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Niche Marketing: 13 Brilliant Niche Business Ideas

By David Jackson in Featured

The key to successful niche marketing is to pick a niche small enough to dominate, and large enough to be profitable. It’s an extremely delicate balance that requires both skill and luck. But when you strike that perfect balance, and are able to dominate a niche, you automatically become the recognized expert and authority in your field – and suddenly, your cup runneth over!

In this article, I’m going to introduce you to 13 brilliant niche businesses that are thriving in niches you probably never thought of or knew existed. Hopefully, this article will inspire you to create or develop a profitable niche business that matches your individual personality, talent and interest. Enjoy!

Romeo Mendoza
Can’t pay your mortgage? Then, paint your house. That’s right, if you will allow the folks at Adzookie, a free mobile advertising company to turn your house into a giant billboard, they will pay your mortgage for as long as your house remains a billboard.

Romeo Mendoza, Adzookie’s founder and CEO, says his idea serves two important purposes: 1. It helps struggling homeowners. 2. It spreads the word about his free mobile advertising company. With home foreclosures in the news almost on a daily basis, from a PR standpoint, this is an absolutely brilliant idea! Romeo’s website: http://www.adzookie.com

Alex Tew
You may not know his name, but I’m pretty sure you know his fame, The Million Dollar Homepage. It’s a website that was brilliantly conceived in 2005 by Alex Tew, a college student from Wiltshire, England. The purpose of the website was to raise money for his college education. The home page consists of a million pixels arranged in a 1000 × 1000 pixel grid; the image-based links on it were sold for $1 per pixel in 10 × 10 blocks.

Alex’s ultimate goal was to sell all of the pixels in the image, thus generating a million dollars of income for himself. He achieved that goal on January 11, 2006, when the final 1000 pixels were put up for auction on eBay. Mission accomplished! Alex’s website: http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com

Darren Berkovitz
Got a chore that needs to do done? Too busy to do it yourself? Imagine being able to go to a website and post a chore that needs doing. For example, walking your dog, mowing your lawn, or doing laundry. Here’s how the service works: Individuals or businesses in your area will bid on your proposal online. You simply choose from among the bids. This clever idea of Darren Berkovitz is sort of a combination of Craigslist and eBay. Darren’s website: http://www.domystuff.com

Marla Cilley
Who knew being a professional nag could be so profitable? Marla Cilley, “FlyLady” makes millions by nagging her approximately 550,000 e-mail subscribers known as “Flybabies”, to do things such as get up and get dressed for work, polish their sink, get their nails done, cook dinner and yes…go to bed! In 2010, sales of Marla’s nag business reached 4 million. Marla’s website: http://flylady.net

Eric Hozle
What do you get when you combine DNA with online dating? You get ScientificMatch, an internet-dating site launched in December 2007 by Eric Holzle, who, before launching his site spent years doing research about human chemical attraction. The site is based in Boston, Massachusetts where its service is offered.

The company uses your DNA to maximize the chances of finding compatible physical chemistry with your matches. Oh, in case you’re wondering, the membership fee is a whopping $2000! Eric’s website: https://scientificmatch.com

Dusty Regan
Dusty Regan, a self-proclaimed “geek” and lover of technology, is the creator of FriendorFollow, an extremely useful twitter tool that tells you who you’re following who’s not following you back. This tool allows you to stay on top of your unfollows, as well as “trim your Twitter fat”, so to speak. Dusty’s website: http://friendorfollow.com

Claire Lamont/Jo-Anne Stayner
I’m a Mrs., an online marriage name change service was created by best friends Claire Lamont and Jo-Anne Stayner, as as result of the quest for the perfect shower gift…and to help newly married friends who spent hours going through the name change process.

I’m a Mrs. provides all of the forms, instructions and personalized letters new brides need when they embark on their official name change journey. The service is easy to use and can help brides save a tremendous amount of frustration and time.

Launched in 2008, I’m a Mrs. is now available in the United States, Canada, Australia, South Africa and the United Kingdom. Claire and Jo-Annes’s website: http://www.imamrs.com

Dmitry Davydov
If you need a memorable, easy to pronounce domain name that exactly describes what your website is all about, you might want to check out PickyDomains. They specialize in finding available domain names that are descriptive, concise and are easily remembered.

And here’s the best part: If they can’t find a domain name, or you don’t like any available domain names they suggest – you don’t pay anything – making the service completely risk free. Dmitry’s website: http://www.pickydomains.com

Bryan Caplovitz
Bryan Caplovitz, a former business technology consultant, in trying to build market share for his consulting firm, saw the need for a service where non-professional speakers could find speaking opportunities. He thought the Internet was an ideal way to bring speakers and opportunities together, and SpeakerMatch was born.

Here’s how the service works: Organizations list their events and speaker needs for free, while speakers pay a small monthly fee to post their profile on the site and pursue leads for possible speaking engagements. SpeakerMatch.com has become the preeminent online destination for those looking for speaking engagements. Bryan’s website: http://www.speakermatch.com

Aibek Esengulov/Kaly Mochoev
Looking for a useful, fun blog to help guide you through the web and tell you about exciting, hot websites that you have never heard of, including the best software programs, and all kinds of “how to” tips for computer users?

Then, MakeUseOf is definitely the blog for you. Launched in July, 2006 by Aibek Esengulov and Kaly Mochoev, MakeUseOf has approximately 350,000 subscribers and ranks among the most popular blogs on the planet according to Technorati. Aibek and Kaly’s website: http://www.makeuseof.com

Sami Bayrakci
Do you like surprises? SomethingStore is an interesting website launched in October 2007 by Sami Bayrakci, that will send you “something”, an item selected randomly among thousands of products from their diverse inventory, for $10 (free shipping in the US), and you will discover what your something is when you receive it. Sami’s website: http://www.somethingstore.com

Paul Singh/Aaron Dragushan
Have you ever called a company only to have an automated operator tell you, “Due to an unusually high call volume, you have to wait for several minutes”? Don’t you just hate when that happens?

Well now, instead of waiting on hold for an eternity, you can have someone else do the waiting for you. Thanks to a clever new service called FastCustomer, created by Paul Singh and Aaron Dragushan, all you have to do is type in the name of the company you are trying to reach and your phone number, and FastCustomer will call you back as soon as it gets someone on the line. Paul and Aaron’s website: http://www.fastcustomer.com

George Burke
Imagine being able to swap unlimited ebooks with thousands of readers nationwide. eBook Fling allows you to do just that. Here’s how it works: Simply share an eBook with others and in return, get back the eBook of your choice. You can choose from the hottest bestsellers, classics and even textbooks and tech manuals.

But wait…it gets even better! You can even trade Kindle™ and Nook™ books using your e-reader device, iPad, iPhone, Blackberry™ or Android™ smartphone. ebook Fling is the brainchild of Bookswim.com founder and CEO George Burke. George’s website: http://ebookfling.com

In closing, niche marketing may or may not be your cup of tea…only you can decide that. But as you’ve just seen from reading this article, the possibilities are virtually endless!

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David Jackson is a marketing consultant, and the owner of Free-Marketing-Tips-Blog.com – Powerful, free marketing tips to help grow your business! http://free-marketing-tips-blog.com

Niche Marketing – Narrowing Your Path to Success – A SPN Exclusive Article

By Cathy Henry in Featured

Almost every single client that contacts me for help with their website laments the lack of traffic and buying customers. Aside from SEO issues, 99% of the time their main problem is they are tackling an enormous market that is way beyond their experience or marketing budget.

For some, the idea of digging deep within their market and targeting specific smaller pockets of traffic is a concept that they do not understand. They assume that they need to have a very large audience to get the most traffic and make the most sales. This might be the case when choosing a location for an offline store, but the world of internet marketing is far different. In this article, I will explain why your chances for success depend on narrowing the field and finding micro-niches within that large audience.

For the purpose of explanation, I am going to choose the digital camera market to demonstrate how to effectively grab search engine traffic using micro-niches. For the record, the numbers I will use as examples are purely fictional. I have not researched this market but am throwing numbers out there as an example. The purpose of this lesson is to explain why niche marketing works and not to help you find your niche. You will need to do that research yourself.

That being said, let’s look at the numbers.

* “Digital cameras” is a very broad keyword. Because it is very broad there will be a huge amount of competition. There might be 750,000,000+ other pages competing for this keyword. It is pretty safe to say you will never be able to crack that market no matter how much SEO you do. It would take thousands and thousands of dollars and a large staff to get anywhere near page one in the search engines for such a broad search term. Your research tells you that this keyword gets 34,000 search queries per day, but if you can’t get near the first page you will never see any of that traffic to your website.

* Now let’s dig a little deeper within that market and look at “Nikon digital cameras”. The competition may be 3,000,000 for this term. That is a bit better, but still pretty stiff competition. You may be able to get on page 10 of the search engines for this term, but since buyers rarely go past page one or two, again, you will never see any buying traffic to your site if you base your SEO and marketing campaigns on this keyword. It would take a hefty advertising budget to bring any traffic to your website if you make this the main keyword for SEO and ad campaigns.

* You have done your market research, and with your experience as an electronics store owner, you know that the “Nikon Snappy Dappy Doo SLR 360″ model is the most popular selling camera. (Can you tell I made that model up?) Your research also tells you that there are only 150,000 pages competing for this keyword and that the search engines get 150 search queries per day for that specific term. The numbers all indicate that this is a micro-niche that is not only doable but can bring buying customers to your website. With some focused
SEO and a bit of work, you can realistically expect to be on page one of the search engines without too much difficulty.

Another great benefit of using this method of developing your marketing and SEO strategies is the fact that the majority of the visitors to your website will be buyers. You don’t want to waste your valuable resources on browsers or researchers. If you focus on too broad a term you may get visitors who are looking for information but are not necessarily looking to buy. They may be looking for tips on using a digital camera, troubleshooting a problem they have with their camera or they may just be in the beginning stages of researching the best digital camera for their needs.

Since your website’s main goal is to sell cameras, you want your visitors to already be in the buying mood when they land on your page. Let’s look at the stages that your customers go through when shopping for a camera. You can do this by thinking like a typical online shopper.

* When researching a product, the typical shopper will first type in the broad keyword of digital camera. This is just their starting point; they are not ready to buy yet. They are looking for reviews and features to find the one that best suits their needs and budget.

* Next, they may type in SLR digital cameras. Now they are comparing the different models available to narrow down which camera they like best. They are still not quite ready to make the leap.

* Once they have decided what they want, they will type in “Nikon Snappy Dappy Doo SLR 360″ because they are ready to make their purchase. This is exactly the time you want them to arrive at your website. They have their credit card in hand and are simply looking for the website they want to make their purchase from. Assuming you have competitive pricing, excellent customer service, a well designed site to instill their trust, and compelling ad copy, they will buy from you.

Now you should understand why it makes more sense to focus your efforts on that small pocket of buying customers within a very large market. You get targeted buying traffic to your website and you convert them into more sales. A smaller field increases your chances of a home run.

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Cathy Henry is an expert in SEO and organic traffic. Her SEO Services Company focuses on helping website owners achieve success online. Visit www.cathyhenryseocompany.com to read more of Cathy’s articles.

Choosing a Niche Market According to Niche Market Potential

By Bill Wynne in Featured

You want your business to be successful so you need to make sure that you do not make the mistake of choosing a niche market with no potential. The niche market potential and size is something that you must research. Of course if this is just a hobby blog or site it really does not matter.

Here are some guidelines that I use when determining a niche market.

Personal Interest – There are a number of interests I have but when it comes to being a profitable niche I find out there really is not any money in it. For example if you were interested in “Training an Elephant to Paint” your prospective buyers is going to be a small number of people. I do believe that it is best to choose a niche market that you have interest in since you will spend a lot of time with it, that is, if you want to successful with your website. Create a list of topics that you would like to market in and then apply the rest of the guidelines in this article to determine which is going to be the best niche to market in.

Niche market potential – Naturally you want to sell something that has a lot of people with interest in your niche. To determine this use Google Trends, Adwords and Amazon.com.com. Go to Google Trends and type 5 of your niche ideas into the search box. You will see on the graph which one is the most popular. The niche that appears to be the most popular may not be the niche that you want to get into, the next rule tells us why. Next, navigate to the Google Adwords webpage, go to Google.com, enter your niche in the search box and count how many paid for sponsored listings there are at the top of the search results and the links down the right hand side of the page. Those listings show that people are spending money on your niche which is a good sign that the niche market potential of your niche is really good. Lastly, go to Amazon.com and type in your niche. Are there books written about your niche and products for sale in your nice? If there is nothing then you should think twice about the niche you are thinking about and find something where there are products for sale.

Fad likeliness – This is a topic that I don’t here people talk about. You need to be cautious, regardless of the amount of traffic in that niche or the number of products that it is not just a fad. Having been in the retailing of vitamins and supplements there is something new every quarter and the old stuff sinks into insignificance, for example, bee pollen, deer antler velvet, shark cartilage and others. These supplements are not as common and popular as Vitamin E and other supplements and herbs that are popular and people will always be looking for.

Competition - There are two different schools of thought on how to relate to competition. The ideal would be to find a niche with a lot of traffic but no one seems to be targeting it. Those niches are hard to find, kind of like the black 69 Camaro that has been driven 150 miles and then sat in Grandma’s garage. She lists it in the classifieds not knowing what the value is and you buy it for a song. Apart from the ideal there are the two groups and the first group suggests that you go into a niche market with little competition and you will be able to rank high in the search engines with good keywords. The opposing group believes you should compete in the more competitive niches. The are competitive because there is a greater profit potential. To do this you need to know how to do the best SEO possible. That is something that you will have to determine for yourself. It is true though that to try to rank for a popular prescription drug without Adwords or some black hat SEO methods would be near impossible.

Those are the most important rules that will assist you in finding the best niche with great niche market potential. Take your time to make this decision, don’t rush or you will most likely regret it.

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Niche Market Potential is something Bill Wynne understands having made a great passive income from operating a number of niche websites.

Long Tail Keyword Choice for Niche Marketing

By Dr. Christopher in Featured

Long tail marketing consists of niche marketing to a great many niches, selling small quantities of many products or services to each. Customers are targeted with “long tail keywords.” What does the term “long tail” refer to?

Chris Anderson popularized the “long tail” in an October 2004 Wired magazine article. Long tail keywords and niche marketing go together on the Internet. To see the long tail, get a spreadsheet of related keywords with their monthly searches, sort the keywords in decreasing order by searches and make a graph of the searches. You should find a very few keywords with many searches and a long tail of the distribution with few.

Most of us can successfully compete only for keywords in the tail of the distribution. The questions are: Which keywords in the tail? And compete how?

You can divide the keywords four search bands: the super, the high, the medium, and the low search keywords. The border between low and medium searches can be set to somewhere around 500 searches per month; between medium and high around 1000; and between high and super around 10,000.

You can divide the keywords into four competition bands as well: the super, the high, the middle, and the low competition keywords. The border between low and medium competing pages — pages containing the exact keyword phrase — can be set to somewhere around 10,000 searches per month; between medium and high around 20,000; and between high and super around 35,000.

To use a metaphor, the number of searches is the quality of the fruit — the higher the number of searches, the more ripe, plump, and tasty it is. The level of competition is where the fruit is on the tree. The super competitive keywords are on the tip top branches. The low competition keywords don’t even require you stretch. There are two not perfectly consistent principles for harvesting the fruit: (1) harvest the best fruit you can, and (2) pick the low-lying fruit first. Here are some suggestions on how to do that:

1. Remove the super high competition keywords from your list. You will not get that traffic.
2. Remove keywords with too high a level of competition for the number of searches. Why bother competing for them?
3. Do not target the high competition keywords first. Devote your time where it will do more immediate good.
4. Usually it is worth optimizing web pages by hand only for middle- or higher-band keywords. An exception might be for selling products with a high profit per sale — provided also the searcher is intending to buy.
5. You can devote web pages to low search and competition keywords if you generate the pages. That way, you only have to create the template once, but you get to reuse it for many keywords. It would not be worth your effort to write each one individually.
6. You can use the high end of the low band keywords in alternative titles of ezine articles. When you submit the articles through a submission service such as Submit Your Article or Unique Article Wizard, those services submit randomized variations of a your article to hundreds or thousands of article directories and blogs. They permit many alternate titles. You can have many articles spread around the web with titles including the low band keywords, all with less than twice the effort of submitting a single article. All these articles invite interested people to come to your web site. For the low competition keywords, appearance in a page title and page name (both of which you typically get in an article directory) may be enough to get the article listed on page one of the search results. Many page-one listings with few searches apiece is in the spirit of long-tail marketing.
7. There are a lot of searches for phrases the search engines have not seen before. You can devote a page as a destination for these very low frequency keywords. Create a page with a couple of thousand words of text filled with words and phrases related to your topic. When the search engine encounters some semantically-related but not yet indexed query, your page would be a good recommendation. You can also drop low-competition keywords into the text. They will bring a few searches themselves as well as contribute to the semantic classification of the page.

Divide your keywords by search frequency and by numbers of competing pages. It will help you plan your long-tail marketing.

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For more information on using long tail keywords for ezine article marketing or to improve web site traffic, visit the web site http://ezinearticleshow.com/ created by Dr. Thomas Christopher, a Colorado Front Range public speaker.

Niche Marketing – How to Target Your Marketing Efforts and Master Your Business Niche

By Karel Murray in Featured

If you want to make more money in today’s competitive environment, then you need to master your business niche. Let me show you a perfect, prime example of niche marketing at its best:

The AARP card appeared in the mail again. This time I actually opened the envelope and reviewed the material included with the invitation to join. Offers of insurance, magazines, on-line registrations and general information related to aging spilled out across the table. Everything in the packet maintained the specific intent of enticing a middle age person to join the group dedicated to senior citizens.

A scant five years ago, I wouldn’t have acknowledged the promotional material. It would have been swept into the nearest garbage can as I briefly wondered why this organization wasted its marketing dollars on me. Now, as I scan the introductory letter, the supporting messages delivered in the envelope are beginning to make sense. I’ve discovered that the magazine is dedicated to providing me with information on medical advancements for cholesterol control, suggestions to slim the middle age bulge and tips to improve my memory. That last one caught my attention.

Startled, I realized that I aged into the targeted demographic of The American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) and didn’t feel it coming on. When, for god’s sake, did I stop being 35? AARP knew it would happen and patiently primed the pump for several years as it waited for me to emotionally recognize that my body and brain would change. My perspective would alter and this organization graciously waited until it was needed.

Now, that’s niche marketing!

When is Niche Marketing Most Effective?

Niche marketing is most effective when you immerse yourself in a specific topic area and then start building your reputation for being a thought leader on that specific topic. It may sound intimidating, but in reality, all it demands is focus.

Nido Qubein, a recognized business strategist and forward thinker coined the term “Intentional Congruence”. He stresses that everything you do in your business must tie into everything else you do. It’s about having intent and purpose to intimately understand what you are doing and why.. Without understanding who you help and why you are doing what you do, how can you expect anyone else to know?

5 Elements to Identifying and Building Your Business Niche:

1. Create an inventory of your strengths. Identify how you relate to people and get specific in your values. List what you already know and what you need to learn to position yourself as an expert in your field. Describe the specific abilities you possess that are unique to you. Determine where you stand in terms of current finances. And, estimate what financial requirements will be necessary to build your niche with your target market.
2. Select the top two areas you have a passion for pursuing. Without passion or emotional engagement for the subject area, long-term success is unlikely. The ultimate goal is to do what you love, love what you do and make an acceptable living as you do it!
3. Research the two niche areas you’ve identified. Determine: who are the top three businesses or individuals already doing what you want to do? Review their websites and gain a sense of how connected and informed your future competition is. Research the internet fully to gain a sense of topic areas, product offerings and customer/client “reach out” efforts. Identify what is already in place and focus on those areas you feel are underserved.
4. Build a resource inventory. Contact business professionals as needed to build alliances. Create opportunities to interview people or hire whoever might be necessary to fine tune your business plan or fill in the gaps of knowledge on areas that are critical in establishing you as an expert. Offer your services to other business professionals as well. Just because you are new to a niche, doesn’t mean you are lacking expertise. They simply don’t know about you yet! Building relational capital with others who thrive in the market you wish to enter is always beneficial to everyone who participates.
5. Put your stake in the ground and claim your position within your targeted niche. Here’s how…
   1. Start offering your knowledge to the masses by using social media liberally.
   2. Become a fan of expert pages and register to participate in other List Serves that focus on your area of expertise.
   3. Read and post to other expert blogs on your topic.
   4. Write articles focusing on your area of expertise and submit them for online publication. You can go to www.TryMyFreeArticleTemplates.com/karel for 3 free article templates.
   5. Make every opportunity to interview other industry experts by teleseminar and provide those to your clients as additional resource material.
   6. Build an accessible on-line library that is exploding with information for your customers and clients.
   7. Create surveys for completion by your target market to gain knowledge through research and insight that is unique to you. Publish a white paper or report annually that includes this research.

Now, you have the keys to dominating your business niche. Nothing is holding you back from being the expert, knowing your target market and maintaining a gentle helping hand. You are in charge of designing and maintaining a world of comfort for your customers and customers. You can make their lives easy because they now have you – the expert to rely on.

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Karel Murray is a Certified Speaking Professional, author of “Hitting Our Stride: Women, Work and What Matters” and business trainer who helps women entrepreneurs and executives improve their overall business effectiveness and productivity. Now, you can listen to her exciting, free interviews at http://www.JustiForaMoment.com. Each podcast interview gives you 3 takeaway ideas or concepts that you’ll be able to implement right away

Search Engines and The Art of Niche Marketing

By Chris Brown in Featured

One Page, One Subject.

Building a new website and looking for a good search engine results ranking is getting to be a major challenge, now that most subjects you can possibly think of are covered by a variety of pages. All the major subjects such as travel, sport, news and sales are covered by millions of web pages. This means that getting top search ranking is really difficult to achieve, and hence the growth in SEO services as authors battle it out for top spot on those all important google results pages.

Even when your subject matter is a little off the beaten track, you’ve probably found you’re locked in a search results battle with all sorts of other sites and related topics. This is where the niche window starts to open, when you see other results coming up next to yours that are not offering quite the same service or information that you are. There’s really no need to be in competition with these sites.

As the web develops and expands, the chances are steadily increasing that a user searching and finding a site will find one where the content is an exact match with their interest. For web authors this means one thing, its no longer sufficient to produce one page covering multiple topics – you need to split up your content.

Doing this is simple enough. Read through your own content and split it up into the different topics or aspects that you cover. Now filter these sections of the information onto different pages, each keyworded to their own niche. Of course you should take care to have a home page that retains the address of your existing one, so that you don’t lose that hard won place in google’s index.

The smaller the niche, the higher the rank.

Lets imagine you had a site about shopping bags. You could cover size, strength and design of bags on different pages. This way, someone searching for shopping bag strength can find a page right on topic, and google will rank it very highly for relevance.

The more comprehensively a subject is covered on the web, the smaller niche you need to target. This provides an opportunity to create a high ranking page even on a subject as comprehensively covered as a pro sport, provided you’re covering information on a small enough niche. Maybe just the history of shirt designs for a particular football team, or the length of downhill courses at different winter Olympics locations.

Don’t contaminate your content.

A friend of mine built a web site to sell his rental apartment in Cyprus. On his front page he also included a short list of places where you can buy flights to the island. He thought that by doing this his page might come up when people searched for flights, but of course there’s no possible chance he could rank ahead of all the airlines and travel companies, so in practice all he’d achieved was to reduce the relevancy of his site to the core subject of rental apartments in Cyprus. Of course his customers may well want flight advice and he should provide that, but it must be on a separate page.

The point you need to remember is that however tempted you might be, don’t try to cover a second subject on the same page, because this will reduce the relevancy of the page when someone searches on your core content.

Let Google do their job

Remember what google’s job is – to bring the best information to the top of the results page. Of course we can spend a lot of time trying to work out what google’s definition of ‘best’ is, but you don’t need to worry about that. For a niche site the definition of best is what you and your readers think it should be. Its down to google to develop their rules to bring your site to its rightful place in their search rankings, and we all know they’re constantly changing their rules to try and achieve this. There’s one simple rule that will hold good through all the rule variations, a site dedicated to the subject a web user searches for will always be rated better than a site covering a wide range of information.

You can use this knowledge to create successful new websites. A page can cover the smallest imaginable subject width and still be a success, so if you have knowledge on a narrow subject, and one that could be of interest to other people, this could be an ideal subject for a website. Given this size of the web and the number of users, what subject could there be that isn’t of interest to anyone?

Of course the first test you should always do with a new web project is to do a trial search before you write a single word, and see how well covered the subject is already. The more coverage a subject already has, the smaller niche you’ll need to target.

My most successful websites have been created in response to failed searches for quality information, times when I can’t find what I want on the web. I’ve then gathered the information I want for myself, by researching around the web, libraries and friends for bits of information, done my own trial and error research and assembled all these results into a brand new body of knowledge. All that’s left is to write it up the article.

Your readers will help you develop your site

Website content development only really starts in earnest once you’ve got a new site moving up the rankings on a niche topic and developing a readership. Make sure your contact details are easy to find because readers tend to get in touch with additional information and questions. This helps you build the content and make sure you’re targeting the information people want.

About the author. Chris Brown has been producing niche web pages (such as yahtzee.org.uk and recordstocd.co.uk) for nearly 10 years and runs local web building tuition sessions in Manchester, England.

Niche Marketing With SEO – A Valid Choice

By Bob Podolsky in Featured

What is Niche Marketing? What is SEO?

Niche marketing with SEO isn’t quite self explanatory – so here’s a simple overview. A niche is simply a product category that people are looking for and that doesn’t have overwhelming competition on the supply side of the demand/supply equation.

The ideal niche is one that has great demand and little or no supply available. Such niches are rare. You could spend a lifetime looking for one and never find it – so don’t count on this if you are planning to do niche marketing.

Fortunately, niche marketing with SEO doesn’t require that one’s niche be ideal to be good from our perspective – just good enough. Most people who set up marketing websites don’t research the competition very thoroughly while picking the market in which they are going to operate. This is a good thing for those of us in the know about online market research.

By picking a niche with relatively high demand and low supply, and by “optimizing” our website to attract the notice of the search engines, we can compete successfully in the marketplace.

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It consists of two parts: on-page optimization and off-page optimization. On-page optimization is mostly a matter of picking a keyword for your page that matches the informational theme of the page. A web page with the theme “niche marketing” would have “niche marketing” in the keywords meta-tag in the Page Source” view of your browser.

Off-page optimization is effected by the recognition accorded your web page by other webmasters – primarily expressed as links from their websites to yours. Search engines are able to track both optimization factors – and they give more weight to the latter than to the former.

A page will have matured when other websites, known to be authorities on niche marketing, bear links pointing to the page. SEO is a big subject and you will see it referred to repeatedly throughout many websites concerned with niche marketing. The first question that should occur to you at this point is – What Am I Going to Sell?

Rather than pick a product that is familiar to you – or one that you can create yourself – both of which are very tempting choices – I strongly suggest that you decide at the outset to pick one that you know people want. In other words do the market research first – find out what people are actually looking for and that can be sold profitably – and then decide what to sell.

If your research leads you to a subject that is not the most familiar, so be it. Learn the subject and then sell it. It is likely that you will find a niche in an area with which you already have some familiarity, because you are likely to start with something familiar as you begin doing the research. It is best if this is so, because you can write most capably about a subject about which you care passionately.

What Do I need to Know to Do Niche Marketing with SEO?

In simplest terms you need to know:

• How to set up a website properly
• How to select the search engine keywords that will bring traffic to your website
• How to structure your website to be ranked highly by the search engines – so it appears on the first page of “results” that a search engine displays when a visitor searches for your keywords,

* How to “monetize” your web traffic to create multiple streams of income, and

* How to lead your sites visitors to a decision to buy what you are selling – without using a heavy-handed sales pitch. This is called “pre-selling”.

The first of these questions is answered very thoroughly by sources that I will reference in subsequent articles. It is a big subject – beyond the scope of this article.

The choice of keywords has also been covered by many writers on the subject. Each has his own angle on doing the research, and some make useful tools available to you either free or at modest cost.

How To “Monetize” Your Website

To monetize your website is simply to connect your site’s readers with an opportunity to buy something in such a way that you make money in the process. There are a number of good choices in this regard, and you can use more than one of them.

For starters, you can directly sell something via your website using your own merchant account or PayPal account. Your product might be a tangible item that you are prepared to ship or drop-ship to your customer – or it might be an e-book, a piece of software, or an information product that you will deliver immediately as an electronic download.

Then again, you might sell a product produced by a company of whom you are an affiliate. There are many good affiliate programs available. In this case you simply include on your website a link that takes the reader to a website provided by the product supplier. The link identifies you to the supplier, so if the reader becomes a customer, you get a commission on the sale. Such commissions can run as high as 75% and be very profitable to you.

And/or you might contract with a product or service provider to be paid a fixed fee for each referral that you send their way via your website.

And/or you might sell advertising space on your website, either via Google’s Adsense program, which will pay you on a per-click basis, or through one of several other programs. Some of these pay you on a weekly or monthly basis and can be more lucrative than Adsense ads.

A Note On Monetizing

One of the most common mistakes that beginners make when setting up a commercial website is to monetize the site too soon. Until the site contains enough useful content, its readers should not be expected to trust its author enough to buy anything on the site. Why should they? The traffic to the site will tell you when that trust has been established – then you will have “earned” the right to monetize it.

If you monetize too soon, before you have at least thirty highly informative pages and twenty unique visitors per day, then you run the risk that both search engines and human visitors will just see the site as a sales pitch – and accord it little value or rank.

The Value Of “Pre-Selling”

As I said earlier, most Internet surfers are not looking for advertising when they use the search engines. They are looking for useful information – authoritative information that informs them about the subject of interest to them. When you provide such information, you gain a level of credibility in your readers’ eyes that you can never achieve by presenting them with a sales pitch.

Niche marketing is all about credibility. As your readers recognize the value of the information content that you provide, they become more open to the idea of buying something from you. As this occurs, the likelihood that they will buy from you rises, the percentage of visitors who are “converted” into customers rises accordingly – and the ease with which you make money online soars.

If you are serious about making money with niche marketing, the next thing you need to study is the choices you will need to address in deciding how you will go about doing so.

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A retired scientist, former psychotherapist, and author of five books on ethics, Bob Podolsky has been involved in Internet marketing since 1994. To learn about more important choices relevant to online marketing, visit http://www.create-easy-money.com/ways-to-make-money-online.html

© Copyright 2012 All rights reserved. Jayde Online, Inc.

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