Can a niche be too small?

[walesy]

First off, I am still very new to the world of website design and development. That being said, for my first web site I chose to create a site focusing on a small town of about 15,000.

At first I thought that the small town niche would be easy for me to work with. Since I am so familiar with the area it is easy for me to generate content for the site. The problem is getting people in the community interested and involved in the site.

Does anyone have any ideas on promoting a web site to an audience of about 15,000?

[mondala]

There is no niche too small.

It really depends on what your goals for the website itself are.

Monetization:
If the goal is to make lots of money, then choosing a bigger niche is better, but not too big. :) However, even the small niche topics can be very profitable if it involves an audience that has money to pay for a service or product you offer, or if you have say contextual advertising that will display advertisements on high paying keywords.
A service or product that you might have is direct advertising to local business. This can be a good revenue source, not just a little income. Your keywords in contextual advertising programs probably WILL pay well, because local advertisers often do not optimize their campaigns and overpay for all keywords. It's money in the bag.
Example monetization possibilities,,, I run a local City website myself and the revenue possibilities are very good considering how easy it is to own that niche (which is actually your real question, though I am off topic now, I will get back to that shortly) How to make money on a local city/town website? With direct advertisements, sponsored classified listings, contextual advertising such as the Google Adsense program, etc etc. To be honest, a community website for a small town with a small population of 15,000 can still turn several thousands dollars a month in pure profit once established. (when you are the myspace or facebook of YOUR niche)


Interest:
If you are creating this site purely for interest, passion, local involvement etc then you are actually in a great position because the monetization will follow your efforts down the road. The important thing to remember is that establishing your website as the number one destination for you niche takes time. It takes time to build the community, it takes time to gain the confidence and creditability of the search engines, and it takes more time to do it right. Ultimately you just need to keep plugging away and the rest will take care of itself.

Here are some top considerations to keep you moving forward:

Your niche is not an easy one to tackle, don't think it is. Keep working.
Your niche is a very rewarding one and once you tackle it, it will probably be yours for a long time. Keep working.
You site needs to be the number one source of information on your niche. Bait new users and try to keep them. See: Web dev soap Opera; how to get traffic
(http://www.gustoes.com/web_development/p2_articleid/27)
How do you bait users? The real question would be, who is your audience? Local company Employees? Local businessmen? Couples/Families? Singles? Consumers? Men? Women? etc If men, what kind of men? Men who play sports, Men who drive certain cars? Men who listen to certain music? Married men etc. If local company employees, where do they work? Unionized? Any events coming up? Issues in the news? Car pooling options? Sponsorship stories? Community involvement? If Singles, where do they go? where can they meet people? what are they doing? If couples/families, do you have information on entertainment? dining? schools? health? city news? crime reports? warnings? events? etc etc etc. Try to think of everyone that you need to target and give them any and every reason you can to visit the site and come back... and of course tell their friends. With a community site like this, it really is only a matter of time before the world spreads. Adding a 'Tell a friend' feature to your site might encourage users to tell others. Local advertisements and local networking of course will help you. See: 25 inexpensive ways to promote your online community offline
(http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/showthread.php?t=64111)
How to keep users. Well this is the fun part and the difficult part... here are some good starting ideas. Create polls/surveys, offer any incentives, offer interaction of any kind, be up to date, all content updated and revolving as much as possible. ... Contests are always a great way to keep users involved.There are many different angles to cover whether it be for building your website or building a forum but here are some good links covering a few different ideas relevant to the work you have ahead of you: ( Building up your site for your users and for the search engines)

Community Building and Social Networks
http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum103/587.htm

Link Development vs. Traffic Development and Staying with the Times
http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum12/3047.htm

Community Building Primer
http://www.sitepoint.com/article/community-building-primer

Participation Inequality: Encouraging More Users to Contribute
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/participation_inequality.html

25 Ideas for Inexpensive ways to promote your online community offline
http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/showthread.php?t=64111

Link Building Tips and Resources
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=224828

People Optimization vs SEO -The web dev soap opera; how to get web traffic
http://www.gustoes.com/web_development/p2_articleid/27

[walesy]

Thanks for all the great information!

I will be testing some of the advertising strategies from some of the links you providied. Mostly from 25 inexpensive ways to promote your online community offline

Got some business cards created to sprinkle around the town. I will post the results later.

[mondala]

Results, results, results!? ? hehe

[walesy]

Results will be in soon.....patience my friend.