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Market projections
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The number of potential users for a Design-your-own-website service. I
know this question could, possibly, be answered by looking at:
* the number of internet users, + projected number of internet
users.
Factors would be population growth, age groups / age profile of
the population, propensity to get online ...
* the number of users with websites, which are commercially hosted
rather than free, + projected number; and the percentage of
these who may want this type of service rather than using FrontPage,
Dreamweaver, etc.
In theory, everyone who's online right now may want their own website.
In theory, you could look at markets outside the US where the
percentage of people online is far lower: English-speaking markets in
Canada, New Zealand, Australia, Ireland, England, Scotland and Wales;
and all the foreign-language-speaking countries which support
English-language newspapers, for example Denmark (www.cphpost.dk).
This seems like a lot of guesswork to me; and the guesstimates will
probably vary widely. I guess you could pick the most pessimistic ones
and that would give you the total market (estimated), and then you
could subtract for market leaders, and then look at how much of the
market is "uncommitted".
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Market Segments
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Okay. Or lets' start afresh.
Lets' assume it's an online service (see comment by
bobthedispatcher-ga). Lets' assume that the market is a segmented one,
with "walls" between the new service and potential users. The walls
are: all the things that "stop" the potential user from knowing about
the new service.
To make this clear: lets' pose the question another way.
What is the potential market for a new Design-a-Site service that
comes up on the first page of results when someone searches for
"design a site" service
on Google? Lets' say it's a site that has the design and content to
keep a potential user *on* the site -- and not clicking fast onto the
next site, like I would do if I hit on www.citymax.com.
The answer to these two questions is: a bigger market than a company
listed on page 2!
Then, another question is,
what keywords would people use to find such an automated service? And
are they looking for that service, or are they looking for web
designers?
None of the companies that come up on the first page of Google for
these words look like the kind of service intended in your question.
I've looked at two of the sites mentioned in some of your other Google
questions:
http://www.citymax.com/
http://sitecreator.directnic.com/
and it seems to me that these would be called "web hosting and web
design services" that offer templates. Is that right? Or is there a
better or more popular way to put it?
Working these questions out is part of a marketing strategy, aimed at
maximizing the number of potential users coming to your site, i.e. to
look at the keywords you would want to use on the site and how to use
them in such a way that you're not just "keyword stuffing" or
providing lines of unreadable text, re-interating words like site
design and web design in different combinations (in other words,
spamming).
If you look at the two sites listed above, from a marketing
perspective, one of them -- http://sitecreator.directnic.com, has a
pleasant easy-to-enter site but zero web presence on the latest google
toy,
http://labs.google.com/cgi-bin/webquotes.
The other, http://www.citymax.com, looks dreadful, and is going to cut
its market share right away. On the other hand, it does have some kind
of a web presence, ranking no. 14 on zeal.com with a placing on a
couple of other directories.
I'm curious as to how you heard about these sites. Possibly that would
be a starting point for making an entry into the market. |
