A Successful Niche Matches Your Skills and Knowledge

Many people are finding success with niche market sales, as niches and their associated products tend to have high demand. In fact, the data shows that about 40% of all current earning comes from selling products in a niche. It may seem like your skills can't help you make a profit in niches; however, by targeting just one specific product, you can sell it at a much higher price point than if there were several different items to buy.

The article offers advice on choosing the right type of niche for your business's needs and summarizes research done by Michael Odey who was an early marketer for LinkedIn and later founded Echo Fox League of Legends eSports team academy.

In it, he details the following successes:

Title: Amazon's First Alexa Skill Is a Free Flash Briefing From The New York Times

Product Information: Live news briefings from the NYT delivered to your Alexa. (It is unclear how much access is subject to a subscription.)

Title: Amazon Launches Free, Subscription-Based AWS Training Program With Certification Exam Included — The AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner exam is now available for $0.99. (In this instance, Alexa supports voice interaction with other third party services. See title for more information.)

Product Information: Access the Exam Center with an AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner certification exam.

Title: A Short Guide to Understanding and Using the Amazon Alexa Skills Kit — The new kit includes tools allowing you to turn your Alexa-enabled devices into virtual assistants. (In this instance, Amazon's voice interface is used to control an outside service. See above for other examples.)

Title: How To Get Your Amazon Echo to Listen To You — A simple guide for enabling a conversational skill in the voice assistant. (In this instance, a service like Twilio or Stripe is used as a way of making a voice request. See title for more examples.)

Title: How to Build a Product in Amazon's AWS Marketplace — This hands-on guide is a quick introduction to the process of building software for the Amazon Web Services marketplace. (This occurs through the use of another service like Twilio or Stripe. See title for more examples.)

Title: What Is Alexa? — An overview of Alexa, including information on skills, voice interaction, the Echo device, and more.

Title: Alexa | Terms and Conditions — A document that explains some key points such as data sharing, Amazon's "Privacy Statement" and other terms.

In most instances above (and I've included below), there is little ambiguity in what is being communicated. However, you can see that this is a balancing act for developers of these skills. By voice, context is not there to help in interpreting what the participant wants to do. The SCALE podcast takes on this issue [9] by interviewing several developers including Rob Rebele.

Title: How Far Can Voice Assistants Go?

A session report from the SCALE conference where a panel of developers give an overview of what's happening with voice interactions and how it relates to artificial intelligence.

Title: Voice Interaction and Artificial Intelligence — A session report from the SCALE conference where a panel of developers gives an overview of what's happening with voice interactions and how it relates to artificial intelligence. (In this example, the presentation is seen through audio only.)

Title: How To Use Alexa To Build Live Events On Amazon Echo — (In this instance, a live event is triggered using Alexa. See title for example.)

Title: [How To] Create Your First Voice Command Skill For Amazon Echo — A quick guide on how to go about creating your own voice command skill for the Echo device. (In this instance, the skill interprets verbal requests from the participant in that room. See title for other examples.)

Title: Amazon Showcases Alexa Skills in Japan | | Smarterware | Nexus Media Group — An article describing a presentation by Amazon and ASUS at the HTO Japan conference explaining the benefits of voice interaction.

Title: An Introduction to AWS IoT – The IoT Cloud and Voice-Enabled Connected Devices — A hosted session from AWS re:Invent showing how agents can be deployed to manage devices in a network using the AWS IoT suite.

Title: How You Can Become an AWS Certified Developer By Building Voice-Enabled Microservices [10] — A tutorial on how to build a voice-enabled web service using an example from Marvel Avengers.

Title: AWS Certified Developer: Voice-enabled Microservices — Provides an overview of a new certification from Amazon that covers building voice-enabled microservices. (This instance demonstrates the use of Alexa, but voice interaction with other apps is possible through the use of Amazon's agent service.)

Title: Alexa Device Detection for AWS IoT – Will this help you build an Alexa skill? — An article that explains how to get started serving an IoT device using AWS. (In this instance, a service like Stripe is used as a way to make a request for products.)

Title: Introducing Alexa Skill Advisor – Today we're launching our new skill advisor tool in preview mode. (Note the use of the word "Preview" in this example. This is a common tactic for eliciting action without making a promise.)

Title: A Guide to Testing Your Alexa Skill — Step-by-step instructions for testing your skills.

Title: Using Twilio to Build an Alexa Skill – A tutorial that explains how to use Twilio's features, including messaging, to build a voice app for Alexa.

Title: The Skills Kit SDK and Documentation – Learn about the underlying technologies behind Alexa skills.

Title: How To Get Started With Alexa Skills Kit — A how-to guide to using the Alexa skills kit.

Title: How To Create an Alexa Skill | A Guide for Beginners — A tutorial on how to create your first skill with this kit.

Title: Tutorial – Building an Alexa Skill that Handles Unauthorized Requests – Building your first skill? Don't forget to implement this step!

Product Description: The Alexa Skills Kit (ASK) enables you to build skills, or conversational applications, for Alexa. You can easily build skills using the ASK developer console and our do-it-yourself workflow.

Title: How to Build Your First Alexa Skill — A quick walkthrough of creating an Alexa voice-based app using Amazon's builder.

Title: My First Alexa Skill – An in-depth tutorial on this process.

Title: The New Era of Voice Interaction Is Almost Here, But What About the Legal Risks? | TechCrunch [11] — This webinar covers how the legal risk will play out for developers and consumers when it comes to voice interaction. (The comments section is also worth a read.) See the following presentation for a more in-depth understanding of what can happen as voice interactions become more common.

Conclusion

The announcements at the recent Amazon re:Invent conference are interesting on many levels. For me, it's almost a return to an Internet of Things future that I was expecting to happen by the end of the decade. Alexa Skills Kit might not be what I expected (it's a developer-level solution for building skills), but it is a step in the right direction. I'm not aware of any other vendor that has this type of offering available for developers today. The next thing will be seeing where Amazon takes this in a few years. One can only imagine what will be possible if Alexa-enabled devices gain greater market share and developers see value in building skills as part of their business model.