Tlacopan
Regular Member
- Nov 20, 2022
- 244
- 280
Welcome to my 2nd Journey.
I wanted to share this journey to show there are still some untapped niches out there and not everything is "oversaturated" (I hate hearing this).
I came up with this idea from my day job, which is in banking. This idea is specific to my own country and may not work elsewhere, but I want to encourage everyone to explore what they know in their day to day from their own day jobs, studying, or family, and find service or product gaps for you to explore. You will be surprised at what you will find and how lucrative they can be.
THE SERVICE
I won't be revealing it in full, but in a broad description - it is specific documents from a government register. No, it's not anything illegal or classified. It's something ANY citizen of my country can request themselves through state government websites at a cost.
The web design and SEO is so poor for the government that if you Google how to get this document, the gov websites do not appear on the first page of Google.
It costs between $22 - $28 (depending on the state/province) to pull these documents, and I am charging a flat fee of $70 per document for this. I post Google Ads driving to a landing page, people pay for the service. I manually go into the gov website, request required documents (it comes instantaneously) then I forward to the customer. I also have a blog that I am posting content for keywords related to this service.
I explored this idea as customers of the bank would contact me and ask me if the bank can provide these documents to them. The bank obviously has a direct access to this, but we can't provide them to freely to people because there is cost to the bank.
COMPETITION
There are two types of competition: resellers like me and information brokers.
-There are two other resellers doing this. One of them is a minor service offering by a small legal firm, so not a priority for them. The other is a more established business that is my direct competitor which is rather established and doing well SEO wise. However, you will see below there is still enough demand for newbies to jump in and make sales relatively quickly.
-The information brokers offer this on an individual level, however they are primarily B2B. Their main clients are banks, accountants, law firms, and settlement agents. Their advertising is 100% directed towards these businesses. I ran some of their sites through Semrush paid search traffic tool and there were zero ads targeting individual consumers.
I was lucky to find a local aged domain with several thousand backlinks and a low spam score.
RESULTS SO FAR
I launched the website one and a half weeks ago and these are the results - five sales. Yes, yes laugh at me for using PayPal - I'm just using them for now while I test the idea. I'll likely move to another payment processor once things pick us.
I am only running ads in one state, with plans to expand into other states soon.
NEXT STEPS
-My main focus at the moment is optimising my ads. I'm a rookie, so perhaps I'm spending too much but learning as go along. Reading a lot on this forum and watching youtube vids on ads.
-SEO. My competitors receive a lot of organic traffic, so I'm publishing more content to rank for keywords. This will take time.
Once I have enough sales (maybe 6-12 months), I will approach one of the information brokers to integrate their API into my website. This will add automation to the sales process where orders can be automatically fulfilled. However, they will only deal with me unless I can prove I'm somewhat established and have a customer base. My work uses an information broker for these documents, so I've been able to speak to someone about this.
Thanks for reading, will post updates as they come.
I wanted to share this journey to show there are still some untapped niches out there and not everything is "oversaturated" (I hate hearing this).
I came up with this idea from my day job, which is in banking. This idea is specific to my own country and may not work elsewhere, but I want to encourage everyone to explore what they know in their day to day from their own day jobs, studying, or family, and find service or product gaps for you to explore. You will be surprised at what you will find and how lucrative they can be.
THE SERVICE
I won't be revealing it in full, but in a broad description - it is specific documents from a government register. No, it's not anything illegal or classified. It's something ANY citizen of my country can request themselves through state government websites at a cost.
The web design and SEO is so poor for the government that if you Google how to get this document, the gov websites do not appear on the first page of Google.
It costs between $22 - $28 (depending on the state/province) to pull these documents, and I am charging a flat fee of $70 per document for this. I post Google Ads driving to a landing page, people pay for the service. I manually go into the gov website, request required documents (it comes instantaneously) then I forward to the customer. I also have a blog that I am posting content for keywords related to this service.
I explored this idea as customers of the bank would contact me and ask me if the bank can provide these documents to them. The bank obviously has a direct access to this, but we can't provide them to freely to people because there is cost to the bank.
COMPETITION
There are two types of competition: resellers like me and information brokers.
-There are two other resellers doing this. One of them is a minor service offering by a small legal firm, so not a priority for them. The other is a more established business that is my direct competitor which is rather established and doing well SEO wise. However, you will see below there is still enough demand for newbies to jump in and make sales relatively quickly.
-The information brokers offer this on an individual level, however they are primarily B2B. Their main clients are banks, accountants, law firms, and settlement agents. Their advertising is 100% directed towards these businesses. I ran some of their sites through Semrush paid search traffic tool and there were zero ads targeting individual consumers.
I was lucky to find a local aged domain with several thousand backlinks and a low spam score.
RESULTS SO FAR
I launched the website one and a half weeks ago and these are the results - five sales. Yes, yes laugh at me for using PayPal - I'm just using them for now while I test the idea. I'll likely move to another payment processor once things pick us.
I am only running ads in one state, with plans to expand into other states soon.
NEXT STEPS
-My main focus at the moment is optimising my ads. I'm a rookie, so perhaps I'm spending too much but learning as go along. Reading a lot on this forum and watching youtube vids on ads.
-SEO. My competitors receive a lot of organic traffic, so I'm publishing more content to rank for keywords. This will take time.
Once I have enough sales (maybe 6-12 months), I will approach one of the information brokers to integrate their API into my website. This will add automation to the sales process where orders can be automatically fulfilled. However, they will only deal with me unless I can prove I'm somewhat established and have a customer base. My work uses an information broker for these documents, so I've been able to speak to someone about this.
Thanks for reading, will post updates as they come.
