(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:

1. A niche market you are interested in
2. A niche you know has products which you can target
3. A niche with traffic
4. 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.

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If anyone has better experience of Mobile Monopoly and has actually got past the follow up or has taken both options and thinks it worthwhile then fair enough and I would be interested with your comments, but I’m afraid this particular marketer has lost me forever. Just too much hype to be greeted with that on the follow up page.

Good luck to anyone delving into mobile marketing, I may join you later but not with Mobile Monopoly.

Cheers

Dave

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Starting an online business such as a blogging business can be exciting but also very daunting and it is far too easy to get sidetracked and end up never achieving anything because of constantly getting distracted.
Experienced successful people that are in the internet marketing business will have several different aspects to their business, all contributing to their income. However when you first start it is too much to try to be successful with all the different ways of making money online at the same time. So you need to pick one method and stick with it to make sure you do it properly. Other methods can wait until you have mastered what you decide to start with.

There are several methods you can pick for your initial online business such as list building, affiliate marketing, selling products from ebay either digital or physical, and many more, as you browse the web you will be inundated with different ideas and schemes.

This series of articles is going to concentrate on one popular method which is building and monetising blogs in niche markets. Now blogs can also be used with list building and certainly once you have successfully got your blog attracting traffic then it is possible to experiment with having an email list as well though this can sometimes detract from commission sales of products advertised on your blog and will also take more time to do correctly, so it depends what your blog is aimed at. With a blogging business aimed at niche markets with the aim of attracting buyers searching for particular products then it may not be appropriate to have an email list on the site. However if anyone wants some better advice on this they would do worse than visit Vance’s blog where you can find details of a wordpress plugin to help make incorporating an email list easier.

This series of articles will be broken down into the following topics:

1.Picking a niche market
2.Finding a product to advertise which you can pick up commission from
3.Finding keywords and picking a domain name for your blogging business
4.Building your wordpress blog
5.Initial content for your blog
6.Some SEO tips for your blog and blog posts
7.Registering your blog with Google, Yahoo and Bing
8.Marketing your blogging business
9.Keeping your blog fresh and building it’s ranking

All the articles will have a description of how to go ahead doing everything yourself or using free tools such as google keyword tool etc, plus a brief overview of the paid tools I use to automate my blogging business and free up time. Paid tools are only useful if you are short of time or if you can do something better in that time. What you will need to do as time goes on is decide based on any income you start getting whether certain tasks are better outsourced or whether a particular automation tool will save you enough time to be worth it’s cost. These decisions will be personal but by letting you know what tools are available and their cost it will give you a better idea what is possible.

With any online business or any other business for that matter, if a business starts doing well then a point will come when the owner of the business has to decide whether to outsource (taking on an employee, hiring a contractor, paying for a piece of equipment or software to save time etc) and paid software tools for your blogging business or any other internet marketing business are exactly the same, to be bought and used when it will make the business more efficient.

Each article will be linked from this introduction so you can check back here if you want to read the rest of this series of articles on building your own successful blogging business.

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If a person uses a search for a particular product then there is a good chance they not only want to find information about it but also possibly make a purchase too. So if you provide good reviews of products and then provide easy links for the person to be able to buy you can also make money.

The way to do this is to find a company that pays a commission for sales through agents. For instance Amazon allows affiliates to sign up and use links to their products such that on a sale you can make a portion of the purchase price as commission. There are many other companies that do this, just type ‘affiliate sales’ or ‘affiliate commissions’ in search engines to start finding companies and procucts. Commission Junction is another big company along with of course ebay, plus smaller more specialised companies.

It is vital to produce a good website for your internet business. A blog is one of the best and easiest websites to set up and easy to add articles about the product type you are targeting. You must use original quality articles to have a chance of getting your site ramked which is vital if you are to get traffic to your site. Using less obvious keyword phrases makes it possible to rank highly (first page) quite quickly, though it does involve work, but the rewards can be worth it if you can rank high in the first page and start getting regular traffic to your website.

The techniques for ranking highly are not easily covered in a short article, but suffice to say that blogs make the task much easier as there are many plug-ins available which help to set up the pages for optimum search engine optimisation. There are also software tools to do some of the more mundane tasks associated with websites and blogging such as keyword analysis and searching for good niches and domain names. These have to be paid for but are well worth it if you intend to set up a business and need to save time.

Blogs are actually able to be used for other purposes than normal blogging as it possible to set them up as static pages among other uses and gives the advantages of easy set up and optimisation so can often be a preferred option to normal website templates. If your internet business is based on a review site though it is best to set up simply as a blog so it is easy to add articles regularly and then add extra review pages if you want.

Now, private label rights products can be used sensibly, to provide inspiration or the basis of products that you create, but some people make the mistake of just immediately using them as their own without any changes. That is ok if you do not put your own name on, in other words you just sell the products as is, though the downside of that is that the products are probably already flooding the internet so no one is likely to be buying.

A far better use is to use them as research already done for you, so you can add your own take on the product, perhaps turn them into a different format, such as creating a video or audio from an ebook, or you could use the material in the product to create several articles of your own to post on a blog or article directory, as long as you have genuinely created your own unique articles from the material. It can save a lot of time and anyone already involved in internet marketing will know how time consuming many tasks can be.

There are a huge amount of private label products (or PLR) on the internet that are fairly worthless in their present format as they have probably been sold many times if they are any good or in some cases may never sell due to a variety of reasons, poor content or just a bad sales page for instance, but even the poor PLR products can give you inspiration and the basis for articles to post.

Article marketing is one of the best ways to help your business as you need to get your website noticed and back-links and traffic from articles posted round the web will help your website get noticed in the search engines. After all the internet is about information so good quality articles posted on the web will always help you with search engines. People use search engines to find out about things, and relevant articles are what they need to find, so posting as many as you can with links back to your blog or website is a sensible way to try and boost your business.

As article writing is not always easy to many people, getting a head start by using PLR products to generate the initial ideas and some of the content can mean you can produce enough articles much more quickly. You can increase your chances even more by getting the right guidance, Find out how to make the most out of private label rights products

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.

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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.

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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.

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You can now also find some excellent automated software that allows you to get articles pulled into your blog from various sources including you tube and several article sites and gives you full control on how many and when they post, you just enter keywords and the articles are dragged in, with a chance to review them and use them or not. It means it is very easy to create good content for your blog and then write your own articles when you have time. My own experience shows that you start to get visitors much more quickly and with less effort than trying to do everything yourself. Of course these sites are not free but for me the cost is well worth the time it saves and the better chance to get visitors and traffic. With more traffic of course it means more revenue, and that is what everyone wants.

Since starting using automated blog networks I have been able to start building several themed blogs and use cpa and ppc advertising on them. The visitors are starting to roll in and the amount of effort required to keep the blogs active is much less with the software. What is often left unsaid when your are being sold the next best thing is that it is only any good if you have visitors to buy from you. Getting visitors is more important than having a perfect product to sell. You need a market to sell to first. So its worth spending some cash on a system that genuinely helps you to create traffic to your websites.

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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.

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