Your “inner game” or mental outlook has a great deal to how you run your business.

In a recent conversation with another marketer I mentioned that a specific home improvement niche might be worth developing, he mentioned that there’re a number of incumbent sites in the space and it might not be worth developing.

There’re bound to be free high authority sites with great content in any lucrative niche. They do have to monetize, even if it’s via adsense, yahoo publisher or some other form of advertising, if they’re planning to be in the business longterm.

On the other hand, you could take a rock and hit some other marketer who’s in the same niche and charging a premium for content – video, PDF reports, audio walkthroughs.

What’s the difference between something that’s free and another that’s paid? Should you fear competition?

My stock response is that free stuff tends to be limited. Unless someone is paying you, the site tends to be one-sided. The site owner publishes content based on keyword demand and search volume and works on 1-2% of traffic clicking on ads or picking broad enough keywords to bring a nice ROI on their CPM-based advertiser payouts.

Paid sites tend to be more customer-focused, just because it’s performance marketing-oriented. If they don’t like the affiliate program you’re promoting or the ebook or guide you’re created and are selling, you’ll come away with empty pockets at the end of the day.

If capitalism teaches anything, it’s that markets are self-correcting. Or in simple English, if your product sucks, you will get zero sales.

So the first thing you need to figure out is your concept. If it isn’t sound, you’re going to have an uphill battle making much headway in your niche, let alone making any decent coin.

–

The second element is probably the more important one. While a solid business model and concept are good, I’d say that marketing is even more important. You could have the world’s best product and yet fail. Two examples: Creative Technology (based out of Singapore) was the first out the gates with sound cards (remember those?) especially it’s “SoundBlaster” series of cards. It was also one of the earliest with MP3 players (at least a couple of years before the first iPod was released into the market). Given its expertise in audio technology, you’d think that it’d have stitched up the market. But no, instead it decided to come up with it’s own kookie/weird advertising and promptly lost the war once the iPod came onto the scene.

Here’s a video about branding and marketing for the iPhone (note: coarse language)

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FL7yD-0pqZg[/youtube]

Like I said: branding/marketing > market concept.