» Online Business

Your Own Online Business-Build A Niche Blogging Business-Picking A Niche Market

Dave Smith — Sat, 14 Aug 2010 23:35:19 +0000

Picking A Niche Market

(View the first article in this series here)

By niche market we mean a specialised market. For instance Health is a huge broad market but Dandruff Treatment is a small niche market within Skin Care within Health. If you go on Ebay looking for something by category you will usually start with a broad market category name and tap down through sub-categories until you reach the area for the product you are looking for. That is a niche market.

When you put a large category search term such as ‘Health’ into a search engine it will come up with a huge number of results, basically the market is swamped with websites and products and it is very difficult to get a website or blog post ranked for that term as so many large companies are paying SEO experts to target the search term for them. So the answer for small marketers is to find a small niche and a longer search term that still has traffic to it but is easier to rank for in the search engines.

So first up is to find a niche market to work in. This series is aimed at showing how to build a blogging business based on reviews for physical products and earning commissions from the vendors of those products. However, the problems of finding the right niche are the same regardless what your site is based on.

You need:

A niche market you are interested in
A niche you know has products which you can target
A niche with traffic
Not too many people working in that niche market, a balance between enough to show it is worth targeting and too many for you to get your website ranking in the top ten.

An initial approach would be to consider any niche market you may have an active interest in as later when you’re trying to increase the position of your blog in the search engines it will help if you are interested in the subject matter as article marketing will be an important part of obtaining links to your website.

However if you are only partially interested or even not at all there will still be the option of getting articles written for you and it is not as expensive as you may think. You can pay as little as $5 for a good well written article and there are ways of using that article to get multiple backlinks without submitting identical articles.

At this stage you should be thinking generally about the niche you may want to work in. Before you finalise your choice you will need to look at what products are available to promote as you will not want to just rely on adsense for monetisation, so the next article in the series will cover finding affiliate products.

Some research to see what markets are getting traffic is useful at this stage though. This is covered more thoroughly in keyword research but it is worth having a look now to help get a feel of what areas may be of interest.

EBAY tools

Have a look through the ebay product categories, you don’t necessarily have to use an ebay product to promote, additionally if you have an ebay seller account you can use something called ebay pulse (http://pulse.ebay.com/) to check the top selling items and much more. It may just give you some ideas. It is almost worth getting a seller account just for information like this. You can pick any main category heading and it will give you a top ten of item sales within that category plus the largest stores by active category listings, and while the latter may not seem so useful, just knowing what ebay stores are carrying is an indication of what may be selling. The sub categories have the largest stores list but not usually the top ten items. You can see the an example of the main menu and clicking on a main category heading below:

There is also Ebay marketplace research (http://pages.ebay.com/marketplace_research/index.html) but it is a paid service at $9 per month ($14 for 45 days) though if you wanted you could just pay for 45 days worth while researching but unless you have decided to concentrate on ebay products there may be better ways of research.

Incidentally at different points in my article series I will link to other good blog posts or products that will help. For anyone interested in ebay you can get a lot of excellent help by visiting blogs such as Barry Wells (http://barry-wells.com/ who has written some great posts on ebay and has some excellent free reports as well on his other site (http://www.e-books2u.co.uk/ebayinfostore/).

AMAZON tools

Amazon has a bestseller list area:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/

where you can see best selling items in different categories. Again it may give you some help in deciding your niche.

GOOGLE tools

Google has a keyword research tool that you can use initially to help you see what niches are getting the traffic. Go to https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

and click on a category on the left and you’ll see something like this:

We’ll look at all these tools again and more in the keyword research article but for now they will help to get an idea of the niche you want to target.

What you should remember is that you will not be aiming at a market that has huge traffic but of course within a very popular market there will exist smaller niche opportunities for you to aim at so these lists of top selling and high traffic items can still help to guide you to an idea for your niche.

Just do plenty of research before you go headlong into creating a blog as an important part of the blog will be the domain name and while they do not cost a lot you do not want to have to start changing your domain name after you have started. So, niche research, affiliate product research, keyword research before you even think about getting a domain name.

One final note is that if I was looking for a niche I would use a tool called Market Samurai to help me.Just a small part of this is the keyword analysis which enables you to check what competition there is for any keyword, how many searches there are, top ten websites, number of backlinks to these sites, PR, etc etc. As it is colour coded I can tell almost immediately now how good a chance there is of me ranking in the top ten for a keyword phrase and I have used it before I enter a niche to see if there are any useful keyword phrases in that niche I could rank for. Invaluable. I will be looking at this more in the keyword research article but it is the best tool I have ever used and is so vital to me that I actually had to look for free tools to use in these articles as I use Market Samurai for so much. However if anyone does not have this tool and is thinking of trying it, be aware that there is a 12 day free trial period where it is fully functional so if you really want to make the most from it before you commit to it you should try to do as much research in those 12 days when it is fully working. It is fantastic value even if you buy it but not everyone will want to buy it straight away. It does however still function as a keyword tool after the trial period.

Ok, enough for now, the next article looks at where you can find affiliate products to sell (physical ones that is as that is a huge area of search where people look for products they want to buy.

I hope there will be many other useful resources mentioned by visitors so make sure you have a look at the comments as you may find even better advice and tools to aid in niche market research.

Related Blogs

Avoiding Hype In Internet Marketing

Dave Smith — Sat, 08 May 2010 14:58:11 +0000

Internet Marketing is a huge business. The vast number of people using the internet means it will always be a huge market place for anyone offering products or services. However, because it is so easy to start a business online it is also extremely competitive. This means that anyone trying to compete by exaggeration and hype will fail, simple as that. The only sure way to succeed is to offer a good product or service and then back that up with excellent after sales customer service and support.

For anyone involved in internet marketing, ending up subscribed to many email lists is normal, and an ability to quickly sift through them to find anything useful is paramount to avoid wasting too much time. Most people will also start to notice the better quality emails and information contained in them, and then un-subscribe from the others. It should then be clear to new entrants to internet marketing what is required to have a successful email list where people value and respond to the emails. The core ingredients are quality information, and not too much hype.

Too many emails over hype products, and after a while you lose trust in the person sending them, thereby making their email list ineffective. This is understandable in newcomers, however several supposedly leading internet marketers also get caught up in this over hyping of products in their emails to the detriment of their standing in the online business world. Thankfully it is only a few of the bigger names, but a huge proportion of new entrants. Part of the reason is probably that the newcomers are oversold a product which suggests how easy it is to make money online and so they get carried away thinking that any sort of email promotion will make them money. It is only after months of failure that they start to realise what they are doing wrong and for many that is too late as they give up.

To be successful in any business you need to offer a good product, good customer service and after sales support, and work hard. For some reason many people think it is different with the internet business world. It isn’t, you still have to follow the same professional standards to be successful. So any newcomers thinking they can make millions without any effort may as well not bother starting at all as they will lose money.

Related Blogs

Building Trust In Your Internet Marketing Business

Dave Smith — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 23:46:25 +0000

Do you want to be successful in your internet marketing business? Well visitors and customers expect a lot and quite rightly, so do not expect to be successful without a professional customer friendly attitude. You need to be building trust with your customers. Its not that difficult, you just need to learn a few basic essentials.

First, when you sell a product or membership, and particularly when you have offered a period of free trial with a refund after say 30 or 60 days, it is essential to ensure that it is easy for a customer to cancel. In many cases the very fact that a customer knows they can cancel without any difficulty will give them confidence to give it a little longer before they make a decision. However I keep coming across marketers (the minority but still too large a percentage) who make life difficult for customers. This is not a good long term strategy.

Most people, and especially anyone using the web, like the idea of not having to phone people to get customer service or to cancel memberships. After all thats what the web is about isn’t it? Lets face it we’re talking about a global market place, it just is not practical to use a phone when you’re dealing with opposite sides of the world, and it certainly is not necessary. Even with offline businesses it is impractical to use the phone as companies ensure you have to wait on the phone, pressing buttons like mad, in order to eventually get hold of a real person, so much easier to try the web first.

What you find is that some marketers have worked out that by making life very slightly more difficult by using phone numbers as the only method of customer service, that they can prolong customers memberships, or ensure less refunds. This may work in the short term but people are not stupid and eventually they will lose confidence in a business that acts in that manner.

It is also not enough to just offer email or support desk cancellation methods, or at least it is better if you can offer a one click cancellation. Having a support desk is excellent for customer service but try to ensure if possible that customers are signed up through services such as clickbank or paypal or similar which offer easy cancellation. If Clickbank is not available (they are a bit choosy I know) then the better PayDotCom is available.

The best internet marketers make life easy for the customer, both with multiple ways of paying and very easy cancellation, plus of course excellent customer service.

To be fair about this, it may be that some marketers may think that offering phone access is giving better service. That only works if it is alongside online access. It is when you are only offered a phone number and if that number is say in the US and the customer is half way round the world (the rest of the world does not have 1 cent a minute international calls unfortunately) then you start to lose customers.

Keep things simple, and understand that any website is global, as soon as it goes online. The easier you make things for your customers and visitors, the more they will trust in your internet marketing business.

Related Blogs

Be Professional In Your Internet Marketing Business

Dave Smith — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 22:32:32 +0000

Anyone who runs a business would tell you this. it is simple and obvious but seems to have eluded many internet marketers. Customers come first! There, only three words but so important. It may be that because many people use internet marketing as a first step into business that they just do not realise how important it is to treat your customers well and above all to communicate with them. So, be professional in your internet marketing business, communicate and give good customer service and you will build your business and get recommendations from other customers.

I have made mistakes in business, the same as most people, but it is important to learn from these mistakes. With internet marketing it is very easy to learn a little and start throwing up websites and buying the latest thing marketed to you and believe you’re running a business, but as with any normal business it is when you complete your accounts that you know whether you have a viable business or not.

Most people starting in internet marketing will make a loss, at least initially, and the period they make a loss may be a year or more, so they need to either budget for this or have an alternative source of income that will allow them to make a loss initially. This is normal in any business. When you first start a business there are up front costs. A ‘bricks and mortar’ business has huge expenses in buying property plus wages and overheads for staff so anyone starting in internet marketing still has it easy in comparison, but there are still costs.

The reason I mention all this in this article is because it often overwhelms new marketers and then panic sets in, which means they become obsessed with trying to sell, sell, sell, regardless of whether they have a good product or whether they are flooding their websites with adverts instead of good content. It is easy to get into this frame of mind, and yes I have been there myself, so I know what I’m talking about. It may be the web, and you may not see your customers, or visitors to your online store, but you should treat visitors and customers as if they were standing in front of you in a shop that you owned. Be polite, don’t take immediate offence if they are critical of something and try to help them at every opportunity. That way they will return, even if they did not buy from you the first time.

So, again, be professional in your internet marketing business, the same as if you were on the high street, and you have a chance of making it in business.

Related Blogs

Creating Your Own Website

socialoomph — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 22:25:03 +0000

Even if you mainly do affiliate marketing you will need a website of your own, if only to give yourself a brand and a place to host sales pages.

However if you are new to internet marketing it can be daunting to try to find out how to create your own website. It can take you weeks to find out even the basics required to create your website and then you see other websites and realise how much better they look than yours.

So, what is the solution? Well as with many other things you need to use a template. However there are many different types of template depending what you want from them. It is easy to get hold of simple web templates, often for free, that you can use as your website main page. However they will need at least a little editing to include your title and domain name and whatever words and images you want on the page.

There is however a simpler solution by using a more complex type of ready made website which includes an admin panel which enables you to edit the site easily without having to do any html editing. You will simply fill in text boxes with your title, words and other content.

A bonus with these types of site is that they can also include the facility to incorporate money making affiliate links, so not only will you have a web presence but you will also have a ready made means of earning some money form the website without much work from you.

With the right hosting company you can even avoid having to upload the website to your domain as the hosting company will do it for you.

Some of the best websites even come fully stocked with products to sell such as ebooks or software. These are ideal for newcomers to the world of online business and internet marketing.

If you are just starting out you need help otherwise you just spend all your time trying to learn, and not achieving much, so getting a ready made website to start you off is a no brainer.

If you do not wish directly sell from the website, you can get a ready made website with multiple affiliate product links which just means signing up to the affiliate networks, putting your affiliate numbers in the admin panel, picking a template and title and away you go.

Related Blogs

Creating Your Own Website

socialoomph — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 22:00:07 +0000

Even if you mainly do affiliate marketing you will need a website of your own, if only to give yourself a brand and a place to host sales pages.

With the right hosting company you can even avoid having to upload the website to your domain as the hosting company will do it for you.

Some of the best websites even come fully stocked with products to sell such as ebooks or software. These are ideal for newcomers to the world of online business and internet marketing.

If you are just starting out you need help otherwise you just spend all your time trying to learn, and not achieving much, so getting a ready made website to start you off is a no brainer.

Related Blogs

Keep Control Of Your Own Website

Dave Smith — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 20:51:51 +0000

Many people new to internet marketing are tempted to sign up with ready made websites to get them started. This is an excellent way to get going with a business as there is so much to learn about creating your own website that a ready made site makes sense.

However, always make sure it is hosted on your own domain. There are good ready made websites that will help you set this up and it is far better than relying on hosting that someone else controls. There are plenty of good low cost hosting companies though some are more helpful than others.
You may not realise it when you first start but you will need access to your own website within a short time. Otherwise you are dependent on whoever owns the site to upload tracking code for such as Google analytics and Yahoo site search.

If you start a website without control and the site becomes a success it is too late to get control back, you will be stuck with relying on someone else to access the website for you.
Similarly if the website is hosted and controlled by someone else and they go out of business your website is gone. You must keep ultimate control. So find a low cost hosting company that is recommended by someone and has shown to be helpful to new inexperienced website owners.

The best ready made websites come with an admin panel which makes most tasks easy with no html editing required but as it is hosted on your own domain it is still accessible if you need to add code outside the admin panel.

There are numerous ready made solutions, some coming as a completely stocked ebook website, or a ready to go software website, and others that make it easy to create any type of niche website with an easy way to monetize the site with affiliate links. You must though ensure that you have direct access to the website if you need it. If the site is hosted by someone else but gives you complete access to it (cpanel, ftp access etc) then maybe that will be alright though you still run the risk of the company that owns it going out of business so you need to ensure you can transfer the website to your own domain if you want to at a later date.

Personally I prefer control of the website from day one, and if you need help with setting it up, buy the ready made website from a company that will help you, either at no cost or at a small reasonable cost.

A sample of good ready made websites is listed below together with a link to the hosting company that is recommended by the producers of these products due to the help with uploading and configuring that the hosting company provides. However you may find other good products online or through recommendations, just make sure that in every case they give you control of your website and you should be fine.

Ebook site

Software site

Automated Website creation

Helpful low cost hosting

Related Blogs

Work From Home Online

socialoomph — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 20:25:03 +0000

Work From Home Online

So loads of people dream about having a job wherever they can operate from house, set their own hours, and deal with minimal coworkers throughout the day. This is only normal! After all, getting in stressful work environments, shuffling about amongst the chaos, and dealing with office politics everyday can truly begin to wear on you over time. Luckily you will find ways to function from house online nowadays. Countless men and women all around the world work from the comfort of their own homes, and for no reason have to grapple with the mess of office cubicles, stressed out employees, and deadlines that often raise blood pressure levels. Welcome to the future!

In case you are wondering how many people function from household internet, it truly isn’t that big of a mystery. The tools you must do this with are just a pc and World wide web access. To provide you with an idea of some professionals that work from their house online, here are few; laptop programmers, freelance writers, editors, tech support experts, and data entry workers. All of these professions have the potential to be carried out solely from home. The key is knowing what you must get executed and performing your duties nicely on your own. Numerous contract workers are employed from household because it really saves a great deal of cash when gas, rent and daycare are concerned.

You will find a few websites that may assist you with getting on the right track toward working from home online. These are SurveyLot.com, YourAvon,com, WAHM.com, and OnlineJobsAuthority.com. Loads of stay-at-home moms are always on the lookout for jobs which can be carried out from home. This really is when selling Avon and completing surveys come in handy. You do not have to have a college degree to do these things. As a result lots of women and men choose to work from home online, but don’t strive for a higher education principal. Now, on the other hand, it is crucial to keep in mind that not all work from household positions are worth your time. You can find some scams on the market.

Use Google to work from home online. Have you ever thought about Adsense or affiliate programs? These are both ways to earn a living from the comfort of your home. You can essentially build web sites and use Google Adsense ads on them free of charge. This way it is possible to make capital every time an individual clicks on an advertisement. The more websites and pages you build, the more potential there is for earning. Similar is true about affiliate programs that allow you to sell affiliate products and earn a percentage. This really is merely one way to work from home online and earn a regular revenue.

Google Helps the Small Business with – Search Advertising

socialoomph — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 20:25:04 +0000

Google Helps the Small Business with – Search Advertising

Small businesses in competitive parts like catering or flower delivery or photo processing, completely depend on Google’s capacity to be visible wherever it matters. Where “organic” search outcomes (getting on top of search outcomes with no paid placement) is possible, of course, there is nothing really like it; but for the rest of us, Google’s AdWords’ search advertising technique is our only hope of survival. Consider Ketchup Castles, a small twenty-woman operation in the Seattle location, that entirely depends on the high income software programmers in the surrounding place for its local meal -delivery enterprise. The time about Thanksgiving ought to be their highest and most profitable; men and women have Thanksgiving parties, or they would like right Thanksgiving dinner delivered to them, and so on. When enterprise was roaring about Thanksgiving, and they felt that they seriously didn’t demand any more custom at the moment than they had, they thought they could save very a bit with pulling back on their search advertising with AdWords. To men and women who don’t seriously understand how search advertising works, it frequently becomes problematic to comprehend how thoroughly a GoogleAdWords spot makes their company visible to millions of potential customers. Possibly only one in a thousand viewers actually make an order from you; but over millions of views, that adds up.

The small catering enterprise had its hopes pinned on a good Thanksgiving sales. The result on the pullback in its advertising was dramatic; in one day flat, they located that they had practically no orders for the day. As their luck had it, their competitors had figured it the other way around: if their current advertising budget was as useful as it was, they figured, it would be a lot improved if they doubled it. All of this comes out of a lack of some understanding over how the search advertising concept works. Mere casual guesswork no longer gets final results, and managing search ads properly, becomes an MBA-level scale; there in fact are consultancies that help small companies decide on when approach to step up and when to pull back.

Search engine marketing, the advertising method that AdWords completely dominates is said to be the most effective way to advertise, that man has ever invented. So helpful is it, that it accounts for fully one half of all of Google’s vast revenues. Advertisers say they resent the way they have practically no choice but to deal with Google, and occasionally have filed lawsuits against the corporation for charging as much as it does for every click. With AdWords sales falling off in recent years, Google is in reality trying to help small businesses understand tips on how to plan for and play the AdWords machine. As an example, it helps businesses see how a lot business basically comes their way from every search engine they advertise with on similar advertising applications. Typically, Yahoo and Bing bring in only a fraction of what Google manages.

The catering company above, has some old Web hands, going through all the information and data that they get from Google to put together a model of what specific places belonging to the city their business most comes from, and what words those distinct citizens in their target demographic are most probably make use of. It soon becomes high science. You can find tools by which they can monitor in real time the kind of traffic they get from Google. Google sells search advertising space by an auction. Advertisers have to use these tools to find out how a lot they can bid for a spot, how many citizens will essentially click on advertisements, thus costing them something, and how many will in fact buy.

Google is obviously on the proper track. Small companies want improved counseling on the way they can use search engine marketing and search advertising. This really is the wave on the future, and the sooner the world is familiar with it, the better it will be for almost everyone.

Thinking of starting an online business?

socialoomph — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 20:25:05 +0000

Thinking of starting an online business? A look at the advantages over a physical shop

Considering the current state from the economy and rising unemployment, many men and women are turning their thoughts and attention to starting their own enterprise. Before we had the Internet, your only option was to rent or lease a enterprise office or store space, which naturally involved a considerable sum of cash before you ever opened your doors for company. Depending on the nature of your enterprise, it was likely that you’d also must hire at least one or two sales families or other support staff. Other costs included taxes to be collected on goods sold, and even quarterly tax payments for employees. You might also should make modifications to your shop to suit your company.

Nowadays, you can start an internet enterprise on a shoestring budget, schedule your job hours about school, your day job, taking care of your kids, all the normal conditions of everyone’s existence. You possibly can also without difficulty handle your sales without hiring sales staff. Even though you should expect to be working hard to get your online business off the ground, you possibly can keep your typical job to ensure that one could make ends meet until your company starts to turn a profit. So it’s clear that you just make the transition from employee to internet business owner far more effortlessly than you may using a brick and mortar venture.

Let’s take a look at some of the other advantages it is possible to recognise with your internet enterprise.

1. With right, effective marketing techniques, you can sell your goods to millions of folks. The brick and mortar shop doesn’t have this potential.

2. You possibly can make affiliate relationships with other companies, advertising their related, but not competing, products and thus expand your inventory – and income via commissions, which can be substantial, depending on the product. For example, should you establish an online gift shop which consists of handmade art objects, you may sell any number of books that give background on the particular art type, historical notes and the like. Normally, it is possible to expect anywhere from 15-35% on the cost of the book, with your affiliate stocking and shipping the item. The brick and mortar business concept requires that you simply stock, track and ship from your shop, growing your cost of doing business. The internet company model thus produces passive revenue, reducing the amount of time you must invest conducting company.

3. Responses to customer inquiries are effortlessly automated, improving customer satisfaction, whereas in the shop, you need the immediate, one on one interaction. Sure, numerous inquiries will require that you write the customer to address certain issues, but an automated response system allows you to acknowledge the customer, letting them know you’ll be getting back to them shortly.

4. With an online company, you can gain even more exposure via reciprocal links, with the added advantage of boosting your search engine rankings. The search engines do pay attention to links, both incoming and outgoing. (Be sure to focus on links to sites which grant high quality material and products.)

5. An online business simplifies your accounting, with an irrefutable paper trail of transactions.

6. Keeping in touch with your visitors is virtually free of charge. You don’t have to incur the postal fees for the extent that you would in paper mailings. Newsletters delivered by email boost word of mouth referrals, as your people can forward your email to interested friends and neighbors, at no cost to themselves. Similarly, ebooks and other downloadable supplies decrease your cost of doing company.

The only real disadvantage of an internet enterprise? If you’re the sort who loves the personal interaction with each customer, you may not derive that sort of satisfaction towards the extent you’d like. In this case, you can always have a physical shop and even your online business. Unless you’ve got funds to burn, all you may need do is wait until your online venture produces the revenue sufficient to fund your local shop. Personally, I’d be just as happy to use that cash to interact with citizens on a beach in some tropical island vacation spot, even though enjoying a prosperous on line business peopled with happy and loyal people. You decide which works greatest for you.