bobmark - 8:05 pm on Jun 8, 2003 (gmt 0)

Agreed, chicago, IITian.
Another variation on this is to use a niche as a wedge into a highly competitive market.
I have a site that is optimized as a blue widgets site but contains a lot of just plain widgets (the competitive field I can't afford to buy my way into as yet). To date, most of my sales are plain old widgets made to site visitors who came looking for blue widgets and decided to purchase their plain old widgets while they were there.
This is a pretty old advertising strategy - make your name in exotic products but make your money on the mundane.