The Key to Successful Niche Marketing – Research

Although you don’t have to have any specialized knowledge or training to be successful as a niche marketer, you will have to educate yourself regarding several aspects of the niche marketing business. Fortunately, all of the tools you need are right at your fingertips; on the information superhighway.

Research Your Niche

Even if you know a lot about your niche topic, you will still need to conduct a certain amount of research on it to ensure there is sufficient interest for you to build a niche marketing business around it. You’ll also need to research the keywords associated with your niche because this will tell you what area of your niche is being searched by interested parties. Then, you’ll need to see how many websites are already devoted to that niche. If there are already two million websites built around the keywords that represent your niche marketing idea, this tells you the market is most likely oversaturated for that topic. However, if there are only 10 websites dedicated to your chosen niche topic, there may not be enough interest.

Research Affiliate Products

You’ll also need to research various affiliate programs and products in order to find a good fit for your niche marketing business. You’ll want to look for quality products that visitors to your site will be interested in purchasing. While you’re researching products to promote, also research other revenue generating methods for your niche. Promoting affiliate products is just one way you can generate revenue but you don’t want to limit yourself to that.

Research Technology

Unless you are already a tech guru, you’ll want to research and learn about the current technology you can put to work in your niche marketing business. Technology changes constantly and today, there are more tools than ever to make your niche marketing business much more manageable for beginners. While you won’t have to suddenly become a tech guru, you can learn about widgets and plug-ins and other things you can ad to your site to monetize it. With technology evolving faster than most people can keep up with it, it is important to stay on top of current market trends.. What works to sell products one day may not work as well the next day. Make sure you have the latest information regarding current technology and trends.

Research Other Niches

While your first website is in its infancy, begin to research what will become the topic of your next niche. Building up a niche marketing business is something you can work on each day because it takes some time to build it up to the point where you will realize the fruits of your labors. Visit other niche websites and take note of some of the topics being covered. Also, look at how the sites are put together to get ideas of things you might like to do in the future.

 

Stay Savvy 🙂

3 Niche Marketing Mistakes to Avoid

Every niche marketer makes mistakes and you will, too. But if you can learn from the mistakes of others and avoid even some of the common mistakes beginning marketers make, you will be ahead of the game. Following, are some of the most common mistakes niche marketers make and how to avoid them.

Choosing the Wrong Niche

In the brick and mortar world, location is everything. After all, if very little traffic passes by your place of business and few people know you are even in business, guess what? You’re out of business. It works the same way online. Your url is the virtual equivalent of your location so you must choose a domain that properly reflects your niche; therefore, you must choose wisely when choosing the topic for your niche marketing business. Sometimes, beginning marketers get so caught up in the current trend of the day that they fail to conduct the proper research to see if their idea is feasible. Take the time to properly research a handful of niches and then pick the best one based on your research.

Marketing to the Search Engines Instead of Customers

Keywords are important, search engine optimization is important, and driving traffic to your website is important. Without traffic, you won’t make sales. However, traffic alone won’t ensure sales either. What you need is targeted traffic. While there are various ways of getting targeted traffic to your site, you must ensure that your site is built to cater to the needs of your potential customers instead of getting so caught up in where your site will land in the search engine results that you are more concerned with keywords than you are with content. While keywords may land visitors on your site, they won’t keep them there. It is your job to ensure that once individuals find your site that they are met with quality content that will keep them on your site long enough to make a purchase. When you market to real people, you find a need and you fill that need. We’ve all been disappointed to find ourselves on sites that obviously cater to the search engines and have nothing of real value to offer. Make sure your website offers real value and you’ll profit accordingly.

Giving up too Soon

Despite the late night infomercials and the thousands of online pitches, no one works 30 minutes a day and makes $5,000 a week, or even a month. At least, not in the beginning. In the beginning, you’ll work hard and be lucky to average the federal hourly minimum wage. The trick is to keep working hard because you are building an empire; one that will serve you well in the long run and pay you for years to come. Eventually, you’ll get to the point where all you have to do is update your site but that position only comes to those who work very hard.

Niche marketing isn’t rocket science. While it is very possible to make a lucrative income in this business, it also takes tons of hard work and persistence. There is no telling how many more successful niche marketers there would be if thousands didn’t give up every day. But the sad fact is that too many of us want instant gratification and don’t have the patience it takes to build the empire brick by brick. This isn’t’ a get rich quick scheme. What it is will offer you the opportunity of a lifetime; the chance to work for yourself for the rest of your life doing something you truly enjoy. Never, ever give up!

 

Stay Savvy 🙂

Income Streams for Your Niche Marketing Website

Niche marketing websites present a number of ways to earn money. Much of the money-earning potential involves trial and error as the same methods will not work for all types of sites. The best plan for earning money through your niche marketing site is to give several options a try and then determine which works best for your specific site.

Contextual Ads for Niche Marketing Websites

The easiest way to make money through these sites is contextual ads. These ads are the small blocks you often see on advertising sites about related content. Google’s AdSense program is the most popular contextual ad program, but many other smaller programs exist as well. These programs are simple. You simply sign up and put the code you are given on your site. Then you earn money as visitors to your site click on these ads.

Selling Ad Space on Niche Marketing Sites

Ad space is available on the outer edges of most websites. Banner ads can go across the top of sites, and many niche marketing sites also sell ad space down the side of their site as well. Many blog designs have spaces for advertising blocks down the columns on the blog. This premium space is one of the best places to get advertising for your site, and you can sell it monthly or weekly.

Product Reviews on Niche Marketing Sites

As your niche marketing site grows in traffic numbers, you may be able to take advantage of requests for product reviews. Some site owners receive excellent – and often expensive – products to review. A gardening blogger may receive a free mower, for instance. While there is no money changing hands, the value of these products can get pretty high. Since it is likely your niche marketing site will be about a topic that interests you, the products often will be things you would enjoy using.

Affiliate Marketing for Your Niche

Affiliate marketing is one of the more tried ways to earn money online, but it requires an understanding of subtle advertising. The process is simple. You sign up with retailers to convince others to purchase their products through links. When people go through your links to make purchases, you earn a small percentage of the sale. The key to this type of income stream is making volume sales through individual articles or “recommended item” spotlights.

These examples are only a few of the ways you can earn money through your website. Many site owners sell e-books, offer courses, or have other innovative ways to earn money. Making money on your site really is a matter of seeing what is available and what else interests the people who visit your site. Some sites are more open to product sales or for contextual advertising, for example, while other site owners may need to be more creative to find ways to earn money. The potential exists for all sites, however, and a clever entrepreneur can find a way to make it work.

 

Stay Savvy 🙂

Niche Marketing will NOT Make You Rich Quick

Too many niche marketers have wild fantasies about making big money on the Internet almost overnight and give up in frustration when that doesn’t happen. Just look around at the sales pitches geared toward niche marketing and Internet marketers. Pitches that promise if you’ll only buy this program or ebook or report that you will make an enormous amount of money working only a few minutes a day. Hogwash!

Slow and Steady

The truth is it takes a while to build up a successful niche marketing business. It takes time and a lot of hard work. In fact, you’ll probably work harder and make less money than you did at your current or last job. In the beginning, that is. However, if you work hard and work smart, you can build up a successful niche marketing business that will pay you for years to come.

You may have very little website traffic in the beginning. You may be working 10, 12, or 14 hours a day for weeks and wonder why you bother when you are getting so little traffic. Often, however, it takes the search engines weeks to index new sites and this could be the case. Besides, you should be so busy optimizing your site the first few weeks and getting it ready for a steady flow of traffic that you don’t have time to be concerned that you haven’t made your first million yet.

Don’t Fall for every Internet Marketing Sales Pitch

Niche marketing is just another form of Internet marketing, although it is certainly one of the best forms. Be aware, though, that there are thousands of Internet marketers promoting thousands of products geared toward making you think you need their product in order to succeed as a niche marketer. Now, while there’s nothing wrong with taking a course, buying an ebook, or anything else that will offer you real guidance, don’t be swayed by every offer you come across. While you can make a living in niche marketing, stay away from any claims with outlandish and instant promises of wealth.

Educate Yourself

Niche marketing isn’t rocket science but it is still in its infancy on the World Wide Web and no one has all the answers. While you don’t have to have all the answers either, you should start your business with a plan of action. You can learn a tremendous amount about niche marketing for free on the Internet without having to buy a thing. You should also seek out blogs of other niche marketers to see how others are setting them up, what products they are offering, and what, if anything, is missing. In other words, do your research and educate yourself about the business of niche marketing.

Duplicate Your Success

The great thing about niche marketing is that once you find a measure of success, it’s easy to replicate that success by doing the same thing all over again. Pick another niche, set up another blog or website and position your product line. Once you find success with niche marketing, you’ll find that it is much easier the second time around. While you don’t want to have so many websites that you can’t give them the attention they deserve and update them regularly, anyone can manage a few easily.

 

Stay Savvy 🙂

Don’t Put all Your Eggs in One Basket

In this time of economic uncertainty, all eyes are on the stock market and one thing we hear constantly is the advice to diversify. That’s because you’re less likely to lose all of your money if you invest in multiple stocks as opposed to investing all of your money in one stock only. If that one stock bottoms out, you’re broke! In the same way, niche marketers should not depend on just one method of making money online. In the following paragraphs, we’ll look at ways the niche marketer can diversify his or her income.

Google AdSense

Adsense is the most popular example of earning money when ads are placed on your site. Once you have your blog or your website up and running, you can apply for a Google Adsense account, which is free. Google will then place ads relevant to your content on your site after you copy and paste the adsense code onto your site. Google has very specific terms and conditions to follow so be sure and read these and adhere to them. Then when your site visitors click on those ads, you will earn revenue. Most niche marketers who use adsense as the only way to earn revenue are sorely disappointed because most ad clicks only earn pennies. However, this is an excellent way to boost your income in conjunction with other methods. Besides, as you grow your niche marketing business and create more sites, your Adsense revenue will grow too.

Affiliate Marketing

Many niche marketers use affiliate marketing as a way to earn money on their blogs or websites. Yet it’s easy to promote the same products without venturing out to see what else is available. However, not all affiliate programs are as widely known as Amazon or the affiliate network ClickBank, which provides digital products for promotion. The fact is, many of the retail stores in cities all across the United States have their own affiliate programs, which you can find on their websites. Take PetSmart, for instance. If you have a blog or a website dedicated to pets, there is nothing wrong with promoting the most popular affiliate programs. But also look around at others to see if there is something unique you can offer.

You might eventually join several affiliate programs but don’t clutter your blogs or websites with each one on every site. Choose the most appropriate products and programs for each of your sites and before long, you will have several different streams of income instead of just promoting one or two products.

Article Marketing

While article marketing is not exactly an income stream of its own, it will help drive traffic to your site, which will increase your profits. When you use article marketing, you write articles and submit them to article directories. Most of these directories allow you to post a short bio and a link to your site underneath your article in what is commonly referred to as a resource box. If you can write helpful and informative articles that leave your readers wanting to know more, you will drive additional traffic to your site.

 

Stay Savvy 🙂

Don’t Fear the Competition – Check Them Out!

It’s easy to get discouraged when we think we have hit on a great idea for a hot new niche and then discover that it has already been done over and over again. That’s when many would be niche marketers give up in frustration. Although there is such a thing as market saturation, don’t give up just because you have competition.

Study Your Competition

Once you have discovered your competition, study them. Evaluate the site for both visual affect and content. Before you take too much time to look around a site, ask yourself what your first impression is. Does the site appeal to you? Why or why not? Are there so many graphics that it takes too long to load? What about the content? Do you immediately see a laundry list of ads or do you notice the ads after you begin reading? Ask some friends or family members to look at some of these sites with you to get a feel for what appeals to them and what it is that makes them want to leave a site.

What is Your Competition doing Wrong?

Make a note of the types of things you feel your competition is doing wrong. This could be anything from the fact that the site is overall boring, or it could be multiple spelling and grammatical errors, too many ads, not enough content or a number of other things. You don’t have to be an expert on niche marketing to see what it is about a site that turns you off. After all, you will be marketing to people just like you; consumers.

What is Your Competition doing Right?

In the same way, make a note of what you think your competition is doing right. Did you get so caught up in reading or perusing the site that you forgot you were doing research? If so, that’s a good sign that your competition is doing something right. How is the site laid out? Is it visually pleasing? Do the ads seem to blend seamlessly into the site? What about the content? Is it new, fresh, and interesting? While you never, ever, want to copy anything you find online, doing this type of research will ensure you avoid making some of the most common mistakes beginning niche marketers make. It will also give you an idea of the kinds of things that will attract visitors to your sites.

Check out the Affiliate Products

What products are your competition promoting? Do they seem to go well with the niche? Which companies are these products affiliated with? Just because your competition is promoting these products doesn’t mean they are good products or that your competition is having any success promoting them but it will give you an idea of what other blogs and websites in your niche are selling.

As you can see, you can learn a tremendous amount of information from studying the competition. You may find that the market is saturated within a certain niche. You may also find that there are not enough quality websites or blogs in that niche and realize that yours is sorely needed.

 

Stay Savvy 🙂

Choose Your Affiliate Affiliations Wisely

Most niche marketers promote affiliate products as a way to earn revenue from their blog or website. While it would take days to research all of the affiliate opportunities online, doing your research at the outset will prevent major headaches down the line.

Affiliate Networks or Private Companies?

Some niche marketers choose to promote products solely from affiliate networks because they can promote a slew of products with just one sign-up and collect revenue from just one company. Also, it is easier to track your sales when all of them are under the umbrella of one affiliate network as opposed to a multitude of affiliate programs. However, to be truly successful with niche marketing, the products you choose must be the right ones to go along with your niche, not just the ones that are currently available at the affiliate network you belong to.

Choose Quality Products

If you wouldn’t buy it, use it, or if you don’t even think the product has merit, why on earth would you try to sell it to others? You might be surprised how many affiliates promote totally useless and worthless products in their niche marketing business. Quality counts. While it’s hard to escape the allure of 50-75% commissions, you’ll be far more successful selling products on a steady basis that have a lower rate of commission than you will with the occasional high commission sale. Choose quality products, even if the rate of commission isn’t as impressive as you’d like.

How can you know you are choosing quality products if you haven’t personally used them? Even if you could, you wouldn’t want to spend the money to sample every single product you promote. You don’t have to; just use a little common sense and read everything the company has to say about the product. You can also search for online reviews to see what other people have to say about the products you are considering promoting. This will give you a good idea whether or not you have indeed found a good product. If you see post after post about the product not doing what it promises or other negative opinions, it may be time to move on and choose another product.

Choose Quality Companies

Many affiliate marketers promote products from Amazon in their niche marketing businesses and there is good reason for this. Amazon is a quality company with a solid reputation and marketers know their customers will trust Amazon. In addition, Amazon offers such a wide variety of products that it works with almost any niche. There are plenty of other quality companies that want to share the wealth with niche marketers. Do be sure to completely read their Terms of Service. As boring as this may be, it will give you the lowdown and what you can and cannot do in your niche marketing business with regard to a company’s name, products, and advertising tools. You don’t want to find success in niche marketing only to have it taken away from you and your affiliate marketing account closed because you didn’t read the TOS. Not all of them are the same either. For example, some affiliate programs forbid the affiliate to make purchases under their own account; others don’t. Make sure you know all the rules before you start promoting anyone’s products.

 

Stay Savvy 🙂

Five Tips for the Beginning Niche Marketer

If this is your first journey into the wonderful world of niche marketing, you’ll soon discover that although it takes a lot of hard work to be a successful niche marketer, it is also a fun and fulfilling way to earn money online. Here are some tips gleaned from successful niche marketers to get you started.

Choose a Niche You Care About

Over and over, successful niche marketers emphasize that the key to their success lies in choosing niches that they feel passionate about. When you choose a niche that has personal meaning for you, all the work that you have to do to get it up and running and then to maintain it doesn’t seem like such drudgery. On the other hand, many niche marketers that have chosen niches based solely on keywords or hot market trends have quickly burned out and abandoned their entire project. It was just too difficult to slave away day after day, week after week, and watch the pennies trickle in while they were struggling to promote something they really didn’t care much about. If you don’t care enough about your subject to devote months of hard work to it, then you probably need to choose another niche altogether because even if you stick with it, chances are your lack of affection will show through and customers will see right through you. The age-old truth is that if you don’t believe in your product, your customers won’t either.

Get Your Own Website

You’ve probably read articles about how easy it is to get started in niche marketing without spending a dime and without having your own website. While it is true that you can have some marketing success without your own website, your success will be limited and it will be difficult, if not impossible, for you to develop the web presence you need to develop in order to be regarded as an expert in your niche. Look at it as an investment in your future and then go price the monthly rental on a brick and mortar storefront. You’ll quickly decide that it is very economically feasible to have your own website.

Write or Hire Writers to Write Quality Content

You don’t have to be a writer to be a successful niche marketer but if you don’t have the skill or time to write quality content, then you might want to outsource that important job to a writer. If you do outsource this position, you want to find someone who is knowledgeable about your niche or you risk paying for articles that do nothing but rehash all the other content already online about your niche. While there’s nothing wrong with conducting research online, you want writers that don’t have to get the basics from research; you want writers that understand how niche marketing in your particular niche really works.

 

Stay Savvy 🙂

Turn Your Hobby Into Cold, Hard Cash!

 

If you’re using the Internet, and you have a hobby, then you need to know how to combine the two ingredients and start turning a profit from the very things you enjoy doing in life.

 

Hobbies sell well on the World Wide Web, whether it’s the tools and materials needed to allow others to fulfill their dreams, or instructions on how to do it.  Some people just enjoy buying the fruits of your labor if your hobby is one that results in a work of art or item of interest to others.

 

  Hobbies are a big business both on and off the ‘net.  Go into any Barnes and Noble and people are spending money left and right on heir hobbies – learning everything there is to know about them.

 

Information can be sold in book form (both print and eBooks), streaming audio instructions, online video files, DVDs, and CDs.  Information is probably one of the hottest commodities on the ‘net, and information on hobbies is one of the prime ways to cash in on it.

 

You can create a simple how-to information product on your hobby and release it on the ‘net on your own website, setting up an automated system to take the money and deliver the product to the customer.

 

Or, you may want to sell something more tangible about your hobby through eBay, and manage the money system and shipping manually.  You have a long list of niches to choose from in the hobby world.

 

Anything you can do can be turned into a hobby, from home repair to tracing names off of tombstones.  Some are really off the wall hobbies that piqué people’s interest, like finding treasures in dumpsters.

 

Instead of creating a broad information product on your hobby, try to focus it more narrowly.  Instead of a Guide to golf, for instance, try writing an eBook on How to Master Your Game Around the Green.

 

If cooking is your hobby, then you can make money on it by writing a How-to guide on cooking for diabetics or cooking with chocolate.  You might even write an information product showing others how to make money from their cooking hobby!

 

Before developing a product, make sure you conduct thorough keyword research and see if the hobby within your niche has enough interest to generate a handsome profit if you put time into creating a valuable information product for their consumption.

 

Stay Savvy 🙂

How to Hunt Down Profits with Your Hobbies

Having a hobby is great.  It fulfills your life in more ways than one – giving you pleasure and relaxing your mind and body.  But did you know it’s also possible to earn money from the things you enjoy?

 

Millions of people all around the world are making money from their hobbies.  It might be something quirky like taking metal garbage and creating beautiful works of art from it, or something tame like writing non-fiction.

 

Virtually any hobby can be turned into a money-making idea. How you start churning profits can be accidental or on purpose.  Perhaps you’ve knitted a beautiful scarf and co-workers are now asking you to knit them one.  That’s accidental profiting.

 

There’s another way to set out on your quest for money from your hobbies – starting a business on the side! Not everyone can afford to quit their day job and start doing their hobby for a living.

 

Most often, it starts out as a side job and gradually builds into a full-time profit machine.  You need to take a pro-active approach to your wealth-building.  Start brainstorming ways you can make money form your hobby.

 

If you enjoy crafts, you could sell the finished crafts, sell the materials and instructions to help others make the craft, or even sell an eBook on how to enjoy and master the craft itself.

 

You might even launch a newsletter where subscribers pay to access new up-to-date information about a particular craft, like a craft-of-the-week hobby alert!  The possibilities are endless.

 

Or if sports are your hobby, you can monetize it on or off the ‘net.  You might want to give golf lessons or write a short eBook about shaving 6 points off of your short game.  Or maybe you can sell baseball cards on eBay and build a profitable business that way.

 

Almost any hobby can be profitable for you – including collecting items like stamps, dolls, and antiques, traveling to different places, arts and crafts, and even technology.

 

You can even start a simple blog detailing your hobby and put ads on it using Google AdSense.  That way, whenever anyone visits your blog and clicks on an ad, you get paid for it!  Start evaluating how you can turn your hobby into a business today, and implement a plan to make those dreams come true.

 

Stay Savvy 🙂