Focus Man! Focus on a Niche.
Many people I have talked to over the years essentially say to me focus on a niche when starting a business. A family friend, Don, said that I should focus anyInput at a niche such as stamp collecting, comic collecting, coin collecting or etc. My uncle said I should focus on a niche for monthly subscription fees such as “hotel inventory software.” Further, there are countless examples of successful websites that have a niche market. There is a wine collectors forum and a php developer forum and forums about anything imaginable. You need to start out in a niche first.
Once your business has a good chunk of a niche market, then you may decide to go after another niche. If you keep growing you may discover that you now own a general market. A perfect example of this is facebook. They started with colleges and were in that market for years until recently they took on the general social networking market. Another example is Amazon which began as an online book retailer.
Even though, I knew about the importance of niche markets, I never applied the idea to my sites. They are all general sites about a vague topic such as “free online storage” or “maintenance software.” These ideas are not focused and will probably not pick up steam. So I have finally decided to use a new strategy based on niches for new sites that I created moving forward.