Newbies’ Guide to Niche Marketing

This method works very well especially in the blogosphere. People love to win things, and they love to be recognized for winning. Be creative in deciding what the prize should be, but consider how much your customers will think it is worth. While prize doesn�t have to be something of great value, it does have to be something that is useful or of some value to the winner. Make sure that it is something they want, not just a blatant advertisement for your business. A bumper sticker marketing your web address is not going to generate a great deal of interest. Your advertisement or web address should be plainly visible, but it should not be the focal point of the item you are giving away.

If you are running a business to business website, free advertising on your site for the winner is something that wouldn�t cost you anything, but if your site doesn�t attract very much traffic the prize may not be seen as being very valuable.

The great thing for you is that running contests is a great way to drive large amounts of traffic to your site. Other than the cost of the prize, there is not very much cost involved in this technique. There are websites and blogs that are in the business of telling others about contests that other people are running. They will do your marketing for you. All you have to do is contact these sites and let them know about your contest. If it�s worth mentioning they will tell their subscribers. If the contest is good enough or creative enough, it may catch the attention of a blogger who will spread the word to others. The better the prize package, the faster and farther it will spread.

A good way to take advantage of this technique is to have a repeating contest, or a series of contests. This method will keep customers returning to your site. Not only will they return to sign up for the new contest, but they will also check back periodically to see what the next contest is, and when it begins.

When you are looking to sell e-books on eBay, this is an area where you can be a little more creative than with many of the other products that are featured within this particular report.

E-books are another product like land where there is not necessarily a good wholesale source for this particular product. If you want to sell an e-book on eBay, you should look for an e-book where you are able to obtain Master resale rights. Having master resell rights on an e-book means that you have the ability to sell that product to whomever you would like at whatever price you would like. If you are looking for a wholesales source of e-books, there are a couple of potential options for you. Within the eBay website, there are some wholesale lots of 45,000 e-books with resell rights that you can acquire for about five dollars. You could then package these in different ways to resell to other eBay bidders. Most eBay bidders will not want to take time to sort through 45,000 e-books to find the one that they need so if you can put everything in a neat package for them, your opportunistic sense can be rewarded. Secondly, you could also look at talking with makers of e-books which you liked and offering them a cut of the profits if you can sell their product on eBay. It is hard to find wholesale sources of e-books because a person searching for your particular title could also find that on the Internet at many different places.

Within this particular category, there are over 11,000 e-books that are currently for sale. E-book niches that sell a great deal or have many products include money-making opportunities, success-oriented products, and credit repair products. The average resale price ranges from one to ten dollars for every item. There were not many sales for this particular niche. One area that does do very well and can command higher prices are website development. If you can find an e-book to sell and combine that with a website, you could greatly increase your profits.

Make sure to stay away from selling an e-book for only one dollar. There are many e-books that are already sold for one dollar and you do not want yours to be fit in with the rest of these. You need your e-book to stand out in some way so that you can make sure you are charging a higher price. One of the great benefits about e-books is the convenience and the speed with which someone who is interested in a particular product can receive information. To play off of that benefit, using a Buy It Now! feature can have a significant impact on your sales. If you are able to get someone interested and motivated to buy your e-book, he or she will not want to wait for the auction to end but rather will want to have immediate access to information. Using this feature will fulfill his or her desires. Most e-books that are being sold take advantage of this feature so it might not have a dramatic impact but it can have an impact on your business.

Selling an e-book on eBay requires that you find some way to differentiate your book from all. There is a great deal of competition and many other products are very homogeneous so differentiating your product will create a difference in the bidders mind. You could feature your item so that there is more prominent attention being paid to it since there are 11,000 items up for sale.

To really make your item stand out, you’ll want to offer your product with a twist. What this means is that you should not just focus upon selling e-book but potentially could sell it with a service as well. In the minds of the bidder, this can make it more valuable as you are packaging two items for the price of one. This can also allow you to charge a higher price than the dollar that most of the e-books are commanding right now on eBay.

You need to find a niche that can be interesting and provocative to a certain subsector of the e-book bidders so that there is little competition. This is one of the more difficult niches to get involved with but you can also do very well if you are able to make your product stand out using a couple of the different ideas included within this section.

Social networks have become an extremely popular way for people to stay in touch with each other. If you have not been to MySpace or Facebook, it is worth a look around. While a lot of the publicity these sites have gotten is because of the teens and college students that use them, businesses have discovered they are a useful way to build their networks as well.

Some of the sites are very bare-bones, but some of them are quite elaborate. One thing most of them have in common is a place for visitors to leave comments. Many times these comments are text messages back and forth between friends, but some of the messages are small digital pictures and graphics with a prewritten message.

There are web sites that provide these e-comments free to their viewers. If you see one you like and want to share with a friend, you can copy and paste a small line of code into your friends comment box, and the e-comment will appear.

When you look at these e-comments you will notice that on every one there is a company name or web address at the bottom. Most of these graphics are clickable links that will take the viewer back to the web site of the person that created it. If your e-comment is attractive or quirky enough, social network users will start sharing it with their friends. When their friends (or their friend’s visitors) see the graphic, they will click on it to see what other e-comments you have to offer.

While many businesses are using these services to build their networks, the majority of users are teens, young adults, and women. If your business is aimed toward adult men, this method may have limited success, but if you are marketing to the younger generation, you can bring a flood of traffic to your site with this method.

A similar service you can offer is free e-cards. People are always searching for cards to send to friends, family members, acquaintances, and co-workers. They are easy to use, and have maintained their popularity over the years. These cards come in several different varieties; with or without music and static or animated. Some are very simple animations; others are very elaborate Flash animations.

Once the person finds the card they like, they can fill in the message box, add the email of the person they are sending it to, and press the send button. An email is sent telling the recipient that their friend has sent them a card, and it gives them a link to click that will allow them to view the card.

The person receiving the card gets a message from a friend to enjoy and a small line telling them who sponsored the card. Because you are hosting the card service, the viewer is already at your site. You just have to give them a good reason to click the links that will take them where you want them to go.

In early 2006 job listing service CareerBuilder.com launched a program called Monk-e-mail. With the click of a mouse you could choose which chimpanzee you wanted to use with your card, then personalize that chimp with different clothing, glasses, hats, and backgrounds. Users also had the option of writing or recording their own message, and even had a text to speech functions that allowed the chimp to deliver your message. As an extra bonus, when you move your mouse around the screen, the chimp follows your movement.

Within 3 months of launching, over 14 million monk-e-mails had been sent. The kicker is that CareerBuilder spent no money in marketing this service. In the first week CareerBuilder sent out 1,500 monk-e-mails to employees and agencies, and word of mouth did the rest. Monk-e-mail was so original and quirky that the buzz quickly spread across the internet, and even maid it to the main stream media outlets.

You do not need to create a program as elaborate as monk-e-cards, but it does need to be creative and unique. If you do digital photography or graphic art, this could be a very good way to use your talent to build traffic to your site, or you could hire a freelance designer to create your cards for you. Do a search for e-cards and you will get a good idea of the types of designs people are using. As always, quality and uniqueness are an advantage.

Like many websites, newspapers need content. A lot of newspapers, especially smaller local newspapers, have a hard time coming up with enough fresh content to fill all of the space they have. With limited budgets, they do not have the staff needed to come up with fresh material every day. This creates a great opportunity for you.

While papers are not just going to give you free advertising, they will allow you to write an article about something that your businesses is doing, especially if it involves a service or a community event. The newspapers understand that they are allowing you to advertise in exchange for the free content, but it can not be blatant advertising.

All you have to do is write the article, making sure you mention your businesses name, and list your web address so they can get more information. You just have to make sure the piece is well written, and that your business is doing something worth telling people about.

Not only does this get the name of your business out to the community, but it also helps enhance your reputation. Even without knowing you, people will make a judgment on whether they like you, and can trust you. By building a positive reputation as someone who is active in the community, it makes it easier for them to like you, and by extension, your business.

Believe it or not, there are still people out there that do not get all of there information online. They use the internet for business or email, and occasionally will shop online, but if you want to reach them you will have to do it offline.

There are a lot of ways to make people aware of you offline. Some are better than others, depending on your business, but they all share a common purpose with the online techniques; get your businesses name front of as many people as you can, as often as you can. Sales people use the term, “It’s a numbers game.” If more people get exposed to your message, more people will go to your site. More people at your site will mean more sales.

From pens to calendars to neckties, company names, logos, and web sites appear everywhere. Some companies have built a strong enough brand that people will pay to wear their logo. Coke and M&M’s are just two of many corporate brands that people proudly display.

There is a small sporting goods store I know of that prints and gives away hundreds of shirts every year. Anyone even remotely involve in local sports has at least one shirt form this store. At any casual event in town at least one person will show up with a shirt bearing that stores name and logo. I have seen pictures from as far away as the Dominican Republic wearing one of those shirts. Anyone new in town or from any of the surrounding towns quickly learns where to go for their sporting goods.

A quick search online will give you a wide range of companies to chose from that specialize on providing promotional materials. There is a wide range of quality, price, and products to choose from, so depending on your budget, you should be able to find something that matches with what you want to accomplish.

Have you heard of YouTube? If you spend any time online, it is hard not to have heard of it. Millions of people every day view video clips that are stored in the YouTube library. YouTube and Google Videos take advantage of the fact that people are now spending more time in recreational internet surfing than in watching television. It is another example of not only how people want to be entertained, but also that people want choices. The public has gotten used to being able to choose the entertainment they want, and not be forced to take what is pushed at them.

If you are creative enough, or cutting edge, or wacky enough, you could quickly be the next hot video. The videos that have the most chance of going viral are ones that deal with current events, especially if you can beat the major news outlets, videos dealing with business issues, and humorous videos.

Steven Colbert was a great example of this when clips of his Comedy Central show, The Colbert Report, were released on YouTube. Despite the objections of the Comedy Central network, when the show was still new, Colbert allowed clips from his show to be posted on YouTube. Within a short period of time his clips went viral, and viewership of The Colbert Report soared.

If you decide this is a method you want to use, make sure you have a fresh idea, and not a rehash of something that has already made the rounds. You don’t need network quality equipment to produce a decent video. While you do want decent quality production, the biggest key is great content.

Make your video, and at the end of the clip place a 3 – 5 second promotional slide with the URL for your website so viewers can look for more useful information. Make sure the landing page you send them to matches the tone of the video. If the video you use is quirky and humorous, and the landing page is serious and all business, your visitors will only stay for a few seconds before leaving for more entertaining sites.

Once your video is produced, and looks the way you want it to, upload your video onto YouTube and Google Videos. These sites offer services that allow website owners and users of social network sites like MySpace to place video viewers on their site. If your video goes viral, not only will potential customers be able to see your video on the host site, but also on all of the personal sites that pick it up. The amount of traffic that could flood to your site is huge.

Have you noticed the number of sites that offer free e-books to subscribers? Give your email address, click the link and you have instant access to an ebook full of useful information. The reason so many sites use this method of advertising is because it works, and here is how you can make it work for you.

Write a short ebook on a topic that relates to your business. In that book you include a little information about your business, and at a couple of key places include a link that will drive traffic from the book to your website. Now post it on your website and let anyone interested download a free copy.

However, it does not stop there. Encourage anyone who likes your ebook to offer it as a free gift on their website as well. If the information is useful, and the book is well written, the number of websites that are offering your book will begin to grow, Soon 50 or 100, or even 1,000 other sites will be helping you spread the word about your business. A successful campaign with timely information could keep driving traffic to your site for months or years to come.

Be careful not to overdo the information about yourself, or include too many links back to your site. The more about yourself you include, the less likely others will be willing to give your book away for you.

Another advantage of having your ebook before thousands of people’s eyes is it establishes your credibility. People give more credence to a published “expert” than they do to someone who has not written a book, even if the book is very short. You begin to build name recognition, and when people see your name associated with something in the future, they will be more likely to check it out.

Internet marketer David Meerman Scott used this successfully when he released an ebook titled The New Rules of PR. He posted a link to the book on his blog, and sent link by email to friends and colleagues. Within 3 days his ebook had been downloaded over 1,000 times. At that point it caught the attention of a couple of internet marketing gurus who talked about it on their own blogs. In the 3 days following those blogs Scott’s ebook had been downloaded over 15,000 times.

To date, the ebook has been downloaded over 60,000 times, and it has resulted in a continuing flow of traffic, and several speaking arrangements. He is now considered an expert in the field of internet marketing, largely because of his ebook.

Do a search for ebook compilers to find a program to create your ebook, or find a program that will allow you to save a document as a PDF. Whichever program you decide to use, make sure it allows you to include active, clickable links. If the person reading the ebook has to copy and paste the link into a browser, many of them will not. Make it as easy as possible for them to get to your site.

Also, make sure the program you use will not let anyone change the information in your ebook. There are less than honest people who will remove references to you and the links to your site, and include their own information into your ebook. Many programs will allow you to safeguard your information, so take advantage of them.

An added twist to the idea of giving something away for free to your customers is to require them to refer someone to you in exchange for what you are giving away. Simply provide a space where they can enter the email address of one or more people that they have to fill out before receiving the item you are offering. This is especially effective when your free item is something the person can download instantly.

This technique not only puts your message in front of the eyes of potential customers, it also helps you build your own mailing list. You can send an email the people that were referred saying “Your friend (name) saw this, and would like to share it with you. By having the ability to use the friend’s name, it helps to establish your credibility. This will decrease the possibility of person receiving the invitation tagging your message as spam.

Like many of the techniques listed, this will only work if your visitor thinks what you are offering is of enough value to make it worth giving you information about a friend or family member. Friendships are built on trust, and most people will not be willing to risk that trust on a worthless gadget.

Do not expect in instant flood with this method. It usually starts as more of a trickle, but that trickle increases the longer it flows. Over time, the referrals will add up. If each person that takes advantage of your free offer refers two or more friends, it will not take long to have quite a list of potential customers, all at no additional cost.