This is the final part of the Niche Network Marketing with LAMP series. The earlier parts have taken you from finding a “Gold Mine” niche to creating a large network of sites around it.
At this point you should have a primary niche site with lots of external sites (articles, Web 2.0 platforms like Squidoo and etc.) linking back to it, and you should have several (the more the better) secondary niche sites with their own wheels of external sites linking to them.
If you have trouble visualizing these wheels you can always refer to the video I made and posted here. The details for building them are in my series posts, but the video gives a decent graphic display of how they work and come together if that helps.
One question I’ve received is “how to decide what will be secondary wheels in the network”? That’s really pretty easy, just pick closely related niches for each wheel.
For example, if your primary niche is “weight loss” then you might have secondary wheels for “exercise techniques”, “power walking”, “healthy diets” and so on. In retail we call this “cross merchandising”, that’s why you will always see weekly specials displayed in stores near related items, like if bleach is on sale this week it will get displayed near the laundry soaps and fabric softeners, or if steak sauce is on sale it might be displayed near the Butcher’s counter.
The same principal applies and works in online marketing too. If you have an site about HTML coding you’ll do well to advertise webmaster related softwares or web hosting services on it because they’re closely related to the core topic, and if you’re building a niche network you just expand that idea to give you topics for your secondary niche wheels.
The last big tip I have to offer is in list building. You should setup a mailing list for your niche network at-least by the time you have decent traffic moving through your sites, and it’s a good idea to place your signup form on all of your sites.
However, it’s likely that the main goal and focus of your niche sites is going to be on making sales or delivering visitors to your sales pages. That’s the way it should be and you don’t want to distract or detour your buyers away from that. So be careful and minimalistic in your list building efforts on all of these sites. Adding subscribers should be secondary and not the focus for them.
What I like to do though, since I’m not pushing my list on most of my niche sites very hard, is to build a separate wheel in the network strictly on an “information seekers” term related to my primary niche. Remember, the wheels we’ve built to this point should have been made around “buying terms” for the best sales potential, but there are a lot of people interested in every market who aren’t yet ready to make purchases, they’re just seeking information and these are the best targets for building your email list from.
Lets say you’re selling some graphics program called “ImageStore” and that’s your niche market. People searching for “ImageStore instant delivery” or “ImageStore with free shipping” are in buying mode and should be your targets on most of your network wheels, but people searching for “ImageStore tutorials” are information seekers–plus likely to already have the program if they’re looking for help using it, but that’s okay because you should always be adding to your offerings so if you’re promoting the software right now you should be thinking about products that will help users use it for down the road that you can add to your offerings.
There will be a lot of information seeker traffic out there, often more than there will be buying traffic, so this is where I like to do my major list building at. I’ll build a strictly informational wheel in the network that is related to my primary niche and make the hard pitch for joining the email list to this traffic. They’re already seeking information, so offering them a private list with tips or advice is an easy sell.
Again, it’s okay (and wise) to place your list subscription form on all of your network wheels, but you never want to convert a buyer into a subscriber before he makes the purchase so you have to be careful with it. To really push your list an informational wheel is where you want to focus your list building efforts the most. It’s easy traffic and these people aren’t in buying mode yet anyway.
One addition to this is if you’re selling your own products on your network wheels, then you can always use the delivery system for list building. For example, your sites sell the product, the buyer goes to PayPal or whatever to pay you and is then usually returned to your download page. Well, instead of a simple download page you can return them to your opt-in form and tell them the download link for their purchase will be in the confirmation email they receive.
It’s a little sneaky and will upset a few people who will see it as jumping through hoops, but it will also increase your list by leaps and bounds because the majority of people who reach this point are invested in your product and possibly even you if you’ve established yourself as an authority to them on your sales site, so they won’t have any hesitations in subscribing at this point.
Finally, don’t waste your “Thank You” pages from the email list subscription process. You should have 2 opportunities with your subscription form to present offers to visitors who are already investing themselves into you or your products. First, when they enter their name and email address and hit “submit” they should be taken to a page that tells them to watch their email inbox for the confirmation letter. Use this page to also tell them about some great offering you have, it likely won’t convert very highly from here, but even .5% is an additional sale for every 200 subscribers. Plus it helps put your offering into the mind of subscribers you’ll be upselling to in later mailings so that’s a good thing too.
And second, when visitors click the confirmation link from their confirmation letter they usually land on a “Thanks for subscribing” type of page. Here again is an opportunity to place another great offering in-front of them. If you set it up right this offer will expand or build upon the offering they received on the first submission page. This is important because most people will confirm their subscription right away, so within a matter of 5 minutes you have the chance to display offerings to people who are both interested in your niche topic and who have made a personal commitment to invest in you for advice and recommendations.
Again, don’t expect huge conversion rates off of these pages, but they’re certainly worth the minor effort of adding your sales copy to once you start getting a steady stream of subscribers coming in.
That pretty much wraps up how I go about building a niche network. When I find a good niche that I want to expand beyond a single site these are the basic steps I take to do that because I’ve found this lets me really dominate a market. There’s no limits to how big or wide you can grow your network. I’ve described how to build the primary and secondary wheels, but in truth you can expand this out to have a third ring of wheels each related to sites in your secondary ring, then out to a fourth ring of wheels related to sites in your third ring and so on. The bigger the market the more effective growing outward can be.
The point is that once you make the decision to invest the time and resources to build a network don’t be half-assed with it, be determined to own that market in the end and plan your sites, wheels and rings accordingly.
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