What we have here is a failure to communicate. No, I'm not stuffed on hard-boiled eggs, either. I did spend some time on a Southern chain gang for focusing a steel pipe on the hard head of one of your American cousins, though.

You see, I had set up this nice little niche market - selling that cologne I was telling you about - at a local flea market. One of the gators down here thought he owned that niche and wanted me to move elsewhere. I kinda took offense at that and we exchanged some harsh words. He refused to even listen, so I made my point with said pipe applied repeatedly to his skull.

Never did do any serious damage to his head, only his pride. However, the local authorities felt I should have been more subtle, so they put me on the chain gang to teach me some humility. Didn't work though. Me and this other cat busted outta there and were on the run for a few months. Things finally quieted down when they uncovered evidence that proved the gator had been wrong about that niche. It really was mine all long.

So, I still own it and now that I can go back and sell that killer cologne there again, I am going to make my nephew the site manager. He's a quite handsome young cat, very athletic and quite a kitties cat, so he should do very well there. He also loves the whole concept and that is extremely important when doing niche marketing.

The point of all this is that, yes, Croc, the Internet is many webs. and they all are different. One web is the one that deals with the flow of information. People come to the Internet, probably first and foremost, to learn something, to get information. That is what the magazine subscriptions to cattle was about, but that was also to set them headed over to the second Internet as well. As you probably know, sheep and cattle are not very independent thinkers. They need to be steered - pun intended - in the right direction.

The second part of the Internet is about the flow of products, or as the humans call it, e-commerce. This is where products are bought and sold. But, IMHO, information is not a product, although there is a whole school of sharks that have made the selling of information their niche. Since sharks and cats are incompatible for a lot of reasons, I don't go near their niche very much. Besides, sharks tend to target sheep and our intended target is cattle, there really is not much need for us to deal with them.

So, here's the plan. We use information about stuff that interests cattle to publish a newsletter that pulls the cattle to our newsletter site. BTW, cattle are happier being pulled than pushed, so that raises some technology questions we need to address. At the newsletter site, we offer them a special price on a print magazine about life in Kakadu and all the benefits for cattle living in Australia. We even offer them help - more information - on relocating to Kakadu that takes them to another site.

By signing up for a print magazine, they give us their physical addresses, so we know where they live. When they move to Australia, they file a change of address, so we have their new address. If they use our relocation help, a paid for service, then just skip the next step.

Once they are in Australia, assuming they do not use our relocation service, we can round 'em up whenever we need them. We know where they live, right? If they do use our relocation service, we move them to some nice pasture near Kakadu, where they are at our disposal, so to speak.

As our end product is joints of beef, we obviously will need a steady supply of cattle. This provides that. We have only to create the demand for our joints. That's where the restaurants come in. We do like so many marketers have done. We create a a need for those joints by promoting real or imagined, does not matter, benefits of eating joints of beef. If we promote those benefits enough, humans, because of their natures, will come to believe that they need joints of beef and cannot live without them. That is accomplished by providing free information about why humans need to eat beef joints prepared a certain way (the way we do it in our restaurants). We even make our recipe free to all, but the recipe is so complicated that most people don't understand it.

So, the information tells them all about our restaurants where they can get their beef prepared in the only way that is beneficial to humans. Guess what? Our restaurants do a booming business! Heck, we could even set up some sort of catering or mail order or whatever system to deliver pre-cooked meals. Another stream of income.

So, we create the niche based on something we love to, and I do love eating joints of beef. We create the need by creating a flow of information. We create the market by creating the perception that we are the only ones that can fill that need (which is true because we created the need in the first place). That's how, among many others, the fast food restaurants did it. Why can't we?

What do you think?

Miao!

The Cool Dude
Editor and Publisher of the R Market Daily
Owner, 3R Marketing

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Keywords:Internet marketing strategy, direct-to-desktop publishing, direct-to-desktop marketing, guerrilla marketing, marketing theory, marketing philosophy