Notes From The Tiger’s Cave

How Japanese Mahjong Gave Rise To An Accidental Internet Marketing Strategy!

If you are a complete beginner when it comes to Internet marketing strategies and are wondering where to begin, my advice would be to build your own Internet marketing strategy around a clearly defined niche market.

If you are wondering how on earth you can choose your niche market, let me tell you my own mini success story, which happened before I had even got around to thinking about what an Internet marketing strategy might involve. I was making money before I had heard of anything like “keyword phrases” or “search engine optimization”!!

I succeeded simply because I tripped over a highly defined, but viable, niche market.OK, to tell the story, I need to track back to September 1990, when I began teaching English at a certain English language school here in Hiroshima.

Japanese Mahjong

In one of my first evening classes one of the students, a certain Mr Noda, asked me what I wanted to do in Japan. I replied that I wanted to play mahjong!

“Oh,” he said, “I can teach you to play…”

And, that was, to borrow a line from the end of Casablanca, “the beginning of a beautiful relationship…” (You can read about our endless mahjong adventures on this blog, if you really really want to!)

Actually, what Mr Noda, and one of his classmates, Mr Yoshimoto, had in mind was a regional variation of Japanese mahjong, called “Sannin-uchi maajan”, or “Japanese Three-Player Mahjong“.

For several years I said that I “ought to write a book about it” since there was no literature in English about the three-player game.

However, being young and dissolute, I much preferred the idea of talking about writing books than actually writing them, preferably while playing mahjong and drinking myself under the table at the same time…

Then the Internet came along!

It proved so much easier to build a website than to write a book! For one thing, mistakes were so much easier to correct after publication that you never had to worry about uploading perfect info from the get-go.

Thus http://japanese-mahjong.com was born!

Having got the rules of the three-player game posted, it then seemed natural to offer some Japanese mahjong sets and accessories. So I teamed up with a local “traditional Japanese games shop” and started to post ads for their sets and accessories on my site.

I never expected to sell anything. I mean, who would buy a Japanese mahjong set from a Japanese supplier and pay Japanese postage rates to get it shipped across the world?

Quite a lot of people apparently!

My website began to show up in searches for things like “Japanese mahjong sets” and people began to buy.

As I say, all this happened before I had any knowledge whatsoever of Internet marketing strategies or keywords and so forth.

In short, I had stumbled upon a nice compact well defined niche market.

So, what does all this tell us?

Firstly, you can make money out of your hobby or passion!

Secondly, you don’t have to be a marketing wizard to succeed online!

Thirdly, if you have a well defined niche market, keywords will crop up naturally and people who are in the market for what you are offering will find your site via the search engines.

David Hurley

Internet Marketing Strategies