Over at Micro Persuasion, Steve Rubel reports on some research by Forrester Research, Inc. indicating that RSS penetration among Internet users may have peaked at 11 percent.

Yes, you read that right: just 11 percent.

Sure, almost 50 percent of Internet businesses have added RSS feeds to their websites, and RSS adoption among Internet users has increased from 2 percent in 2005 to 11 percent now. But if Forrester Research’s findings are accurate then of the 89 percent of users who don’t use RSS feeds, only 16 percent are somewhat interested, and just 3 percent are very interested, in using them.

According to Forrester, marketers have not done enough to promote the benefits of RSS to their customers. Probably because they’re too busy promoting the benefits of RSS to other marketers! And there ARE benefits - just ask a guy like Peter Drew about the power of RSS in terms of search engine optimization.

But when it comes to consumers using RSS, maybe Steve Rubel is right when he says that “feeds are way too geeky for most and the benefit does not outweigh the learning curve.”

Rubel also makes a great point: just because RSS adoption may have peaked, it doesn’t mean other online optin communications aren’t working. Writes Rubel:

“The Facebook newsfeed, Twitter and Friendfeed are perfect examples of opt-in vehicles that bring content you care about to you… In each case, you’re total in control. You can unsubscribe from individuals or groups and tailor the stream so that what you want finds you… RSS is only one form of opt-in communications. The potential is bigger when you look more broadly to social networking. This larger promise still holds and as the technologies become more invisible the newsfeed could even one day subsume RSS.”

Source: Steve Rubel, “RSS Adoption at 11% and it May Be Peaking, Forrester Says”, Micro Persuasion, October 20, 2008

Following on from yesterdays Feature Article, let’s discuss five (5) ways you can build barriers to entry in your niche business.

1. Deliver quality - always strive to be better than everyone else.
2. Be unique - provide something that’s original and different.
3. Build a brand - build a strong connection between your name or your company’s name, your unique selling proposition (USP), and your products / services. Ultimately, you want people to think “valuable, quality products/services” whenever they think of you.
4. Integrate yourself personally into your brand - be recognizable as the person behind the brand. No one else can be you.
5. Protect your brand and business. Make sure you have the financial and legal resources to protect your brand and business. That means registering trade marks, etc and not hesitating if you see someone ripping you off. We were ripped off by two big companies a few years ago… but we didn’t have the $ to go after them. We suffered as a result.

Now, you can certainly take and benefit from these steps if you sell your own infoproducts… But what if your business is based on Adsense revenue or Affiliate marketing?

Let’s take each one in turn:

1. Adsense

If you churn out Adsense sites like everyone else… you’re vulnerable. Now, if you create 100s of these sites then sure, you may be able to make a significant amount of total revenue without getting a lot of competitors competing in ALL the same markets as you. Lots of eggs in lots of baskets, in other words. But any one Adsense site is at risk…

Unless, you don’t think of it as an “Adsense” site and position it as a “media” site. In other words, you think of the site like any reputable magazine/newspaper site. You provide quality, unique content, build a brand around providing that content, and sell advertising space (whether Adsense or otherwise) in order to generate revenue.

2. Affiliate

If all you do is put up the same sales letter webpages as all the other affiliates… then you’re not building a sustainable business. Instead of thinking of yourself as an “affiliate” position yourself as a “value added reseller”. Sure, sell other people’s products, but add value so that you in turn, can deliver quality, unique value, build a brand, and so on.

Of course, none of this means that you or any “guru” has to tell everyone everything you’re doing! You’ll naturally want to keep your most powerful strategies and techniques secret (unless you are paid megabucks to reveal them). This is because they are part of your competitive advantage and thereby contribute to your barriers to entry.

However, you should be able to tell people what business(es) you’re in without fear (and maybe benefit from the promotion)… (If you want to!)

Yesterday I revealed the 8 most dangerous words in Internet marketing: ‘I have a great idea for a product.’

Why so dangerous? Because they can so very easily lead you to create a product that no-one wants… that no-one buys… and that causes your business to fail… and your heart to break.

That doesn’t mean that I don’t believe that it’s impossible to create or stumble upon a product that no-one knows they want until you release it, and that turns out to be an enormous success. We probably all know of businesses that have succeeded that way.

But when you don’t know what the odds of your success are… it’s a gamble. And unless you are willing to gamble your money, time, resources, and so on, you’re much better off taking an entirely different - and much less risky - approach to starting a business.

What is this much less risky approach to starting a business?

It’s to identify a market, find out what they want, and come up with a product or service that satisfies that want better than anything else available.

Note that I said ‘want’, not ‘need’. Forget what people ‘need’ – most people buy what they want, or what they want and need. Rarely do they buy – and it’s much harder to sell – based only on needs.

Sometimes finding out what the market wants requires a little research. For example, if you want to sell on the Internet, a great way to identify market niches is to perform ‘keyword’ research. Tools like Wordtracker (http://www.wordtracker.com) and Keyword Discovery (http://www.keyworddiscovery.com) can help you uncover topics that large numbers of people are searching on. One or more of these topics may signify a want (or wants) shared by many people.

In other cases, you don’t really need to do a lot of ‘market want’ research. You can simply observe how many other businesses already sell a particular product or service. There wouldn’t be so many if there wasn’t sufficient demand for that product or service, right?

You might object that that if there are so many competitors then the market is saturated. I used to think that way too (I’m also recovering from the ‘I have a great idea for a product’ syndrome). But experience and common sense tells me that even in saturated markets there are often plenty of opportunities to do things better – provide a better product or service, do better marketing, deliver better customer service, and so on.

What concerns me more than a saturated market with lots of competitors is a market that has only one, two or three huge competitors. Wanna go up against Adobe? Having said that, it’s not impossible… but that’s a whole other story…
So, if you don’t have money to burn, don’t let the words ‘I have a great idea for a product’ ever pass your lips, or the lips of anyone among your staff.

Instead, train everyone to say, ‘I have a great idea for a market’ – meaning that you (or one of your team) has done some market research and come up with an idea for a product or service that gives the market what they want.

On Tuesday I discussed what I believe to be one of the most critical - yet often overlooked - skills needed to build a successful Internet business: business management.

Kind of obvious, isn’t it? Yet, not necessarily easy to implement when you realize what effective management involves.

Well the 2nd critical skill is also fairly obvious… yet, still quite challenging to do well.

It is… marketing!

Yes, the ability to plan, and most importantly, IMPLEMENT, a comprehensive, multi-pronged Internet marketing effort.

Marketing really is the lifeblood of your business. However, here at Kikabink we define “marketing” a little differently to some of the definitions you’ve probably come across.

By our definition, marketing involves:

1. Generating leads (”traffic” in Internet parlance);
2. Converting those leads into customers;
3. Satisfying those customers;
4. Keeping those customers - which implies getting them to buy more, and more often, from you.

Although a lot of attention is often given to generating and converting traffic (elements 1 and 2)… the ongoing growth and prosperity of your business really depends on doing 3 and 4 exceptionally well.

In any case, when you think of YOUR marketing efforts… are you doing everything you can in each of these areas of marketing?

This doesn’t mean you should be doing everything yourself - as a provider of Internet marketing services we definitely believe you should hire experts to do what they do best.

However, you still need to plan and manage your overall marketing strategy and be aware of what is - and what should be - going on. Next time we’ll talk about the 3rd critical skill you need for a thriving Internet business. And this really is unique to the online world.