Image via WikipediaAs I was searching the web today, looking for some work related information, I got more and more furious. Top hits in google were dead-end webpages, with irrelevant information, and only after extensive advanced searching I was able to find the needed info. So I decided to write about the phenomena called niche marketing abuse.Niche marketing is a good way to succed online. Assuming you're starting your own online business, going straight on with the big players usually isn't the smartest idea. But if you succeed in finding a niche, a small, specific group of dedicated buyers, you're in for the win.
And it didn't take long for people, always on the look for a new get-rich-quick scheme to find their niche. The hit of the century became building webpages with the sole purpose abusing the niche. All you need is a simple webpage (usually wordpress with a simple preprepared theme) on the right domain, two 600 word articles about the subject in question (online article writing business is booming, they are cheap to get and quickly obtainable) and lots of backlinks from other pages.
Of course the hard part is finding a good niche, that isn't too crowded with competition. Doing this has become so popular, that software has been developed to research potential niches using google statistics.
And what's the point you ask? Well by finding a good niche, and setting up a mock website you attract people via search engines, such as Google. Then by smartly placing as many ads as possible between the text, you are likely to get paid for users clicking on the advertisiments. The higher you rank in search and more interesting the search phrase is, more you earn.
All good and fair, after all nobody is breaking any rules by doing this, but things like this just make the internet a bit worse, and a bit more useless. Search engines were once designed to help us find relative information quickly and easily, but now, thanks to this abuses, searching has become a challenge again. Google is of course responding to this sort of activity, but people on the other side are always finding new ways to trick the user.
Remember back in the days, when ads weren't what ran the net? When content was the main part of the page?
