« Content is King | Main | Webpage Title Tags »
May 28, 2007
Follow the Leaders
Sometimes the best website ideas are not your own. It is often best to follow the big successful sites that have the resources and manpower to do usability studies, focus groups, and feedback loops that a small startup website could never do on a limited budget.
If you have a website idea, look at what successful sites are doing in your area of business and mimic some of the things making them successful. Sometimes this strategy can help you grab a market niche that the “big guys” aren’t serving properly.
One excellent example of this strategy being used is by ShopIreland.ie. Irish consumers use the Euro, and Amazon.co.uk shows prices in UK Sterling. So ShopIreland.ie is set up to mimic what Amazon does, but present the currencies in the correct format for the Irish shoppers. So if a web buyer is shopping in Ireland, they can find their books in Ireland in the correct currency. In essence, ShopIreland.ie gives Irish consumers the benefits of Amazon.co.uk at a local level.
You can see this same strategy used by 100s of niche auctions sites that use eBay.com as their model and now I am seeing YouTube.com knock offs all over the web. The bottom line, look what the big successful sites are doing and go after the consumers they are missing by slightly altering their strategy to serve a specific niche market.
Sure you won’t make billions of dollars like an Amazon.com, but most webmasters would be happy with a much smaller piece of the pie by serving a market segment overlooked by the big guys.
Posted by Idea Man at May 28, 2007 12:49 PM