Find A Niche

Find a Niche

Possibly one of the hardest things to decide when you start to blog is “what do I write about”.  This has a number of elements to it’s answer initially dependant upon your desired outcome.  If you are looking to connect with your audience about a passion then obviously you need to choose a niche that you have a great deal of knowledge about, something that offer you an endless opportunity to spout and scribble.

If your intention is to make money with your blog then you need to take a more scientific and analytical approach to your blogging.  Niche research is a greatly under-performed principle when approaching the art of making money online, there are many things to consider before writing a post, deciding on a theme or a host etc etc.  Check my find a niche category and refer to the research which I carried out on the Camper VW niche before I decided to put any work into starting the blog.

This really is the most crucial part of blogging in my opinion, after all it takes just as long to set up a site to fail as it does a site to succeed and make money online.

“Make Money with the Long Tail…”

The long tail was not effectively put into action until a few years ago. When the idea of effectively targeting consumers for smaller niches all of the sudden became very feasible and extremely profitable.

So why is the long tail so effective? Years ago, if you typed in the search term, online automobile insurance quote, you would probably not get what you were looking for. The long tail is so effective because there are millions of niche topics out there that are not targeted by marketers. The search term, Nike shoes, will return thousands and thousands of targeted results. The search term, Nike shoe retailer in Indiana, may result in thousands of results as well but very few will be targeted relevant results.

So, why is this important? The main search terms have a lot of competition. The niche topics have fewer visitors but a lot less competition. This means that if you can create one site for a certain niche, you can make a few dollars a day. If you can make 100 sites that make five dollars a day you have five hundred dollars a day. Replicate this process more and more and you will find yourself making loads of money online.

Many people are making money online because they are targeting these niche topics. A lot of the money that is being made comes from several small websites composed of a few good articles will information on that niche. Once the small site is created, google ads are placed on the page along with affiliate links to monetize the site. Once the site is setup and ready to make money an article is written everyday and submitted to well known article directories. The more articles you can write and submit, the more visitors come to the site. The more visitors you get to your site, the more money you make.

There are several tools you can use to speed up the process and many tricks of the trade that will make the process for efficient but now you know the basics. You can start making money online with the long tail promoting niche topics from the knowledge you have obtained from this article. It is not rocket science but it does take discipline to keep going. Anyone can do it but many do not. Those that choose to go through with it are becoming very wealthy making money online through long tail marketing.

Often is the question from marketers during coaching sessions on building content sites is wether to use Adsense or Affiliate programs.

A general rule of thumb is always go where the most frequent and high payouts are, but in making the decision between Adsense or affiliate programs, there are a number of things that should be considered.

Initially, it will all depend upon your niche or market. If an affiliate program exists  that converts well and also pays well, then you should take the affiliate program route, you can check this out simply by researching the marketplace details within Clickbank, Commission Junction or whichever Affiliate network is your preferred, in my experience Clickbank offers the simplest method and the highest rates of pay per product, however CJ can pay small percentages but on higher ticket items like digital cameras. I’m sure you would rather make dollars than you would cents, so using an affiliate program in this situation would be your best bet. However, if there isn’t an affiliate program, using a pay-per-click service such as Google Adsense will at least allow you to earn a little money from your content site.

This leads to another question though. How do you tell if the affiliate program you are looking at is a good one or not?  The answer to that question will take some research, but will be well worth your time. One of the very first things That I would encourage you to do is to contact the  affiliate manager and ask what the average conversion rate is for the affiliate program. You could also ask if they have any affiliates that would be willing to email you their experiences with the product. Once you have the answer to that question, visit a few affiliate marketing forums and ask if anyone has promoted the program before or if they have any experience with the owner or affiliate manager of the site. Usually if it’s a bad program, many people will tell you about it.

If you are finding it difficult to locate any suitable affiliate programs/products for your niche, then I would suggest using “Google Adsense” or any of the other Pay per click programs similar to it, perhaps Yahoo or MSN search marketing. Always check though to make sure you can’t make more money from something else. You don’t want to be making pennies on a site you could be making dollars from. In most cases Google  only pays out pennies per click, therefore if you receive 100 clicks and made say $2.00, and then conversly you received 100 clicks on an affiliate link and made $50, it obvioulsy makes a great deal of sense to focus on affiliate programs?

Testing and tracking with a good quality tracking system like Google Analytics is a great way to definitively decide which is the very best method of promotion for your site…in my humble opinion I would use both as long as the larger of the income streams isn’t eroded by the smaller!

Setting up a website and receiving targeted traffic is still only a single step in the journey to make money online, what about the quality of your sales page, can you increase conversions with just a few tweaks??

Sales conversion is a crucial part of any marketing campaign. You might be able to generate hundreds and hundreds of leads, but if you can’t convert them into customers or subscribers, then you will ultimately have done nothing other than perhaps wasted money to generate the leads in the first place.

Before you send an email to your list, always make sure you have checked it with a spam rating detector. If your email cannot pass a spam check, that’s a good indicator that you will end up with a low sales conversion rate. Even if your copy is excellent, you will not get good results because your email won’t get through.

One good way to increase your conversion rate on your sales page is to add a picture of yourself in the top right corner. This piece of personalization will help presell your visitors by letting them know that a real person is actually selling this product, rather than some nameless entity or pen name that is used to cover up someone’s identity.

Consider using low pressure sales tactics to increase your sales page conversion rate. In many niches, including self help niches, low pressure sales works far better than the normal Internet marketing routine, which can often turn off prospects. Instead, use blue fonts, realistic claims and avoid hype altogether.

Consider testing various different email subject lines to constantly improve your sent-to-opened version rate. This is critically important if you own a list. You will have to determine what does and does not work in terms of subject lines, so you can be sure that you get a good portion to read your email when you send out a product offer.

If you don’t feel that you have the talent to create copy for a sales page that will convert visitors well, then don’t write the actual sales page yourself. Instead, outsource that job to someone else. If you don’t have $1,500 to spend, you can always contact someone over Guru, Elance, or Rentacoder who is a good writer and then refer that person to other good sales pages to use as models.

If you sell an audio product, consider taking clips from your product and giving them away for free on your sales page. These free but incomplete pieces of your entire product will entice visitors to go from being tire kickers to potential buyers. This is especially true if you use these audios to get visitors onto a mailing list.

Now take what you have learned in this lesson and begin working now.

Finding a product and a niche to make money online is just the start of the journey!  What about generating traffic?  Not just any traffic but targetted traffic, hungry for your wares, read on…

Advanced website traffic tactics may become daunting, but if you use low cost strategies you have nothing but a win-win situation.Use the below mentioned low cost advanced website traffic strategies and you’re in for a huge online success.

1. Write an article.

By writing an article you are able to put a compelling piece of writing right in front of your audience using the leverage of article directories like eZine articles and Article Underground. Article directories offer the opportunity to place a limited amount of links to your squeeze page or sales page and given that your article is on topic and well written for your niche you will receive a steady flow of traffic over time. Once you have completed your article submit it to e-zine articles and seduce traffic from various visitors. It really is as simple as that. But don’t just stop at one article directory - post your article to as many directories as possible! I have acquired many visitors from single articles over a long period of time, this is possibly the most powerful traffic generating strategy of all!

2. A link exchange

Never underestimate the power of a link exchange.  By typing your keyphrase or targetted keyword into Google in addition to the word “+link” will return websites that have a reference to links within your niche.  Check out each website and if you feel that they are ‘on topic’ make a phone call to the webmaster and discuss the possibilities of an exchange after studying the target website.  Be sure to discuss the content of the target website with the webmaster to show that you have read the content with interest, there is an art to requesting links and link exchanges.

3. Become active in Forums.

In a similar way, searching for keyword +forum will return a nuymber of forum based websites that are currently active in your niche.  Join a couple of forums and start making subtle comments and take part in discussions.  If you are an enthusiast within the niceh then search for people in distress and offer help and advice.  Don’t go for the kill and try to pitch products from day one…mull around for a while, get a few posts under your belt and after a few weeks start to seduce your prospects.  Using html links in your signatures is the key to getting links and traffic, once you have a number of posts in the forum you will start to receive visits from curious prospects.

4. Directory Submissions

Make use of online services and software like SEO Elite to obtain links and references within related directories and categories.  Over a period of time this method of link building will cultivate visitors and link within your niche

There are sites available that specialize in low cost advanced website traffic tactics. Search for them online and let your site rise to online popularity!