What Is Niche Marketing?

Niche Marketing is the way to go to make money online today. As opposed to affiliate marketing in general niche marketing allows you to zero in on a more targeted market which lessens the number of competitors you would have.

This also gives you a chance to develop an Internet business around a theme that you have an interest in, a passion for, or are an expert at. You not only get to make money online, but you will also have fun doing it.

What Is The Niche Power Group?

The Niche Power Group membership program is for people who need more help than they might normally receive in an affiliate marketing program. It contains a staff of five coaches who are available in a private online forum to answer questions and help you become successful with your own Internet business.

The Niche Power Group, or (NPG) for short, was started by a group of successful Internet marketers with the sole purpose of passing on their knowledge to others who are having problems becoming successful themselves.

Let’s face it, in spite of discussion forums, social networking, video training, weekly webinars, and so on, some people struggle to figure out how to make money online. The NPG understands this and has developed their program specifically for this target market.

The whole idea is you can receive coaching beyond what you might normally receive in other Internet marketing circles. You receive more hands-on attention because in a private membership the number of participants is smaller than in large discussion forums such as the Warrior Forum or others.

How Does It Benefit You?

The NPG forum is where you can go and ask questions. The difference from other forums is the staff mentors participate on a regular basis in answering your questions.

This is something you do not find even in forums started by other successful Internet marketers. Most of the owners are absent or participate on a very low level.

The benefit of having an experienced person answer your questions is you get quality answers. These are provided to you from a position of expertise as opposed to theory. This certainly is one problem that comes up in discussion forums where people who do not have actual experience attempt to be helpful in answering questions for other members.

One other thing you will like about the Niche Power Group is you receive honest advice. If you are doing things wrong those are pointed out directly to you.

When you are doing things right you receive positive input as well. The NPG staff understands your success is the only thing that will keep you as a member in the future and they hold nothing back in helping you achieve that.

As a member you will get your own WordPress blog set up for free. If you prefer they have pre-built niche blogs you can purchase at a reasonable fee to get off the ground even faster.

By using the WordPress blogging platform you will not need to learn HTML code to build web pages. All you do is type and the pages are built for you.

The Cost!

So how much will this cost you? You can take a trial membership for one week for $4.95. This lets you check out the program before deciding to become a member. After that there are various payment programs including the popular monthly membership of $29.95 a month.

The Negative

Mentoring on the Internet is not going to be the answer for everyone. You still must be responsible for your own success and put in the effort to achieve that.

The Niche Power Group can help aid you in your success, but will not do all the work for you. That is something you must consider before you decide to become a member of this exciting group.

Summary:

The features of the Niche Power Group, and the benefits you will receive, far out weigh the cost of this program. Mentoring on a personal level may be just what you need to really make money online.

By choosing a niche you have an interest in you get to have fun and make money at the same time. The Niche Power Group will be right there with you every step of the way.

Sign up for a Trial of the Niche Power Group for just $4.95.

The final step in the process of setting up a successful and profitable niche blog is the management of your site.

I’m talking about management in terms of keeping your site running, monitoring what’s working and what’s not, and monitoring the success of your site so you know how much effort to commit to it on a continual basis.

Here are some of the elements involved in the management area of a successful blog.

1. You need to manage and track your search engine statistics. Here I mean two things. 1. is the doings of your search competition and 2 is the rankings and traffic from various pages of your site.

In 1. You need to be always checking up on your search competition. Just by knowing what sites link to your competitor site can allow you a way to gain new backlinks. You contact the same people and get the same links PLUS keep doing all the good SEO you’re already doing, you can steal their spot.

In 2. You need to monitor your own search rankings to see what search terms are bringing you traffic. At this point you can either choose to focus more of your content on those terms, giving readers coming from those terms more to look at and more opportunities to get pushed to your affiliate link OR you can look harder at the monetization of those pages. This might include testing different affiliate link positionings, changing the text, and more.

Following on from that, something else that needs to be tracked on your blog, is how successful your content is at converting visitors to sales.

This has traditionally been tough on a blogs because the way they are set doesn’t generally allow for any form of split testing. However, a new blogging software called Firepow has made this possible. What you can do is test which content your audience responds best to. You can use variations of two different posts, have them alternate for each new user to the blog, and see which version of the post generated the most affiliate link clicks.

Optimizing your content like this may be the easiest way to increase your bottom line. After all think about this: If you want to double your profits from a site, you can either double your site traffic, or you can double your conversion rate… what’s easier? In a lot of cases, it’s doubling your conversion rate.

Finally, something that needs to be managed on your blog is the updating of your content. The most successful blogs and mini sites always have something new for their readers all the time, and when you’re running more than one blog, this can be an ongoing challenge. The best thing you can do here is get yourself the help of some software like the above mentioned Firepow, which can help you manage a number of blog’s content from one control panel. Something like this will give you the ability to post content on schedules, get notified of when a blog needs updating, and offer you options of how to get relevant content on to your site without your effort.

Combined with all the elements we’ve talked about in previous articles, managing your blog will put the profit icing on your blogging/mini site cake. I trust that you’ve found this series informative and helpful.

Traffic generation

Here we’ll look at some primary ways of driving quality traffic to your niche site. Keep in mind the phrase QUALITY traffic is important – we only want the visitors who might buy our products and make us money – we don’t want freebie seekers in this business model.

The first and best way to generate traffic is to do as I’ve described in the previous article, which is to produce content based on long tail keywords from your niche. After optimizing your page well for this term, and using the built in pinging function to notify other websites of your new content – you can be ranking and getting traffic for uncompetitive terms within the first few days of your site’s existence.

After this, there are many ways to approach your traffic generation.

1. Article Marketing: This is essentially (though often misunderstood) the process of having articles you’ve written, published on websites other than your own, for the purpose of including a link back to your site and funneling traffic from their site to yours. You can do this with article directories or with other blogs and websites by contacting the site author. Either way, the extra exposure from these sites can drive through important relevant visitors to your pages.

2. Ongoing Keyword research and SEO: The reason I believe in having a big focus on SEO is that the people who have a specific problem and are looking for a solution, tend to gravitate toward a search engine. Yes there are millions of web viewers who don’t go near a search engine but they can be harder to target and can represent not as high a quality traffic. In other words they don’t tend to make you as much money.

Continually finding new keywords that represent relevant traffic for your products, and continually creating content to target those visitors is about as smart as you can be with ongoing traffic generation.

3. Link Building: This is both for the purpose of boosting your search engine rankings and increasing exposure to your website. You have probably heard that links back to your site from relevant websites indicate your site is more trust worthy and worthy of better SEO rankings. At the same time, a link on a relevant website, whether in a piece of content on a sidebar, can increase visitors to your website. You should make it a point to continually do activities that motivate similar sites in your niche to link to you – or even if not in your niche, sites that could send you relevant visitors.

4. Using Social Networks: Using the myriad social networks like Digg, Mysapce, Facebook, Stumbleupon, etc. can be another great way to increase traffic to your website.  Just by submitting all the posts you make to your blog to site’s like Digg and Stumbleupon, you can earn yourself extra backlinks, and the potential to have your content seen and then shared by new members of your target audience.  As is becoming clear, almost EVERYONE online hangs out at some social network for some reason, and if you can find where your target market is hanging out and leverage that, your traffic can increase exponentially.

Finally, remember when trying to generate traffic to your blog, you should consider your niche before deciding which methods to utilize. As I’ve said before, using a social network might be great, but certain niches might be too technically unadvanced to know about social networks, and they only use Google. Some niches might be more easily approached by use of visual media like video rather than article content. The bottom line of traffic generation is where are my target market hanging out, and how can I get my site in front of them in a way that contributes value to their lives.

The 4th and final article in this series of setting up a profitable blog or mini site we’ll look at the management of a successful blog.

Joyce Jacobsen

In the first article of this series we looked at Step one – creating a successful blog or mini site namely, the selection of a truly profitable niche.  Now, once your niche is selected, you obviously need to create a website to capitalize on it.

Blogs in particular have become such a popular choice for niche marketers because of their extreme ease of use, ease in maintaining, and ease in updating. Not to mention the structure of a blog is generally by nature, search engine friendly. AND furthermore, where it isn’t, there is always a third party plugin to make it so.

There are many ways to create a successful blog, and the one you choose should reflect on understanding your target market. What we’ll look at here is an example of one such method, that focuses on the generation of free traffic, and the promotion of an affiliate program for monetization.

The first thing you need to do is create a blog that’s visually or aesthetically sound. A visually sound blog, other than just looking pretty, is arranged in a way that maximizes all the content you create, by maintaining your readers attention, and drawing the most attention to your affiliate program.

There are a few ways you want to do this:

1. Choose a blog theme with a predominantly white background and with black text. Simple advice, but often ignored. Black on white is the easiest for the eyes to read. Other colour schemes can quickly tire the eyes and make it hard to maintain concentration.

2.  Choose a clean and neat theme. You don’t want too much going on. It should be very clear where your content is located, very clear where your sidebar and navigation is located, where your other categories can be viewed and so forth. If a reader comes from a search engine, they should know exactly where they have to click to get the information they want.Generally I say the less options the better in terms of other features on your blog.

3.  There are certain pages you absolutely want to have on your site. These are a Privacy Policy page, an About Us page,and a Contact Us page. Google in particular looks at these things as indicators of a serious, quality, non spammy site. Furthermore, you want to have an archives page (easily achieved by the SRG CleanArchives plugin if you use WordPress), so as not to have your archives taking up valuable room in your blog sidebar.

Once you have an aesthetically pleasing blog, you need some reader pleasing content.

I am going to assume here you have a product selected. Of course the next step after picking your niche (sometimes these tasks are one and the same) is to select a product you’ll promote to the niche. This is where you’ll earn your cash.

So once you’ve got a product selected, and the base of a good blog created as above, your job is to create some content the people in your niche will find valuable and use that content to drive your website’s visitors to the merchant’s page and earn an affiliate commission.

By this point, you should have your niche’s keywords researched – by that I mean you should have some idea of what might be a good place to attack the niche from.  Ideally you’d have some keyphrase related to your niche that are uncompetitive in terms of the number of pages optimized for them in the search engines.

Where you’d ideally start your content creation is by writing an article on this uncompetitive term, posting it on your site and getting it ranked in the search engines. From here, you can develop as much content on search phrases from your niche, as you desire (remember you got those phrases from a tool like the Wordtracker keyword tool) in order to increase traffic to your site.

Some factors we didn’t get to mention in this article are things like:  page optimization, making your pages of content rank well in the search engines – and monetization – the art of getting the highest percentage of visitors to your site actually making you money. But for a basic overview, I think we’ve done alright.

Here is the link to several profitable mini sites I have created if you would like to see my end results:  ImprovingYourGolfSwing, ReverseEmailFinder and one on WeightLoss.

In the next article we’ll look at driving traffic to your website.

Selecting your niche. The first key to the success of a blog or mini site is it should target a group of people (a niche) who are hungry for information of a specific nature.

The group of people your blog or mini site targets should be a group of people who have problems or needs information. Problems in the sense they are looking for a solution to something, looking to improve something.  Furthermore, in a great niche, that SOMETHING, is something that causes pain. Financial pain, physical pain, emotional pain, some sort of pain, for the simple reason people who have pain will want to buy solutions to that pain, and hopefully from your website.

If that sounds a bit sick, trying to exploit people with pain, it’s not. It’s called marketing.   And what’s more, you’re actually going to provide these people with a real solution, so you’re being helpful!  So you’re looking for a group of people with a problem, but that’s not all.

Your next concern has to be whether there are enough of these people searching for solutions to their problems on the internet. How many is enough you ask? It’s a good question. With certain kinds of sites, all you need is 10 visitors to your site a day and you can turn a nice monthly profit. Other niches and products you promote you might need thousands per day. It all depends on what you sell, and who to, AND how much commission you make when you sell to them.

The things you should do are look at the search volume, as indicated by a tool like Wordtracker. Here you’re simply looking at how many searches per day a particular keyphrase gets in the search engines. Then after that, you want to look at whether there are other sites or blogs competing in the same niche.

Contrary to what a lot of people think, NO competition isn’t necessarily a good thing. NO competition could and often does mean it’s not a profitable niche. So we want competition in our niche we choose.

The final piece of the puzzle of finding a good niche, is whether the niche has a quality product for you to promote. You need something to sell to these people, that is high quality, has great marketing material (sales letter etc, so it will convert your traffic well) and pays a decent commission.

This is of course assuming you’re looking at the affiliate marketing model of making money with your blog – which I suggest if you’re looking to retire from your job and earn a full time passive income, you SHOULD be. There are other ways to make money where you might think about some different factors in your niche selection.

So if you can combine all of the above factors when selecting your niche, you’ll be giving yourself and your new blog the best possible chance of success.  Stay tuned for part 2 tomorrow on setting up a profitable blog or mini site.

While we are in no way in a “Depression”, we may be in for a prolonged “Recession”.  In fact, our current recession in the United States is about to match the record for the longest recession since the nation entered WWII (15 months in the mid-1970s), and it’s likely to surpass that record before things get better. So, let’s face it: with the loss of jobs and rising costs, many are really caught in a bind.

But, can online network marketing really make a difference? Is this one of the few keys to financial success and independence in these economically troubled times? The answer is a resounding – YES!

When we talk about internet and network marketing, many people conjure up some very unwelcome images in their heads: prospecting, talking to family members, friends, long lost acquaintances, your mechanic, your doctor, the check out girl at the local supermarket…and using anything from pleading to badgering to get them to check out your product and possibly, join your business. Of course, who really likes being badgered and the people you are inflicting yourself upon, often start avoiding you.

Anyone who is successful in traditional network marketing doesn’t use those type of tactics to grow their internet marketing business. They use much smarter (and much less offensive) methods for MLM lead generation and now, with the power of the Internet at your fingertips, you can apply their trade secrets yourself; and, you can do this in a way that’s easier and less expensive.

Online network marketing requires no face-to-face prospecting, no driving all over God’s earth spending tons of money on fuel and take-out foods to go to appointments in the hopes of making a sale, no cold-calling (smile and dial club). You don’t even have to buy expensive clothing, or wear shiny shoes, and you don’t have to stuff mailboxes.

Now, this doesn’t mean you don’t have to work this business. Online network marketing requires plenty of work, especially in the first year. You may not make much money the first year, so keep your dreaded day job while you get things set up. But once you do have things in place, you can achieve financial heights perhaps you have been afraid to even dream of before now.

WHY ONLINE NETWORK MARKETING WORKS

Online network marketing works for one reason: the Power of leveraging:

• Knowledge

• Outreach Using the Internet

• Efforts of Other People

Leveraging means you get big results from small actions. When investors leverage money, they make small investments or pay small fees to have the possibility of making large sums of money. That’s similar to what you’ll do with online network marketing.

WHAT YOU’LL NEED TO BE SUCCESSFUL IN ONLINE MARKETING

Only a small percentage of the people are going to buy from you and/or join your business. So what this means is, this is a numbers game. You need a large percentage of people visiting your site and making contact with you online.

You need to work with qualified leads – people who are already predisposed to having some interest in what you have to offer. Qualified leads are people who are more likely to visit you over and over again; refer your business to others; buy from you; and join your business. And by using the righ tools, you can draw qualified leads to yourself without any “hard selling” or “cold calling”. You might need to have a telephone conversation with people now and again but this will be easy, because they will already be interested in what you have to say.

HOW TO GET QUALIFIED LEADS AND BUILD YOUR ONLINE NETWORK BUSINESS

Create and keep updated a website that markets a very specific product or service or markets to a very specific niche of people. Never try to be all things to all people. This is the first and most important step in your business. If you join an established online network marketing business, they will probably have tools and guidance to help you with this and the other steps.

Be as knowledgeable as possible about your product/service/niche. Never stop learning about it.

• Write articles related to what you do, showing your knowledge. Publish them at content websites, and use social bookmarking to get them out to as wide an audience as possible.

• Create online videos about your business and place them on sites like YouTube and Video Jug.

• Have an opt-in e-newsletter list. This is where people who visit your website can choose to receive your latest e-newsletter, which you will be writing and sending on a regular basis.

• Use podcasts and webinars.

• Use an auto-responder
  

• Consider using Google AdSense or Yahoo’s similar online Pay-Per-Click advertising program. You only pay when somebody clicks your ads.

LEVERAGING OTHER PEOPLE’S EFFORTS

Now…some of the people who become your customers will also become your affiliates or your downline. Teach them how to duplicate your business. It’s like having one “office” turn into 50 offices…and every office is bringing in money for everyone.

PERSISTENCE AND PATIENCE

The reality is the vast majority of your downline will be ineffective. They’re just along for the ride. That’s okay. Recognize the 10% or so who really care, and train them thoroughly. They will not only make a lot of money but they will be able to realize their dreams.

And remember: getting set up is everything. Don’t expect big results the first year. Work your business and constantly create and disseminate new content about it.

The day will come when it was all worth it—and you become financially free!

Offline, traditional network marketing schemes will come and go, but the Internet is here to stay. Those who either have a product to sell or have the creativity to develop a value-laden product to sell will have to develop Internet marketing skills to stay alive.

Success in online network marketing (or affiliate marketing, or any home-based business, for that matter) is achieved by the person who stands out as a leader by mastering attraction marketing principles, offering value to others, constantly learning and growing in business and being willing to help others along the way.

ATTRACTION MARKETING PRINCIPLES

Attraction marketing principles are the opposite of shameless self-promotion. You don’t blare out you have a business opportunity or product and obnoxiously talk about it with everyone you meet and come across. This is what gives salesmen a bad name.

Attraction marketing is what is used by truly successful salesmen and affiliate marketers. The Internet has made attraction marketing principles more potentially successful than ever. Essentially, it means you get people to come to you and choose to do business with you by creating value. You must make yourself and your business attractive. There are proven ways of doing this.

Do not try to be all things to all people. No person can do this and no business can do this. You want to become a specialist in your chosen niche because, even if you have broad knowledge, there is so much intense competition out there that if you don’t offer something that utterly differentiates you, you’ll just be lost in the shuffle. Your business needs to fill a niche, and target only the people who are most likely to be interested in that niche. You need to be a master of this niche, a set-apart leader who establishes yourself as doing it a little better than everyone else.

Along with this, approach your Internet marketing the same way. Choose only one or two out of the set of Internet marketing tools and establish a powerful presence in those markets, being a master of and leader in your chosen format(s).

Your marketing must be oriented towards creativity and quality content. Leaders give content. If your marketing content sounds like a pitch, you aren’t practicing attraction marketing.

Give people as much free stuff as you can without giving away the farm. People want to do business with people who are willing to share with them; sharing builds trust.

Consistency is all. To be a leader, you have to do what you do every single day. Don’t get caught up in what seems “urgent” when you have necessary tasks to attend to—those “urgent” things are hardly ever important, and what’s really important is hardly ever urgent. Learn about and do the marketing program for your business every day. When you are first starting out, it will be a while before you see much in the way of results, but if you are consistent the payoff will come. Time management is extremely important—make your business your priority and don’t get caught up in peripheral matters.

”Time equals Life. Therefore, waste your time and waste your life, or master your time and master your life,” says Alan Lakein.

You can get ahead of the curve by learning those skills now, do it with a system that teaches it thoroughly and clearly, at a reasonable price. Don’t put off your decision. If you want a new life of independence, self-reliance, and more money, learn Internet and Network Marketing.

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As a consumer we want to make sure the person or company we are dealing with practices ethical marketing. It doesn’t matter what side of the fence you’re on – you need to make sure what you are selling or purchasing meets the standards that are being advertised.

We’ve all come across words like “incredible”, “fantastic” and “extraordinary.” These words work great in marketing campaigns. Now I understand, it’s absolutely crucial to use some compelling marketing phrases to convey the benefits about your product, because you have to convince me, as a consumer, I can’t live with out your product or service. Over the years I have run into a few sellers using these type of descriptions to market their product and offering benefits which don’t even exist.

I’ve been wondering – how many other naive newbies on the internet have been drawn in to these sites with over-hyped sales copy?

What can you do to keep this from happening to you? Whenever you have even the slightest doubt about any of the promises or the merchandise mentioned in the sales copy or on the website:

1. Research it! We were told they were incredible, so what about the credibility of the company?

2. Google it! Perform a basic check on the merchants internet site by going to google.com.

3. Call or Email customer service! Take note of the attitude on how they answered you on the phone or your email. Customer service brings out a great deal about the values and integrity of the company. If you are unable to even find support e-mail on their internet site, and you are having the wrong vibes—you may want to just click the “delete” button!

Sometimes, when things sound too good, in all likelihood, maybe it is too good to be true.

CLICK ON THE LINK BELOW AND WATCH THIS VIDEO IF YOU WANT TO UNDERSTAND THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THIS COMPARISON:

GUMBALL COMPARISON ~ COFFEE VS NUTRITION VS TRAVEL