Oliver_Henniges - 10:29 am on Aug 27, 2006 (gmt 0)

It is still relatively easy to acchieve market-leadership in ordinary serps on a very narrowly defined niche. I concede: this is much easier for bricks and mortar businesses than for services, software or other immaterial goods, simply due to the diversification in that area. If you manage to do so, serps are definitely the cheapest way to market your product.

If you have targeted at the long tail in a relatively broad niche for a while, you will find some smaller low-competitive sub-niches, which bear an amazing stream of revenue each, simply because noone on the net has yet discovered them. But it is hard work, both to get there and then to elaborate that.

And it requires some very detailed product knowledge. To acquire this, is boring in the beginning, but your protection in the age of lazy googlers later on. I think it was Dreyfus on AI, who called this the status of an 'expert.' Search engines seek and like what experts have to say, so you will be relatively safe against a) hickups of the algos and b) competition, because the probability that this product- AND this SEO-knowlegde meet somewhere else, is very low. {else: cooperate or buy;}

there is an interesting thread [webmasterworld.com] in the ecommerce-section, where hellraiser1 asked whether some generalizations can be drawn on why some niches or products convert over the net and others do not.