War room.... why should I join? Whats the best thing you have gained from your membership?

You misunderstand; my fault for not explaining properly.

Million years ago, clever guy comes up with the Bum Marketing Method. I say "comes up with" but what he actually did was bottle up - very nicely, though - a preexisting method. Worked like this: Instead of trying to rank a website for a popular term, you ranked hundreds of articles for low-hanging fruit terms and, taken in their entirely, all those terms could amount to a pretty decent chunk of traffic; considerably more, say, than if I'd you'd opted to rank that website for the one term. Times change (in this business, that's perhaps the most important term to know), and the method lost it's effectiveness.

But the general principle of it will always hold.

Every product or service has roads along which you, as a marketer, can walk and successfully receive whatever it is you want: some form of action that leads to remuneration. (Think of it like trees of fruit along the roadside.) Some roads are dense with other marketers; others, not so dense. The key is acknowledging your own strengths and, on any given road, deciding if you can push others aside and lead the pack (picking up most of the fruit as you do) or, and this is the most common, finding quiet roads where the fruit - if you reach out - often falls into your hands. In the real world, this translates like this: As marketers, we all scatter across the internet trying to generate desirable actions in consumers, and some internet locations are too competitive for us to be effective at it, whereas others have less competition or none at all. The trick, for the beginner or the veteran marketer, is to penetrate these markets (to walk these roads) where the most fruit is likely to be taken, given our own unique strengths and the strength of those marketers around us.

Back in the primordial days of Bum Marketing, some marketers found it easy to rank (in 48 hours or less) articles for low-competition terms. They found their easy-to-walk roads. And if you look, and I do every day, such roads exist all over the place; they're an often interconnected network that spans the entire internet, reaching through Google, Yahoo, Bing, and Facebook, and Twitter, and LinkedIn, and G+, right across Youtube and DailyMotion, and on and on and on, from one end of the network, circling and circling.

So.

Don't throw up a blog and add content. As Willy Wonka would say: "Reverse that." Find out the problems people want to solve (loneliness, poor golf swing), find out where they exist online and offline, find out how much competition exists on each platform, given your strengths and the strengths of other marketers, and work out how best to exist on each platform and where to send each person in order to have their problem solved most effectively.

Maybe you find out that MMORPG gamers want to learn how to design mods and a good informational product exists for it but you see no mention of it on forums or groups or in Yahoo answers or for some killer PPC terms. Maybe a new dating site for golfing enthusiasts lands on your network and you notice how easy it would be to rank for the appropriate terms with a video or two (or two hundred). Maybe a new product lands on the market that can truly (truly) help work at home moms to make $100 a week from home and yet you notice no product reviews ranking well or you notice no mention of it on WAHM mailing lists or no talk on G+ or FB groups or no FB page dedicated to it.

Opportunities exist everywhere. Seize them.

Tom

I just wanna say that from my perspective you're asking exactly the right questions. Why would someone go to you? What can you offer that the major (and even minor) sites can't? This is a great place to start -- and questions like these are really the foundation of any successful business, whether online or offline.

It may seem daunting to compete with the major sites -- and you're absolutely right that it's not easy -- but it's certainly possible. For instance, think about the lion and the vulture. One might think that there's no way they should be able to coexist: the lion is bigger, stronger and could kill the vulture with a swipe of its paw. Moreover, they often eat exactly the same kinds of food, so at first glance it would seem that they're competing for the same resources. But of course, they're not. The lion isn't really interested in the small pieces of meat that get stuck to bones nor all the nasty animal parts that I won't mention. The vulture, on the other hand, is interested in everything the lion ignores and moreover, it's specially adapted to take advantage of the lions' leavings.

That, in essence, is what niche marketing is. You find a way to position yourself and adapt your business so that even as you're targeting the same customers that the major sites do either (a) you're not really competing with them or (b) your adaptations have enabled you to actually serve your smaller subset of customers better than the major sites are able to.

As a real-life example, check out KenRockwell.com: Photography, Cameras and Taking Better Pictures. This is a site to help you buy digital cameras, specifically Nikon digital cameras. It's really ugly: to me it looks like it hasn't changed much since it was started in 1999. Additionally, it's not really all that user friendly: it has no search and there isn't really a good way to sort through all the products.

So why would anyone go to this guy's site instead of just going to Adorama or Amazon? Because to some people -- my guess is amateur Nikon photographers like me who (a) think they're better than they really are and (b) have extra money to throw around -- find it really, really useful. His reviews are well-written, informative and honest. He both knows his stuff and is great at presenting his knowledge in a way that people like me (who like to think we know a lot but really don't) can understand.

I'm not bringing up Ken Rockwell because I think you should necessarily follow his model. (Actually, I normally find "review sites" useless -- precisely because they don't have the quality and honesty that Rockwell does.) But I do think his site is a great example of how he was able to successfully bite off a chunk of a pretty lucrative market (believe me, even amateur photographers are often willing to spend a lot of money!) using his particular talents, skills and interests. Moreover, he's done it in a way that a site like Amazon could never really do well. Amazon's competitive advantages are (1) that they sell just about everything and (2) that they will get your purchases to your doorstep really, really fast. It's really not in their business model to become experts for every product they sell -- and that's where Rockwell was able to find his niche.

To sum up, I think it's great that you're asking what I think to be the right questions -- this already puts you ahead of most of the people who stumble upon the WF. But the hard part is answering them. And to a large extent, this is something you'll have to do for yourself: nobody knows you and your capabilities better than you do. Of course, the even harder part is implementing your answers... But maybe we should just take one step at a time...

Good luck!