Newbies’ Guide to Niche Marketing

Make sure you take these into consideration when building websites:

Just don’t focus on the home page, keywords and titles.
The first step to sales when customers visit your site to see the products they were looking for. Of course, search engine optimization and better rankings can’t keep your customer on your site or make them buy. The customer having visited your site, now ensure that he gets interested in your products or services and stays around. Motivate him to buy the product by providing clear and unambiguous information. Thus if you happen to sell more than one product or service, provide all necessary information about this, may be by keeping the information at a different page. By providing suitable and easily visible links, the customer can navigate to these pages and get the details.

Understanding Your Target Customer
If you design a website you think will attract clients, but you don’t really know who your customers are and what they want to buy, it is unlikely you make much money. Website business is an extension or replacement for a standard storefront. You can send email to your existing clients and ask them to complete a survey or even while they are browsing on your website. Ask them about their choices. Why do they like your products? Do you discount prices or offer coupons? Are your prices consistently lower than others? Is your shipping price cheaper? Do you respond faster to client questions? Are your product descriptions better? Your return policies and guarantees better than your competitor’s? To know your customer you can check credit card records or ask your customer to complete a simple contact form with name, address, age, gender, etc. when they purchase a product.

Does your website give enough contact information?
When you sell from a website, your customer can buy your products 24 hrs a day and also your customers may be from other states that are thousands of miles away. Always provide contact information, preferably on every page of your website, complete with mailing address, telephone number and an email address that reaches you. People may need to contact you about sales, general information or technical problems on your site. Also have your email forwarded to another email address if you do not check your website mailbox often. When customer wants to buy online provide enough options like credit card, PayPal or other online payment service.

The money is in information.

That’s what you have been told and the people preaching that gospel have been very persuasive. It motivated you to write (or commission) a fantastic informational product in a hot niche and now you are ready to see that investment pay off. Before you try to sell a single copy, however, take a lesson from the greats of internet marketing and optimize your ebook for success.

That doesn’t just mean good design, quality content, a great sales page and eye-catching graphics. It means actually going back into the ebook and properly outfitting it with information and links that can make it an effective residual income generator.

Are you linking to another product you are offering within the ebook? If not, why not? Your readers, if they like the material, are going to be pre-sold on buying from you again. Give them an opportunity to make that purchase easy.

Provide the link to other sales pages in which you have an interest. Use your great ebook to sell your other great products. If you don’t have a complimentary product of your own, become an affiliate of a few nice matches and provide the links to your sites for those sales. A successful ebook can easily produce a nice cache of affiliate sales if you have tapped into the right products.

Provide some way of using the ebook to build your list, too. If your sales process doesn’t involve getting your buyers on your mailing list, change that. Offer another chance via a link within the ebook. If you can get a list of prospective future buyers, that is money in the bank.

The trick, of course, is to find a way to do all of this without compromising the integrity of the ebook.
You don’t want to transform a great informational source into an affiliate catalog. It cheapens the look of the book and waters down its message.

Instead, you will need to find a way to seamlessly integrate additional offers and opportunities within it in a way that does not appear to be a mere sales ploy. That takes style, effort, and talent–combined with a level of sincerity. Countless internet marketers will tell you they have sold ebooks that didn’t initially produce the kind of numbers for which they had hoped that produced very successful results on the back-end.

As you prepare to launch your new informational product, be sure to outfit it with back-end opportunities that can multiply its value. Selling your text is fine, but that is a one-shot deal.

By offering an opportunity to produce additional sales, you make it a long-term earner! The money is in information, but a lot of that money doesn’t come up front. You need to optimize your informational products to grab the income you deserve.

Ebay is well known as the world’s most successful and highly-frequented online sales and auction site. In many cases, we think of it as a place to buy and sell household items and collectibles, but its potential with respect to informational products shouldn’t be overlooked. One can generate profits by selling ebooks and similar items via Ebay.

Think about it. One of the most difficult parts of successfully selling your own product is generating an adequate flow of traffic to your sales page. Often, this requires the use of an advertising campaign, affiliate program or other methods. Ebay, on the other hand, is already visited by millions of potential buyers every single day. The traffic flow is already there for you, and if you can put the right product in front of that audience, you can reap the rewards.

A cursory examination of the informational products offered on Ebay may dissuade some online entrepreneurs from pursuing the strategy. They will note that hundreds upon hundreds of ebooks are listed and often they are sold for only pennies. It doesn’t seem as though any profit potential exists. That view, however, may be shortsighted.

Many of the bargain-basement listings are for older materials or ebooks that have already reached their zenith and are now in decline. Many were sold repeatedly with resale rights, flooding the market with copies of the same material. If you have an exciting and new product, you may be able to avoid that fate.

Additionally, even those penny sales can turn into big money if your product is properly designed. You can think of Ebay as a pay-per-click advertising campaign with fringe benefits. Buyers may snap up your book cheaply, but in return, you will be putting your text in front of an interested reader who may be quite likely to follow the affiliate links or up-sells offered in your ebook. The initial purchase may not actually be the part of the deal that makes the real profit.

Thus, Ebay provides two ways by which one can profit from selling their informational product. A new item may have a great chance at reasonably-priced up-front sales. Then, there is an added opportunity to make a residual income from the back-end of each sale. The combination can make selling your product at the auction site a moneymaker. The information product on Ebay is crowded, but that popularity is not an accident.

It is because the system can, when used properly, work.

There are millions of visitors to the site every single day and many may be just the customers for which you have been looking. If you have written or own an ebook of your own, selling it on Ebay may be far more lucrative than peddling your old golf clubs or that stray piece of grandma’s fiesta glass. There is money to be made with ebooks on Ebay.

If you have created a great product that you know could be a blockbuster hit, but lack the talent, experience or overall wherewithal to get it into the public eye for maximum sales, it might be time to enlist some support.

Fortunately, there is an army of professional internet sales experts ready to help you out and to peddle your product to thousands of potential customers. To make matters even more enticing, these marketing pros won’t require you to make any out-of-pocket expenditure. They will work on commission, giving them an added incentive to sell your product as fast and furiously as possible.

We are talking about affiliate sales, of course.

The affiliate marketing strategy, in its most simplified form consists of a vendor (in this case you), affiliates (the sales force, who will sell the vendors product on a commission basis), and the customers (located and closed by the affiliates). It’s a fairly easy model to understand, but one that produces some amazing results.

What do you need to recruit affiliates?

One of the best strategies is to open a vendor’s account at Clickbank or some other affiliate program management site. You can, of course, operate your own affiliate program and that may be a desirable solution for experienced marketers, but Clickbank and other like sites work well for most marketers. You’ll pay a nominal fee, and in return, you will be able to list your product, along with a sales page and a “thank you page.” After approval, your product will be available for any of the thousands of Clickbank members to promote.

There are a few tricks to making it work.

You need to have a great sales page, a solid product and offer a healthy commission.

It might make you wince to offer half or more of every sale to your affiliates, but it is that income opportunity that motivates them to promote your product.
In most cases, the net financial gain after consideration of registration and commission payments outstrips what you might have been able to make selling your product without affiliate assistance.

The management of affiliate payments will depend upon the system you use. Some will automatically tend to paying those who log sales for you. Others will require you to personally administer affiliate payouts.

Make sure you understand how this is handled–it is essential to pay your affiliates on time and accurately on a consistent basis.

What’s the most important characteristic to make a single site profitable? Many would argue that a high volume of traffic is right up toward the top of the list. They’d have a strong argument. You cannot sell anything or expect a single click on an ad if you don’t have visitors.

The problem, of course, is that getting massive traffic swells isn’t always easy. In fact, as more and more websites pop up every day, the online marketplace grows a little more diluted, making it harder to secure a steady stream of visitors.

At the same time, however, software advances and increased skill levels among internet marketers has made site creation easier. What used to take days can now be done in minutes. Additionally, private label rights and free content is in greater supply, giving webmasters a chance to full outfit a site with relevant text with only a few clicks of a mouse.

Those two forces have led many to work from a different business model than what has been traditionally used.

Instead of building a top-drawer site, promoting it and developing a healthy readership, some are focusing on making many sites, each of which will generate a smaller number of readers and outfitting each of those sites with Google Adsense as a means of producing revenue.

The strategy can make sense.

Let’s look at a hypothetical example :

Let’s say you can create search-engine friendly content sites that will attract twenty visitors per day. That sounds relatively easy. Let’s also assume that you can place Adsense ads on the sites effectively enough to garner a 5% click through rate (CTR). That is also pretty believable. Finally, let’s say that each click will earn you a dime. That’s also fairly reasonable.

That site will make an average of a dime per day
(20 visitors X .05 CTR X $.10).

At first glance, that might seem absolutely horrible. Who wants a site that makes a dime per day, right? That’s only about $35 per year!

However, with one hundred such sites you could earn $3,500 dollars per year on an ongoing basis without doing much, if any upkeep to the sites.

If you went hog wild and built 1,000 of these Adsense mini-sites, you’d be raking in $35,000.

Automation is a friend to anyone trying this technique.

Additionally, you will need to secure cheap domain names and inexpensive hosting, as well. All of those investments will cut into the bottom line. However, if you can make the proposition profitable on an individual site basis, all you need to do is multiply your sites to multiply your earnings.

One of the smartest ways to market successfully in the long run involves the creation of your own mailing list. “The money is in the list.” You have probably read that sentiment repeatedly if you have investigated internet marketing at all. The reason for the saying’s popularity is the kernel of truth it contains. Money is in the list. Having a great list doesn’t guarantee wealth and success, but it’s a lot easier when its there.

Here’s the basic strategy:

Over time, you collect email addresses from individuals interested in your products, services, or information. You convince these individuals to allow you to mail them occasional announcements, interesting tidbits or outright sales pitches. Over time, you cultivate that list.

You provide your list with opportunities and values and develop a level of trust and credibility. Then, when you have something to sell, you tell your list. Predictably, list-members tend to buy your products at a fairly high rate.
Everyone is looking for targeted traffic. They spend fortunes on pay per click campaigns or for link placement in areas they think will get them that targeted traffic. Your list is like having a ready base of prequalified buyers to whom you can speak directly without having to persuade them to visit your site.

You can get quality buyers in a number of ways, but the easiest is by managing a quality list. If you are marketing and don’t maintain a list, immediately search for ways to start building that collection of prospects.

Treat them well; offer them something of value, and eventually you will be able to rely upon them as a smart way of working hard to make money online. The money isn’t really in the list–but it sure comes to you with a lot less effort because of it.

Internet marketing boasts a robust community.

Hundreds of other marketers are also trying to crack the code of online success and they are willing to share their ideas while exploring new perspectives along the way. Unfortunately, many new marketers tend to believe that they are better off keeping to themselves, staying quiet.

They may fear having their ideas co-opted or stolen.

They might just be worried about seemingly silly or uninformed within the community. Regardless of reservations, however, the notion of being an isolated island of a marketer is a poor one.

Take a moment and look at some of the biggest names in the industry.

Consider those internet marketing gurus.

They seem to know everyone and everyone certainly knows them.

They are “out there,” networking, exchanging ideas, answering questions and even asking a few of their own.

If there’s one thing we all know, it is that we can take a lesson from those who have succeeded. By modeling our approaches, to at least some extent, after theirs we can usually find a faster route to our own success. If you are tempted to be an island, think about that and then consider copying the proven strategy of involvement.

Consider these advantages:

First, you can make friends and improve the overall quality of your marketing experience. It may not be quite the same as socializing around an office water cooler, but it does add a human component to your online business and that is worth its weight in gold alone.

Second, you can learn new strategies, techniques and ideas.

You can also discover the ways other people have successfully dealt with the challenges you may be facing. You could reinvent the wheel every step of the way, but it does make a little bit more sense to borrow the blueprint from someone willing to offer it.

Third, you can create business contacts that will mean money later.

Countless affiliate arrangements, joint ventures, barters and other profitable business moves have been constructed because of participating in an active exchange with others in the internet marketing field.

Who knows, your answer to a question might just land you a chance to partner with a big-timer on your next deal. If you don’t interact, you’ll never have those opportunities.

Take a lesson from those who are excelling in internet marketing and take the time to join a few of the respected forums and to spend some of your time networking and interacting with others in the field.

You’ll find that those opportunities are both very educational and potentially profitable.

Interaction is a great way to get help with problems, learn how to avoid common pitfalls and to get a stronger overall sense of the industry while gaining a variety of other unique advantages.

Doing it alone isn’t just harder; it’s less profitable, too.

It may not be as easy to become a “dot com” millionaire today as it was before the internet business bubble burst, but moneymaking opportunities are still everywhere. Even hobbyist webmasters have discovered that with a little bit of effort, they can transform traffic they already have into cash.

They don’t sell the traffic.

They point the traffic in direction of products that will appeal to their visitors and reap a commission on sales made to those they refer. These affiliate marketing opportunities allow anyone with a visited website the potential to make money.

There are, of course, professional internet marketers who work from an affiliate model. They scour the net for the best opportunities, hottest products and highest commissions. They use their marketing talents and a variety of well-honed techniques to send potential buyers to products for which they will recoup a commission. It is an interesting way to make a living, and anyone with the right disposition willing to learn the trade can make it work.

However, affiliate programs are a real opportunity for the less advanced, too. A simple blog about a favorite hobby may eventually attract a substantial readership. If the blogger, even though he or she has no real strong interest in trying to earn a living online, finds and refers those visitors to a good product, he or she will profit. If the product is chosen wisely, the visitor is rewarded, as well. It is a win-win proposition.

Becoming and affiliate isn’t difficult.

Many companies operate their own affiliate programs and one can often find the link at the bottom of product advertisements. Others prefer to investigate and join affiliate sites such as Clickbank, where they have the opportunity to choose a variety of products to promote–many of which offer commissions in excess of fifty percent of the gross purchase price.

Hobbyist affiliate marketers are unlikely to make a fortune, but they can make a few extra bucks while still enjoying their online efforts. Many who experiment with affiliate sales develop a heightened interest in internet marketing and may, over time, actually blossom into professional-grade marketers who are able to earn a full-time income online.

All one needs to get started is someone to refer–the more the merrier.

If you have a traffic flow interested in a particular subject matter, you can direct them to a product for which you receive a referral commission and can profit while introducing them to something of interest. You won’t make much if you are only sending an occasional stray guest to the affiliate program, but you can earn more as your readership increases.

Whether you are a skilled webmaster or a beginner with a small blog that just so happens to attract a consistent readership, you can use the proven system of affiliate marketing to your advantage.