Something I get asked about a lot, and see getting asked in various webmaster and business/marketing forums is how to pick a niche out of a larger market.
So, I put this quick video together that shows how I often use the same tool for coming up with narrow niche market ideas that I use for doing keyword research:
I hope this is helpful to anyone having trouble coming up with niche ideas for themselves.
Given the impressive results I and others have been having with the NIMS script, my associate Heather has convinced me to put together a full case study (almost an e-course you could say) on how I approach niche marketing, including how I see NIMS best fitting into what I already do.
Now, Heather thought I should put this together, package it with the NIMS script and sell the package for $49 or something close to that… I had a better idea though, I’m going to create the case study and give it away absolutely free right here to the subscribers of my eTips monthly newsletter.
Now, I know right away that some people are going to think I’m just trying to raise my subscription levels with this “ploy”. That’s absolutely not true.
Unlike a lot of mailing lists, members of mine know that I only send a single monthly mailing (I don’t abuse subscribers with tons of messages), and I almost never upsell anything at all in my newsletter. It’s all about sharing information that to be honest, I’m not always comfortable sharing openly here on the blog. I do like to keep some of my techniques and tips semi-private, and just won’t post those on an open blog, which is why I created the Leap eTips newsletter.
In fact, looking at all of the mailings I’ve sent out for 2008 so far, there hasn’t been a single affiliate product promoted in any of them and the only time I’ve included anything at all that made me money was this month when I offered my subscribers a discount deal on the NIMS script as a “thank you” for the time and attention they give me by reading my mailings.
So I hope that makes it clear that I’m not trying to raise subscription levels, since honestly I make more revenue from having people visit the pages of this blog than I do with the eTips newsletter since I just don’t use it as a sales venue.
Like I said, my reasoning is simple, there are certain techniques and resources that I use which I won’t talk about on an open blog. None of them are black-hat or dubious in any way, but they are valuable and I’ve learned in the past that when a valuable resource gets too much public attention it begins to get abused and loses value quickly. I won’t contribute to that by openly discussing certain resources.
But I will share them privately in my newsletter since I do want to help the people who are truly interested in doing better for themselves and are willing to put in the time and efforts to succeed.
Okay, enough about why I’m sharing this in the newsletter only, now on to the good stuff like what will I be covering?
Here’s The Deal
I’m going to start a new niche site from scratch. It’s going to be in a niche I’ve never worked before so I won’t have any advanced inside knowledge or presence.
Starting from scratch (not even a domain name yet), I’m going to enter a niche, create my own product for it and document the entire process from start to first sale as an informative and candid look behind the scenes for anyone who has struggled with some of these things.
I’m going to document each step of the process using a lot of video to really show what I’m doing and how:
- choosing the niche
- keyword research
- researching the market and competition
- decide what product to create and build it
- setup my niche site
- article marketing
- setup a niche funnel for building quick links and traffic (including the use of NIMS)
- monitor and tweak to first sale
Here’s what I won’t have or be using:
- any product to start with
- any email list to mail to
- PPC (pay per click) advertising
Goals I want to achieve with this:
- Enter a new niche and create a profitable product from scratch
- begin building an email subscription list for expanding in the niche later on
- make my first sale
- have the foundation for a full niche business to expand from in place
I’m going to start this whole thing this coming Monday, and my hope is that by the following Friday I’ll have my first sale recorded.
That’s starting with absolutely nothing (I don’t even know what the niche is going to be yet), no product, being completely unknown in the niche, having no email list and I won’t use any PPC (pay per click) advertising methods either.
The point to this is to show exactly how you can start with nothing and make a sale within a few days, and have the foundation for a whole business to build upon at that point.
And that’s key to know, starting out in a new niche is an “in the red” experience. You don’t hit profit with your first sale because you’re in the red from the time and labor invested to get up and running…and this case study isn’t about showing a profit–it’s about showing you exactly how I lay the groundwork for a profitable niche that once up and running, I can grow and expand upon until it’s a full-time income. That’s why I’m documenting this from start to first sale, to show the most vital early steps which properly position a niche project for that growth.
Now, I can share an inside peek right now at what you will see if you’re subscribed to the Leap eTips and watch this case study…taking action and doing the work is all it takes to succeed.
I’ve done this before, in fact I do it all the time, so I know that I should have my first sale in a new niche recorded within a couple days, but I don’t want to give the impression that this is going to show some “fast track” to easy success for you.
It isn’t, because there is none. It’s going to take a good deal of research and work to enter a niche market, create a product and set the foundation for a long-term business in that niche.
But, what this will show is that with a little commitment and effort, my mantra of “just put a desired product in-front of people who want it with an easy path to purchase” is a winning formula.
So, I believe this is going to be an informative and fun experience to share, I’m going to do my best to make it completely candid and easy to follow.
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An interesting thing happened over the past week that I think makes for a good story to share here. It’s about how I accidentally recognized a market opening that isn’t being completely filled and am attempting to step in and explore the opportunity.
Last Friday I posted on a number of topics, and among them was my disdain for folks selling “neat package” business models that promise wealth and riches with a single mouse-click (or some such similar nonsense in their sales copy).
And in writing about that I realized that every day there are more and more people trying to turn their online time into profits. Some out of a sense of entrepreneurial spirit, but many out of desperation to just make ends meet in their daily lives.
This all got me to thinking about another post I made last year on what I would do if I had to start over again from zero.
I went back and re-read that posting and still believe the strategy I laid out there is sound. Which got me to thinking, are there any good tools available right now that would be helpful for someone in that position?
The first thing I did to answer that question was write down what someone just starting out would need:
1. help finding good topical keywords to build their pages from
2. help to build content rich web pages based on the keywords they find
3. a path to revenue for their pages (like contextual or affiliate advertising networks)
4. help driving traffic to their pages
For #1 there is a fantastic and free tool available at Wordtracker, so that’s covered.
For #2 there are some site building and content generating programs out there, but I don’t care for most of those because they usually leave giant footprints (warning search engines your site may not be original or unique), or they attempt to dupe search engines and visitors by rewriting other’s content… basically most of them work really well for what they do but doom your site to a short shelf life.
So, #2 is something that needs looking at closer.
For #3 that’s easy, Google, Yahoo or any one of dozens of affiliate networks are all free to join, so there’s an easy path to revenue available.
And for #4, traffic, there’s no shortcuts (other than paying for clicks with Google or Yahoo) for this. Traffic just takes hard work to build. But, if you start with good keywords from #1 then with a little smart social bookmarking of your pages (using delicious, reddit, faves.com and similar sites) then you should have a shot at good placements in the search engine rankings.
Add in some basic article marketing and the traffic should start to slowly come and build for you. It just takes putting in the work.
To Recap
Of the 4 things someone starting out would need, 3 have great resources that are freely available to them already. That’s not too bad.
The sticking point is for building great content pages. Sure, anyone could site and manually write good content pages, and I suggest doing that most of the time because it’s the best solution for getting original, quality content.
But I wondered if there couldn’t be some easier way that was also still ethical?–meaning you could generate lots of good content fast but without risking a short shelf life for your web site. What came to mind was mashups
NIMS – Niche Instant Mashup Sites is born
A mashup is simply a site or page that aggregates content from multiple sources and serves it up (displays it) in a single centralized location.
For example, at their core all RSS Newsreaders act as mashups. They let you subscribe to numerous RSS feeds and then you can read them all in a single place.
That got me to thinking about how cool it would be if you could easily create mashup pages based on the keywords you wanted to target, where the content would always be fresh and current. Creating a script like that seemed easy enough, so I began coding.
In no time I had a script that could gather the latest articles and news stories related to whatever keyword I wanted and display them on page.
Then I decided to pull data from the Yahoo! Answers feeds too, because there’s great information there and the point of this script is to get good content for my pages that would be of value to visitors.
And finally I decided to make the pages even more interesting and valuable for visitors by also pulling in the latest videos from multiple sources that were related to my keywords.
Once I had it working I cleaned up the coding a little bit, made it simple and fast to build lots of individual pages with, and began adding in easy ways that users could add their advertising codes into the pages.
When I had it all together I put it up on a demo site (split screen image to show the page in full, and also the same page with all of the features highlighted and described):
And it’s working great! In just a couple of days and with only minimal social bookmarking efforts (no article marketing yet) I’ve already earned a little money with the demo site. How cool is that?
So, how easy is it to use?
You upload the few script files to your domain, edit a couple of options to select whatever advertising sections you want to use, paste in your advertising codes, then edit a couple of options for how the site layout works (to reduce you site footprint), and finally build pages by selecting a couple of options and entering the keywords to target for each page.
The initial site setup should take between 5 and 10 minutes for most people, and then about a minute each for every page you want to create. And from that point on your pages will always have the most recent, fresh content on your topic keywords, which visitors should enjoy and bots should love since the content is always updating.
For more information about the script or if you want a copy it’s available here
I know, a blog post titled “Stop Reading This…”, am I crazy or just in love with irony?
The truth is I just try to share the most truthful, candid and sincere thoughts I can about making money online here and there’s nothing more simple or honest than this, “stop reading about how to do it, and start doing it”. Period.
For example, you can spend forever learning about picking the right niche, keywords, article marketing, exposed secrets and special reports from every silly guy with a blog (like me) and so-called (or self proclaimed) guru out there, but until you get off your butt and take action you’ll never earn a dime.
And it isn’t complicated. There’s no real secret information or special skills required. I’ve said this here on the blog before and I’ll say it over and over again. Put popular products in-front of buying visitors and you’ll make money.
Say this out loud to yourself right now: Put popular products in-front of buying visitors and I’ll make money.
Everything else beyond that, all of the nuanced tactics and information is good to learn along the way and much of it will help you to improve what you’re doing… but the catch-22 is you have to already be doing something to improve on.
Here’s the most basic, sure-fire formula for making money online that I can imagine:
That’s what works!
Finding those hidden niches, mastering the art of pre-selling in your copy, learning those secret methods for scoring with article marketing… this stuff will build upon your success and improve your conversions–but the core component has to be in place first for any of it to work. And that’s simply understanding–and acting on–the basic principal of putting popular products in-front of buying traffic.
Don’t be afraid of competition. As I’ve written here before, it’s a good thing that keeps us on our toes and makes us be better at what we’re doing.
Here’s a secret about me that I’ve never revealed here on my blog or anywhere else online before: the bulk of my affiliate marketing profits come from the web hosting industry.
Talk about a competitive market. Yet month after month I make good money from it, and have been for years.
And I personally think this is the most cut-throat of all markets because I know first hand that not only do I compete with other marketers, but some of the hosting companies themselves are known for watching the affiliates who consistently do well and then copying their methods for their in-house marketing campaigns.
Still, I’m making money every month from this market for one simple reason, it’s in demand (has buying visitors) and I promote companies that are well known (popular products).
See, I’m just putting popular products in-front of buying traffic.
Think of that rule as the gown or dress, and everything else you ever learn or discover as accessories. They matter, but without the actual gown you’re still naked.
Now, get off your butt and start taking action!
This is part 7 of 10 in the Niche Network Marketing with LAMP series.
While it’s always crucial (and fun) to watch your site stats climb from day one, you really won’t get a valid sense of how your efforts so far are paying off until your primary site has been live for about 3 weeks.
By that point if you’ve done a good job of creating quality on-site content, written and submitted quality articles and responsibly promoted your site and articles across social platforms you should be seeing a mixture of traffic coming into your site from the social networks, the article directories you submitted articles to and also some natural traffic from search engines.
The majority of your traffic at this point will be from social networks. That percentage will eventually drop as the search engine traffic increases over time. Also keep in mind that the natural search engine traffic will be more highly targeted, so if you’ve only made a little bit of revenue in the first 3 weeks with your primary site–or even no revenue at all in some cases–that’s not something to panic about yet.
You’re building a niche network here, so the goal is to position yourself for the long-haul and it’s really the search engine traffic that’s going to bring you revenue, so you can’t make any honest financial assessments of your site or niche based on this very early data. You have to wait until you have a steady and significant amount of search traffic to do that.
What this step is about, and you can do effectively at this point, is looking over your traffic and trying to visualize your visitor trends.
How long are visitors staying on your site? Do the majority seem to be spending enough time to read or scan some of your content–or are they leaving almost as soon as they arrive?
If they’re leaving too fast that may indicate that your site is taking too long to load, or maybe your titles and H1 headings aren’t “grabbing” their attention. It could be that your layout isn’t well suited to your content. There’s an unlimited number of things that can account for fast click-aways, so if you see this as a trend in your visitor stats you need to take some time to review every aspect of your site and try to pin-point where the problem is and correct it. This may take some trial and error but with diligence you should be able to sort it out.
You should have a number of pages for your primary site created at this point, are visitors hitting multiple pages or leaving after only seeing the page they entered your site on?
Again this can indicate that your content or writing style isn’t compelling enough, or it could be that your navigation links aren’t obvious enough… if there seems to be a problem with visitors bouncing from the entry page you’ll want to spend time on figuring out why and correcting it.
Keep in mind however that the fewer pages you have the lower your “pages per visitor” numbers will be just based on averages. I’m assuming by the 3rd week you’ll have a dozen or more pages for your primary site online, but if you don’t then you should expect to see lower page views.
At this point, and before you can really move on or begin to assess the profitability of your site and marketing copy you’ll need to have at least 400 click-thrus to the affiliate product you’re promoting–and be averaging at least 50 visitors per day from search engines.
Until you reach those benchmarks you should keep repeating steps #6 and #7 (this one) over and over again to increase your site pages and search engine reach.
Finally, conversion rates. Once you’ve had 400 click-thrus to your affiliate product you can make a fair assessment of your conversions.
Is your conversion rate at least 2%? That would be 8 sales out of 400 click-thrus. If so you’ve got a great position with a buying niche, a solid product that converts and your primary site is seemingly doing a good job of pre-selling the traffic you send to the affiliate sales page. At this point it’s wise to move on to step #8 of the LAMP series.
If your conversion rate isn’t at least 2% is it at least .5%? That would be 2 sales out of 400 click-thrus. If so then odds are the niche is fine but there may be an issue with either the product you’re promoting, the product sales page or your site copy that everything isn’t working in harmony to convert better.
I always look at the product and product sales pages first when this happens. Sometimes, even though everything looked good in the beginning it can turn out that once you’ve created your site content and become more familiar with the niche and the people who would be buying in that niche you may realize that the product you picked to promote, or the sales page it uses aren’t as good as you originally thought.
Now is the time to go back and review it to see if there’s anything obvious that you may have missed earlier when selecting it that might be working against converting sales with the traffic you’re sending.
If you spot something there’s 2 things you can do. First, you could just dump the product and find something else. Or second, if it’s something obvious in the sales page copy you can always contact the product supplier/creator and discuss it. I’ve done this in the past, pointing out something obvious in a publisher’s sales copy that was turning away people in their market simply because of the wording, and been pleased to find many times they’re open to suggestions for improving conversion rates. And why wouldn’t they be? After all, the more sales you make the more sales they make, right.
Of course not everyone is going to listen to your input, or be willing to test your ideas, so you may still be forced to drop the product and find something better. But if you think the current product is good and that you’ve spotted something obvious in the sales copy that’s bad it’s worth contacting them first.
If you don’t spot anything obvious with the product or sales copy that would be hanging up conversions then it’s likely something with your site.
Either your site content isn’t making the case for how people in your niche benefit from using the affiliate product, or you’re not doing a good job of sending the right visitors through to the affiliate sales page. I see that one a lot. Usually it happens when someone puts the affiliate link too high up on their page.
What happens then is that you send through a lot of “blind” traffic. These are visitors to your site who haven’t yet been shown the benefits of owning the affiliate product, they just came to your page because they’re interested in the niche, and since your affiliate link probably used niche related keywords in the anchor text they clicked it thinking they were heading for more information rather than a place to purchase the benefit at.
In my experience the best affiliate links work when provided after you’ve shown the visitor that they’ll benefit from owning/using the affiliate product. This may mean placing the affiliate links way down in your content, and that may seem counter-productive at first but you have to keep in mind that you’re not trying to send the highest volume of traffic through to an affiliate sales page, you’re trying to send the highest qualified visitors through.
And by showing them the benefits of the product (pre-selling it) first, you actually create more qualified visitors for yourself to ultimately send through.
High up on the page or in your content is good placement for contextual ads (like Google AdSense) where you’re being paid per click and not a commission on the actual sale, but for affiliate products it’s far better to bury them deeper in your content and after you’ve show the benefit of the product to a visitor. That way they’re already thinking about how the product will benefit them when you say “click here to get it”.
What if my conversion rate is below .5%?
Then there’s something really wrong in the chain. Odds are there are multiple problems existing between your site, the product, the product sales page and perhaps even the niche you selected.
My point is something is really broken and there’s far too many variables that it could be for me to try and address them.
All I can suggest is go back to step #1 and retrace your steps along the way to see where things went wrong.
Something–and it should be obvious to create this much havoc–hasn’t gone according to plan and you’re going to have to find it and fix it.
If you can’t figure it out, or you find it but can’t figure out how to fix it feel free to contact me with any questions you may have. I’m willing to help as much as I reasonably can, that’s why I’m publishing this stuff after all, but please make your questions as specific as possible if you want anything useful back from me. I can only provide help based on the information your supply to me in your questions.
Part 8 of the series should be available in a day or two so please check back, or better yet subscribe to my RSS newsfeed and be sure to get it as soon as it gets published.
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