we were being asked to

provide advice on how to design cables for specific

applications - we had arrived - we were now the

acknowledged experts - customer loyalty rocketed and by 1988

our turnover reached? 00,000+ with gross profits of 50% or

more. Now I'm the first to admit that luck played a hand in

turning my company's fortunes around, but the experience

taught me my most valuable lesson in business - you have to

focus on a specific, under-served market niche if you want

to be really successful in business. I have applied this premise to four other businesses since

then and, with one exception, all have been successful. My advice? Find yourself a small, focused market niche (the

Internet is full of them) where you can carve a reputation

for yourself and become an expert in the field - like I

did. Copyright? 2005, Andr?Anthony Niche Market Know-HowAndr?Anthony owns and operates Niche Market Know-How a

resource for beginning Niche Marketers. Visit

http://www. nichemarketknowhow. com today to find strategies,

tips, tools, products and resources for effective niche

product creation and marketing. Get his Niche Market

Know-how Mini Course here:

http://www. nichemarketknowhow. com/course. htm

Author:
Andre Anthony