This article originally appeared in XYZ Quarterly Vol. 2 Issue 1.
Getting online is a critical part of successfully reaching the people that matter most when you’re looking to promote your business, showcase your work, or raise funds for an important cause. An online presence is how your audience will find you, learn what you have to offer, and potentially become loyal customers, fans, and supporters.
One of the very first steps of marketing yourself online is picking a niche. A niche is an industry or genre that you specialize in and the types of products or services that you offer. Some popular niche markets of 2019 are alternative health and diets, environmentally responsible living, and the latest modes of transportation. Essentially, it’s a particular market that you know you can serve over and over again.
Growth marketing agency, GrowthEngine.xyz, is an excellent example of this. By focusing mainly on “growth hacking” for digital businesses (e-commerce, mobile applications, and software as a service), the agency is able to expertly deliver what their clients want most: customer acquisition and retention.
Finding your niche will help you to strategically concentrate your efforts in one direction. If you’re clear on what you offer and who your audience is, you will be able to best determine how to entice them.
One common misconception is that your online presence needs to appeal to everyone. A new business that attempts to market itself to the masses often results with a watered-down message. Creatives often seem more experienced when they have a distinct specialty, and non-profits can seem more trustworthy when known for benefiting a specific cause.
Marketing with focus will help you build expert status in your space. You will be able to bring value to your potential audience by identifying and meeting their unique needs. Starting with a small, well-defined niche doesn’t mean you can’t expand into other spaces as you grow. Take notes from contemporary culture online publisher, Milk.xyz. They have been able to expand beyond writing about innovative brands to rolling out their own collaborations and podcast due to the growth of their community.
Start defining your niche by making a list of possible ideas. Some questions to ask yourself are:
Chicago Tribune reporter Louisa Chu and WBEZ’s Monica Eng did exactly this when they started Chewing.xyz. The pair combined their shared interest in food culture to create a podcast and website that explores the intersection of good food, good health, and good policy.
Pick your top three ideas and narrow them down by general interest and profit potential. It’s important to know if there is an audience out there that can benefit from what you have to offer, and there are a few ways that you can determine this:
A useful way to gauge general interest and profitability is by checking keyword search query reports online. Generally, focus on keywords with at least 10,000 search queries in order to find a niche with a substantial audience. A high level of competition is not necessarily a bad thing, as competition means there is a market interested and ready to buy. A low level of competition may mean that there are not many interested people out there.
Another way to measure the market size for niche topics is by checking the amount of books, articles, and papers written about it. If there is a substantial volume of work on your topic out there, then that means publishers have deemed it to be a profitable subject, publications consider it to be newsworthy, and researchers find it to be important. A low amount of published work on the subject could mean that there’s relatively low public interest on the subject.
After determining which topics have an interested market, it’s time to research the competition. Search the keywords associated with your niche and see what and who comes up. Start logging all of the major competitors and defining the characteristics that make you stand out in the crowd.
Key differentiators may be the pricing, level of quality, and innovation of your product or service.
Fashion tastemaker, JovelRoystan.xyz, stands out from other influencers by catering his content towards ambitious young professionals, and sharing on-trend style sharp enough for the office.
One immediate way that anyone can instantly differentiate themselves is with content and design. An expertly branded website with clear navigation and functionality can be the ultimate decider for a new customer or supporter.
A new domain name ending like .xyz can offer a consistent and clear brand message. Get a domain name that is the exact name of your business, or your first and last name, so your audience can easily find you online. A .xyz domain is generic yet memorable, so it’s perfect for any niche market. Register your .xyz domain today to start building your online reputation.
For more tips be sure to check out our other internet “How Tos” and subscribe to our newsletter to receive the XYZ Quarterly.
Happy Thanksgiving from all of us at XYZ! Now that Turkey Day is in the rearview mirror, it’s time to shake off that tryptophan-fueled food coma, fire up your web browser, and get incredible deals on .xyz domains. During this year’s XYZ Black Friday Cyber Monday sales, you can get your hands on memorable .xyz domains for as low as $0.50!
Want to get the perfect domain name for your side hustle or business? Register YourBrandName.xyz. Looking to launch a personal portfolio to show off your work or to stand out to potential employers? Grab YourFirstName.xyz. Been working on something cool all year that you can’t wait to share with the world? Launch it on YourIdea.xyz. Whether you want to secure a few domains for yourself or a handful of domains as gifts for the holidays, there’s no better time to get the .xyz domains you want at super-low prices.
Can’t think of what you might do with your .xyz? No problem! Check out our #WebsiteWednesday series for inspiration from .xyz users, discover members of the XYZ community from around the world, or learn how to start building your website in our How-to blog series. You can also take advantage of the helpful tips we’ve been giving all year for how to get your business online in each issue of our XYZ Quarterly.
Simply find your preferred registrar below and click through to take advantage of their Black Friday Cyber Monday sales.
Vega.xyz – EuroDNS customer (Gibraltar)
Blockchain technology has been making headlines all year long as more and more decentralized apps (or DApps) are hitting the market. If you’ve kept up to date with our #WebsiteWednesdays, you’ll be familiar with attendance protocol service POAP.xyz. This week we’re showcasing another DApp that uses the blockchain and their .xyz domain to allow users to securely trade derivatives on the open market: Vega.xyz.
Vega.xyz is a DApp designed to allow financial investors to trade stock market derivatives like stocks, bonds, commodities, and currencies. The key difference with Vega.xyz is that trades are conducted on the decentralized blockchain network. This, according to Vega.xyz, puts the power and control back in investors’ hands by allowing them to bypass the high-cost middlemen and gatekeepers of traditional markets. Users can process transactions while taking advantage of Vega.xyz’s fully automated, end-to-end trading service, and can even take advantage of built-in liquidity incentives that match traders and market makers.
Vega.xyz’s service represents the increased disruption happening in the worlds of both finance and technology, a shift that forward-thinking VCs have taken note of. Vega.xyz has raised over $5 million in seed round funding led by Pantera Capital, who share Vega.xyz’s vision of bringing control of the markets back to investors. Vega.xyz plans to leverage that funding to achieve its goal of designing and implementing a protocol for safe and non-custodial decentralized margin trading.
Another way Vega.xyz sets themselves apart is by actively cultivating a community for their users to gather and share knowledge. Users in the Vega.xyz community can converse with each other about the platform, get answers to their questions, or simply chat about investing in general. Vega.xyz’s creators are also active posters in the community forum, offering a unique opportunity for users to get answers to their questions and suggestions from the people who know the platform best.
Vega.xyz has created a unique trading platform and the significant funding they have secured could power them to becoming a leader in the industry. Their memorably branded domain name helps their platform stand out to users and investors alike, and is poised to grow alongside their platform as they march on toward their goal of becoming a globally used decentralized trading service.
Stay up to date on Vega.xyz by following them on Twitter and LinkedIn or reading their articles on Medium. Inspired to create your own disruptive DApp using blockchain technology paired with your .xyz domain? Take the first step and grab the .xyz you want today!
wearehypothetical.xyz – eNom / Open SRS customer (Australia)
People say that if you pursue what you’re passionate about, then you won’t work a day in your life. But how do you turn your hobby or favorite past time into a lucrative business? For this #WebsiteWednesday we interviewed a .xyz adopter with one of the coolest jobs we’ve ever heard of. Learn how music photographer and videographer William Zhang made his dream a reality and created the website he needed to prove his skills: wearehypothetical.xyz.
wearehypothetical.xyz is the online portfolio of Sydney-based arts and entertainment photographer and videographer William Zhang. He’s traveled the world capturing photos and videos at music festivals like Lollapalooza, Electric Daisy Carnival Japan, and Falls Festival. His portfolio features some of music’s biggest names, including Flume, Odesza, and Anderson Paak.
I’ve always been fond of band tour videos, short films, ads, and music videos. During high school, I would go down the rabbit hole on Vimeo and Reddit watching the aforementioned content trying to dissect how stuff was shot. Being that engaged in something, you obviously want to give it a go yourself. Film school being out of the question, I made an assumption photography would be a good place to start and that shooting live music would be the lowest barrier of entry to achieving the first goal of making tour content. I also love a wide variety of music genres so it was a natural fit. I transitioned into video about 2 years ago and have a long journey ahead.
EDC Japan. It started pouring during Alison Wonderland’s set to the point where the water on stage was about a centimetre or two tall. She continued playing to an enthusiastic Japanese crowd in ponchos and, of course, I kept shooting with a towel over my camera. It was one of those moments where the show goes on and you gotta think fast but the content was definitely unique compared to other shows thanks to the heavy rain.
Around mid-late 2015. [The process was] quite easy thanks to the rise of content management platforms that anyone can use. The initial set up process was easy and getting the site live with content was intuitive thanks to the well thought out UX design.
‘xyz’ has futuristic and abstract connotations. They’re typically letters used in product models or in popular culture to denote that something (usually a machine) is advanced or is categorised to do a cool thing to its other counterparts. It also matched with my brand name ‘hypothetical’ which ties to the similar connotations around possibilities and ideas.
For starters, it’s my portfolio so it’s typically someone’s first impression of the stuff I make. Thankfully it’s left a good impression to most people I’ve sent it to, so that’s maximised the opportunities I get. In my other job within marketing analytics and automation, it’s a cool thing to show people when I tell them I’m a photographer/videographer and that I’m actually serious about it in the age of everyone having a camera.
I’m still well in my early days despite the cool opportunities I’ve received. For advice, reach out to as many people as you can and shoot as much as you can. The more you do stuff the better you get, obviously. To overcome the catch 22 of how to get gigs when you don’t have a portfolio, shoot anything that’s accessible (landscapes, portraits of your friends) to show you have a good eye and can use a camera.
Will has turned his music photography and videography dreams into a reality and he has the .xyz website to prove it. Having a top-notch website professionally showcases his talent and expertise and enables him to easily share his work with clients. Follow Will on Instagram with @Will.Hypothetical to stay up-to-date on the latest shows he captures, or contact him by email. Do you need a place to showcase your work and turn your hobby into a reality? You can head to Squarespace to register your .xyz domain name and build your website today!
Romoni.xyz – GoDaddy customer (Bangladesh)
Busy parents and professionals know how tough it can be to find time for beauty and self-care. Between booking multiple appointments, driving to the salon, and finding parking, a simple manicure and facial could eat up hours out of their day. One female CEO and co-founder is solving this problem for Bangladesh residents in this week’s #WebsiteWednesday with Romoni.xyz.
Romoni.xyz is an online platform that allows customers to search, compare, book and review at-home beauty services in Bangladesh. Without the overhead cost from a traditional salon or spa, beauty and wellness artists are able to enjoy higher wages, and customers can conveniently get their beauty services at home. Romoni.xyz ensures that all of their artists are skilled and experienced through their partner application process and continuous training workshops.
Armin Zaman Khan came up with the idea for Romoni.xyz in 2015 when she was working as a government consultant and recognized the disparity between a beauty and wellness artist and salon owner. According to her research, the beauty industry is the second-largest source of employment for women in Bangladesh, yet the artist will receive only about 30% of the revenue, while the salon owner keeps the remaining 70%. Armin saw an opportunity to fill this gap using technology, initially starting the direct-to-consumer beauty services platform through a Facebook page called Book My Look.
Together with her mobile app-skilled co-founders, Tarique Ibn Haider and Abidur Rahman Mallik, Amin upgraded the page into a full-fledged website and app in 2017. There are two sides to the app: Romoni Customer and Romoni Partner. Customers can book services through Romoni Customer, while professionals track their appointments and manage their online profile through the Romoni Partner. Women professionals who provide beauty services on Romoni.xyz can earn as much as three times as much as they normally would. To date, they have on-boarded over 200 women professionals, making it the biggest beauty and wellness destination in Bangladesh.
To book a service on Romoni.xyz, head to their home page or download the Android app on Google Play. From there you can choose from salon services (manicures, pedicures, facials, waxing), spa services (massages and scrubs), and hair and makeup. For brides and bridal parties, there are even special wedding hair and makeup packages, as well as mehendi (designs made from the henna plant). You can book services from almost anywhere in Bangladesh, and Dhaka and Chittagong residents may expect an artist to arrive at their home in as little as two hours.
If you’re in Bangladesh, head to Romoni.xyz or download the Android app to book your appointment. You can also learn more about Amin’s journey to creating Romoni.xyz on their YouTube channel and connect with them on LinkedIn.
