May 19, 2013

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Niche Marketing: Will the Latest Google Update “Clobber” Micro-Niche Blogs?

October 15, 2012 By 1 Comment

I am interrupting the planned sequence of my series on Niche Blogging to discuss the latest Google Update that is causing some consternation among some online marketers who own niche blogs.

None of the blogs I follow have published anything about this yet – which gives me some encouragement because, with two new niches under development, I had already decided NOT to go into panic mode, stay calm, continue the development and wait and see how things go.

For those of you who may be wondering what I am talking about, here’s a blog post that has caused discussion in my networking groups on Facebook:  Google Takes Aim at Exact Match Domains (EMDs).

An EMD is one that you will have keyword researched and set up with the sole intention of trying to dominate the market with that keyword.

Writing Online is actually an exact match domain as this keyword was researched before we bought the domain and set up the site. However, we are not panicking on here, neither are we panicking about our own individual micro-niche sites being penalized by Google.

Why are we not panicking?

For the simple reason that this site is full of original content and the ratio of content versus adverts and product links is extremely high.

It is the same with our individual blogs. Although we have blogs that have been set up for the sole purpose of making sales, those blogs have a good proportion of  original content in relation to the number of products appearing on each post.

As far as I can tell, this latest change to the Google Algorithm is simply part of the evolution that has been going on since I first started writing online. In 2008, the “gurus” tended to advise that if you were setting up a micro-niche blog, all it needed was 10 posts, featuring strong keywords plus a good number of backlinks and that would be enough to get traffic and make sales.

A couple of years ago that number was revised to 30.

Then we saw the value of having huge numbers of backlinks reduced – Google had woken up to the fact that people were “gaming” by paying for hundreds of backlinks that were not necessarily actually relevant to the content being published.

Now on some sites we are seeing content indexed fast and sales made from content that has no backlinks and has only been published for a few days.

Google insists that only low quality sites will be hit by this. However, as we know from past experience, with any change that Google introduces, which involves sites being penalized, there’s going to be some innocent Bystanders caught up in the cross-fire.

We believe that by “low quality” sites, Google is looking at sites that are full of sales items but very little content. Pages full of Amazon Sales Widgets, which of course do not have a full product description. You have to write those yourself.

It seems to us that providing you have a good amount of original content to accompany those products, then you may well be OK. Currently, we are ensuring that for each post on our Micro-Niche Blogs we have at least 500 words of original content. This is made up of a proper introduction to the post (remember one sentence does NOT constitue a paragraph!!) plus original descriptions of each product.

You have to hope you won’t be one of the innocent bystanders, but if you do see a drop in traffic then I suggest you try to contain your anxiety and wait and see what happens – if you really are innocent, then you may recover if you give it time. Google is constantly tweaking its algorithm, so hang on in there.

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Niche Marketing: Niche Blogging

September 17, 2012 By 6 Comments

So far in this series on Niche Marketing, we have looked at establishing niches on free Publishing Platforms, like Wizzley, Hubpages and Squidoo and before we move onto Niche Blogging, let’s just remind ourselves why we can become successful fairly quickly on these sites.

Our success will depend on having a basic understanding of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and the crucial factors in optimizing pages for the Search Engines are:

1) Keyword research

2) Publishing quality, original content

3) Some quality, relevant backlinks – although large numbers is becoming less important

Given an understanding on how to get traffic, publishing on a site like Squidoo gives you the extra “edge”. Google likes Squidoo and Squidoo pages get a boost from Google as a result. Hubpages used to enjoy the same preferential treatment until Panda waddled over the horizon – but that’s another story as we watch Hubpages slowly recover!

And because we know how to get traffic and convert to sales on Squidoo or other free sites, some of us have stayed within our comfort zones and become pretty reliant on those sites. This is not wise, because relying on a site that you do not own makes you vulnerable and this is why we need to think about spreading our content around and why niche blogging is something I personally feel everyone should consider, particularly if you rely on the income you generate online.

Owning sites gives US more control over our online lives. It makes us less vulnerable to changes over which we have no control.

Niche blogging may not reap the same rewards as quickly as publishing in a niche on the free platforms, but done properly you have the potential to build a solid income stream that will start to show results in the medium and longer term.

One of the reasons why it takes longer to establish a good stream of traffic that then converts to sales is that your Niche Blog will not start with the same authority as the pages you publish on the free platforms. You will have to patiently build authority for your niche blog and give it time. Google seems to like sites that have been around for awhile and that are regularly updated, so don’t give up!

And you can use the free platforms to help you build authority for your blog – I will discuss this in a future article.

How to Build a Niche Blog

As with any content you publish, you need to prepare before you publish a single word. And the process for building a Niche Blog is the same as with publishing a page on a free platform. Yes, you do your Keyword Research.

Assuming you already know the specific topic of your blog, you need this keyword research to:

1) Choose a URL

2) Choose a Blog Title

3) Choose a Sub-heading

4) Choose the headings for your articles – try to find enough keywords for 10 articles to start with and then be prepared to do additional keyword research every so often

Once you have the keywords for the URL and Title, then you need to go and buy your domain, which will be the topic for my next article.

In the meantime, you may find these articles useful:

How I Learned To Do Keyword Research

Build It And They Will Come – Not!

How Do I Decide What To Write About

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Niche Marketing: Where To Build Your Niche

September 10, 2012 By 1 Comment

Following on from my last article Niche Marketing: Identyfying a Niche, when we looked at how we need to think like our potential market in order to identify a niche, we are now going to look at where we publish our content.

If you are new to publishing online, you may not feel confident enough to want to start a niche blog, so in this article we are going to look at the free publishing platforms that I and my colleagues here on Writing Online use to publish and make sales in various niches. We will start covering Niche Blogging next time.

The platform on which we all publish the most and with which we have the most success is Squidoo.

Bev, Paula and I have all been publishing on Squidoo since the Summer of 2008. We all arrived on the site not knowing much about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and had a steep learning curve to climb. But thanks to help from the Squidoo Community we learned a lot very quickly. We also recognised that there were no short cuts to success and I think for all of us it took some time before we felt we knew what we were doing.

Squidoo is many different things to different people. If you want to get the word out and inform people about different things, pass on your knowledge and your experience, then Squidoo is a great platform for doing that.

If you want to establish niches and make sales in that niche, you can do that too.

And if you want to use Squidoo’s superiority on Google to drive traffic to your own sites, then yep, Squidoo comes in very handy for that too – and we will cover this in more detail in a future article.

You can also use other sites in the same way.

Hubpages is another place you may want to check out. Although it was mightily slapped in the first ever Google Panda update, the site is now recovering.

Another site I like is Wizzley and you may also like to check out:

Zujava
Webnuggetz
Netleeks

What all these sites have in common is the ability to publish content AND make sales. Some also have revenue share.

But be sure to check out the Terms of Service on each site. Certain topics are banned, either because they are Spam Magnets or they are hateful or they can be just too controversial. Each of these sites has accounts with Google Adsense so they are mindful of not compromising that account.

Do you already publish on sites like this? You do?

Then next time we will start on a series of artcles about Niche Blogging and look how interlinking your content between these Free Publishing Platforms and a Niche Blog can work very well indeed.

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Niche Marketing: Identifying a Niche

August 13, 2012 By Leave a Comment

In my last article Niche Marketing: Common Mistakes, I wrote about how if you jump into a saturated niche, without doing keyword research, you will probably get swallowed by the crowd.

In this article I want to discuss how you need to think like your potential buyers and why certain topics can convert well to sales. Understanding this is important in helping you identify your own niches.

At this point let me be perfectly honest and say you need to be aware that if you want to build a reputation as an ethical marketer, some of these niches need VERY careful handling. This is because, thanks to the amount of junk that has been written about some of these topics and the spam promotion methods used, you may not get the response you would wish for if you start dropping links to these topics in your regular networking groups.

I would also add that not all of these are topics that I personally would write about. However, I think it is important to include them, because they do help us understand WHY people buy in these niches and you can then apply this understanding to other niches.

So let’s go through the list and I will tell you why I think they convert well. Also, as you read through, you may spot that although this list contains a variety of topics, they have something in common: all of these topics are offering solutions to problems.

1. Parenting Issues, Problems and Worries
This was the first niche I ever published in. Anyone who has kids knows that if they have a problem, you as the parent, will do everything in your power to “make it better”.

And one of the biggest problems in parenting is that you can’t exactly go on a training course and learn how to be a parent, because each child is different and no matter how you try to prepare, sometimes you have to wait until it happens, before you can learn how to deal with it.

In my case it was bullying. When it happened to my daughter it took me days to research how to deal with the school, which at the time was not accepting that the bullying was taking place.

I would have given anything to find a resource that would give me tips on exactly the action I needed to take, so I could take that action quickly and get the problem resolved.

Once the problem was solved, I then documented our experience and provided a page that has the advice that any parent in a similar situation would need. It gets good traffic.

This page also recommends books on Bullying and it makes regular sales.

2. Relationships
The web is full of pages about “How to get your Ex back”,”How to get over your Ex and get on with your life” and “How to keep your relationship”, but for me, I am not interested in listening to anyone who tells you how to do that because they have read that this is a lucrative topic. So if you are going to try promoting products in this niche, then you had better be sure that you can come across as genuinely interested in helping people to solve these problems.

So why is this topic so popular?

Often, the initial reaction of anyone who has ever been dumped by a girl or boyfriend, and who did not want to be dumped, is to start looking for ways to get him/her back again.

A huge niche has grown up around the human instinct to stop hurting and make ourselves better. And when we are hurting that bad, an instant download will appeal to those who won’t want to wait for that self help book from Amazon to be delivered.

This is one niche I do not dabble in, but it is here as an example because it is so easy to see why these products sell.

3. Our looks and appearance
Some of the biggest sellers are products and information aimed at reversing the effects of aging and other issues that worry us, such as hair removal and keeping hair.

I do have a page about this topic and I added some personal content to lend authority to the article to ensure people know that I am recommending a product that solves my problem and will hopefully solve theirs. This page makes sales and is yet another good example of the problem solving that sells.

4. Health
50 years ago we were totally reliant on Health professionals such as Doctors and Nurses to help us work out what ailments we had and how to get better. We also relied on them to explain to us how to stay fit and healthy. This started to change with the increased popularity of magazine and newspaper articles, as well as TV programmes, discussing topics such as why we might be feeling tired or generally run down and what we could do about it.

Then the development of the World Wide Web put all this information at our fingertips. We can now research for ourselves to identify the problem and decide what we needed to do to make ourselves healthier. The health niche is massive and the web is full of articles recommending solutions to health problems.

Again I have been able to write an authoritative article that gets fairly good traffic about a disease of the middle ear that I actually suffer from.

And of course it is not just human health problems. Pet care and health issues is another niche that is popular and I do very well with a page all about keeping rabbits happy and healthy in large rabbit hutches and runs.

I do know what I am talking about because we have kept rabbits for over 10 years – I sell a lot of rabbit hutches.

5. Exercise and Fitness
More and more people are using fitness equipment at home – after all it can be cheaper than an annual membership to the Gym.

Do you use any exercise equipment? That could make a page and if you are a fitness fanatic who is passionate about helping others to get fit, then that could make a niche blog.

6. Dieting
Dieting is possibly the most written about topic on the net. I also have a page in the dieting niche and again I have related my own personal experience and the method I used to lose weight after I had my fourth child.

This is one of my best performing articles and I make regular sales of recipe books that will help people follow this diet.

Because of its success on Squidoo, it is probably the most frequently spammed page I have. I am constantly deleting comments that include links to poor quality dieting websites.

However, there are quality dieting websites and this can be a profitable niche if you can present content that convinces your visitors that you DO know what you are talking about.

So far most of these niches sell products that are related to very personal problems that people are looking to solve but the collapse of the world economy over the last few years means that self-improvement help of a more professional nature could be another potentially successful niche.

Many people have found themselves out of work and so they have turned to the information available online to improve their prospects, save money and perhaps even make money.

7. Saving Money and Making Money
Everyone wants to know how they can save money and it seems to me that the number of people looking to make money online is increasing as the recession bites. However, “making money” could also include advice on how to start up a business or how to write a good resume.

A related topic is:

8. Personal Development and Self Awareness

Please note I am NOT necessarily advocating that you start writing in these niches. My advice is that PROVIDING you have personal knowledge or experience in these areas and that you are passionate about topics within these niches, then go for it. But the reason why I am discussing these niches is to get you thinking how buyers think.

Remember the crucial thing is that you are NOT selling products, you are selling solutions to problems. The trick is identifying the problems that people have and how you can offer the solutions. Narrow the topic with some keyword research and you are on your way.

And of course if you are offering solutions to problems that you have solved for yourself, or you are writing about topics in which you are genuinely interested and for which you have passion, then that will mean you are well placed to write with conviction. You can also add your own genuine personal experience, which will add authority to your writing.

From my comments about these various niches you can see how I apply my own experience in my everyday life to write on a variety of topics that fall within some potentially lucrative niches. Many of these pages are published on Squidoo, where, if you know about keyword research and how to use it to narrow a niche, it is fairly easy to get indexed by Google and also start getting search engine traffic.

You can also use pages on Squidoo and other free publishing platforms to build authority for, and send traffic to, your niche blogs and I will move on to niche blogging in my next article.

But in the meantime, you might find it helpful to look through the niches I have discussed here and list out some possible titles for articles.

If you can find ideas for 15-20 articles within one niche then you may have enough material to consider starting a Niche Blog. Any less than that, then the effort is not necessarily wasted, because you could write a series of related pages on Squidoo, Wizzley, Zujava or other free publishing platforms and earn some income that way.

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Niche Marketing: Common Mistakes

July 2, 2012 By 2 Comments

Today, I would like to discuss some common mistakes made by people new to Niche Marketing.

One of the biggest mistakes I see when people first start trying to market online, is that they just repeat what others are doing. Of course it makes sense to learn from the methods that others are successfully using and put them into practice, but if you simply jump into a niche that is saturated with people promoting the same hot topics, chances are you will just fade into the crowd.

In my last post Niche Marketing: Building Authority In Your Niche I discussed what you need to do to stand out from the crowd. However, in addition to the tips I gave in that post, today I want to mention keyword research. Because keyword research, when done properly, will also help you stand out from the crowd.

Keyword Research is an essential tool for not only narrowing your niche but will also help you target strong keywords in what may be a competitive niche. My best current example is The Hunger Games.

I have written a series of Hunger Games pages on Squidoo that is targetting one of the hottest entertainment niches in 2012. The Merchandising is excellent, much of it officially licensed, and there’s a huge variety. Yet, despite all the competition, that niche is bringing in some nice sales for me.

But here’s where I am beating the competition. Each page is a very specific topic within the niche and each page focusses on some very specific search terms. To give an example:

My best selling product is a Mockinjay Pin. The competition is huge – 387,000 pages when I searched that term on Google a minute ago.

Am I targetting “mockingjay pin”? No, I am not. What I am targetting is where can I get a mockingjay pin, which is the search term people are using who actually want to buy one of those pins.

(And if you are not sure about keyword research, I have written a series of pages that will help you. Check out: An Introduction to Keyword Research. Make sure you read all the pages in the series – there’s four.)

Another mistake you can make is to offer expertise, when you are only just starting out. For example, how many times do you see on sites like Squidoo, Wizzley and Hubpages, a new member offering tips on how to succeed on that site?

Who has more credibility? The person who has only published 5 pages on the site? Or the person who has been around for awhile and can demonstrate that the methods they use are successful?

How about the people offering relationship advice? Who will you listen to? Those who are promoting a get your ex back ebook because it is a hot topic that they have been told converts well, or the person who actually DID save their relationship and it is quite clear they did because they are telling a genuine personal story?

What about a new product? You know it is going to take off big time, but so will a lot of other people. The biggest mistake you can make here (apart from NOT doing keyword research) is to leave it too late to publish, when the danger is that you most certainly WILL fade into the crowd. So, how can you stand out from the crowd?

You need to get your content about this new product published way ahead of time. This will give you a head start over the competition, because a lot of the competition won’t realise that the product is even planned. Get the content published, build authority for that content and you stand a better chance of featuring in the first couple of pages in the Search Returns, when the product is released.

Next time we will discuss topics that generally convert well to sales. Some of these topics are not ones that I particularly like, but that wont stop me from discussing them, because they are good examples of the psychology and thought processes of buyers. And to be successful in Niche Marketing you need to be able to think like your potential buyers.

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Niche Marketing: Building Authority In Your Niche

June 5, 2012 By 1 Comment

In my last post in this series we discussed How to Start Choosing Your Niche and looked at how you need to think in order to come up with niche topics about which, not only can you write with authority, but how you can also keep writing over a long period of time. Now we are going to look at how you can establish yourself as an authority in your niche.

(Note: By “Authority” I mean not only with your target audience, but also with Google and the other search Engines.)

And to do this you need to take your time! No way can you establish yourself as an authority in your niche over a few days or weeks.

Think about it this way. OK so you may genuinely be an authority on a topic. But unless members of your target audience know you personally, then no one is going to be aware that you DO actually know what you are talking about.

You have to build a following. You have to show people that they can trust you. No one is going to accept recommendations unless they fully believe what you are saying.

So how do you get yourself known?

This is where Networking comes in and by Networking I don’t mean dropping your links all over the place. I mean engaging with your potential audience, having conversations with them and only leaving a link when it is genuinely relevant, NOT whenever you make a comment.

I see people doing this in forums all the time, they join in a thread and then they drop a link to their own stuff and make it look as though they are only in the conversation because they want to drop a link. It is a huge turn-off!

If you are seen as a person who is genuinely trying to help someone, without regard to what might be in it for you, then you are going to get noticed. And then when you DO leave a link, that will get noticed too.

Somehow you have to find a way to stand out from the crowd. You have to be different to everyone else who is publishing content and trying to make sales from similar products to you. And sometimes less is more!

Who are you more likely to listen to? The Niche Marketer who constantly seems to yell:

“Buy, buy, buy from ME”?

Or the marketer who seems genuinely interested in passing on help and tips to help you solve your problem as well as offering a product?

Places I use to network include:

Twitter
Forums
Facebook

However, I also know that Bev Owens has started using Google+ to great effect and as a result has made good connections with people who are interested in her Native American Totems and Old West Legends blogs.

And while you are networking, you should also be publishing quality content to build the authority of your site in the eyes of Google. If Google can see that you are regularly updating your site with unique content that people are searching for, then you will rank higher in the search returns and get more traffic.

Eventually networking will become less important because Google will do your promotion for you and that is a great place to be.

Networking won’t make you successful overnight. But put the time in at the beginning and then the time you need to spend will reduce as time goes on.

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Niche Marketing – How To Start Choosing Your Niche

May 14, 2012 By Leave a Comment

In my last post about Niche Marketing, How To Come Up With Ideas For A Niche, we discussed how establishing authority is crucial in order to establish trust. Simply – people have to trust what you are saying, in order to believe what you are saying and then they may just buy through your recommendations.

We also looked at how important it is to choose a niche where you can write about your topic regularly and with enthusiasm. Running out of steam, because you don’t actually ENJOY writing about your niche is not going to get you anywhere.

So did you make a “five minute list” as I suggested in my last post? If you did not, then you may find it helpful to do it now, before we carry on…

Do you remember my saying in the first post in this series An Introduction To Niche Marketing that as a Niche Marketer you are offering to solve people’s problems? Forget about looking for hot topics. You need to look for a group of people who have a similar problem and set about providing the solution to that problem.

Don’t get me wrong hot topics do have a place in your niche marketing strategy, but if you want to make a consistent income, then much of this will come from “evergreen” products – products that are not popular one day and gone the next. Ideally you are looking for products that will sell well over a period of time.

Have a look at your five minute list. Is there a topic on there that you really enjoy AND about which you are passionate AND that people would be willing to spend money on? These are the three main ingredients that will blend together to head you in the right direction.

Two out of three ain’t bad – two out of three is utterly awful!

As I said in my last post, I had a successful blog, it got traffic and it made sales, but I ran out of steam. I did not have the passion for the topic that would help me keep it going.

So how do you know if you are really passionate about a topic?

Ask yourselves these questions:

Do you already know a lot about the topic?

Do you look forward to genuinely learning more about the topic?

Do you already write about the topic?

Do you ever discuss the topic with your family and friends?

Do you read books or magazines about the topic?

Do you yourself spend money on products related to that topic?

Do you already belong to an online or offline community centered around that topic?

No, you don’t have to have said “Yes” to all of those questions, but if you said “No” more than twice, then I would be wondering if that is the right topic for you.

This is where I went wrong with my niche blog – heck I could only answer “yes” to ONE of those questions!!

My big “light bulb moment” came when I was having a “Skype” with Bev and Paula, my co-collaborators on Writing Online. I was going through one of those phases I go through every so often, praying I could win the lottery and start writing for pleasure rather than an income. I was struggling to find a new niche to develop on the free publishing platform, Squidoo.

It was Paula who told me to talk to my teenaged daughters. Girls of this age are a huge market. So I was about to start a conversation with my youngest about the sorts of things that she likes to spend money on, when out of the blue she started raving about a book she had just read. Little did I know that thanks to the fact that she made me want to read the book, that this would turn into a great niche for me. The book? The Hunger Games!

Sometimes niches are right there under our noses!

Yes, The Hunger Games may be a niche that will not last for ever, but with three books in the series and one film already released, with two more in the pipeline, I can see this niche lasting at least 3 or 4 years. No, sales wont be sky-high throughout that time, because interest will dip between films and as far as I am aware we dont have the anticipation of new books in the series. But Hunger Games sales have the potential to peak each time a film is released and I reckon that Halloween and the Christmas Shopping Season will see good sales too.

I confess that at the moment as far as blogs are concerned I am “in between niches”. I published my Hunger Games pages on Squidoo – it is a competitive niche so I decided that the page rank boost we get from publishing on a platform that Google likes, would be better for my Hunger Games pages than creating a blog. We will discuss more about these considerations later in the series.

I have two new niche blogs planned, but I am finishing off some work for two clients before I make a start on them. So to give you a couple of examples of niche blogs that have been set up by someone who is genuinely passionate about what she writes, take a look at Bev Owen’s blogs: Native American Totems, which is a well established blog and Bev’s newest blog: Old West Legends.

Yes, you can see a connection between these blogs, but the important thing is that Bev is totally passionate about both these topics and she is targetting people who share that passion. But not only is Bev passionate, she is also knowledgeable about the topics.

Going back to your list of topics, do you have a potential niche in that list or do you need to think about it some more?

Now that we have you thinking about how to go about selecting a niche topic with the right mindset, next time we will start discussing how you can build authority in your niche.

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Niche Marketing – How to Come Up With Ideas For A Niche

May 7, 2012 By Leave a Comment

In my first post about Niche Marketing, Introduction to Niche Marketing,  I discussed how I started writing online and that in order to find a good niche, ideally you need to write about topics with which you have personal experience AND those where you can develop a reputation as an authority on that topic.

Today we will look at this in more detail and how to come up with ideas for a niche.

So why do you need to develop authority in your niche?

Think about it this way…if you are looking to spend money on a product, who are you going to believe when they say they have the exact product you are looking for?

Is it the person who has obviously researched hot topics because they believe they are going to make some quick money that way? Or the person who clearly has genuine experience of that topic and who will therefore genuinely know the best products to recommend?

It is all about trust – who would YOU trust?

Establishing authority is about establishing credibility. And this will actually make it easier to choose your niche. Because if you have knowledge and enthusiasm about a topic, it is easier to keep writing about that topic.

How many of us have started a blog on a whim? I am putting my hand up here *blush*.

I have a blog I started as an experiment. I wanted to prove that Link Wheels work. I did some keyword research (of course!) and found a terrific, very narrow niche. It had the potential for some good traffic and there was very little competition.

The experiment worked. The blog got good traffic, it made some sales, but the biggest problem is that it was a topic about which I had very little knowledge – tattoos. No I don’t have a tattoo. I was shocked when I discovered that my eldest daughter sneaked out and got a tattoo when she was 15. I don’t mind tattoos, but not on my kids. Then her older brother got a tattoo for his 18th birthday….I am hoping my younger kids don’t want tattoos but I am not banking on it!

I guess what convinced me to give the blog a go, was because the tattoo niche did involve a topic about which I do have some knowledge, a topic I like and a topic I would not mind reading up on to further develop my knowledge: Chinese Astrology. So, Year of The Tiger Tattoos was born and then evolved into Tiger Tattoo Designs.

The blog still gets reasonable traffic, despite the fact that it is neglected. Perhaps I will sell it one day. But why is a potentially successful blog neglected?

I ran out of steam. I was not sufficiently interested in the topic to be motivated enough to post new content on a regular basis. It is not costing me any money because it is hosted for free on a multi-user platform. So the blog just sits there.

And this is a huge consideration when you start up a niche blog or a series of pages on sites like Wizzley, Squidoo and so on. Are you interested enough to keep the topic going, or will your enthusiasm dry up?

Before Google introduced us to Panda, niche marketers were saying it was easy to set up a micro-niche blog, with very little effort and then watch the money roll in. All you needed to do was your keyword research, identify a topic that had potential and set up your blog, which would cost nothing in a year for the domain and hosting, when you compare the cost to how much you could potentially make.

They reckoned ten posts would be enough to populate the blog and you were on your way to easy money.

But, as I said, that was <i>before</i> Panda!

Now, instead of 10 posts, you probably need more than 30 AND the blog will need fresh content from time to time. Therefore, because of the effort that will be required to set up and maintain the blog, here are some other things to think about:

When choosing your niche, you need to honestly consider if you actually have 30 posts in you to start with. Posts that will need to be added quickly over a period of a few weeks as you grow the blog (and its authority) as fast as possible. Will you be able to produce that much content? Will it be quality and original? Does the topic have potential to be “evergreen” or will it become outdated in no time at all?

Perhaps, you have no problem with a niche blog, (or a series of Squidoo, Wizzley etc pages) that you know has a limited shelf life, or is holiday specific so it will get most of its traffic at certain times of the year. And that is fine.  But if you do have “time specific” topics, try to have a range of topics, so for example, when Christmas is over, you can focus on a Valentine’s blog, then move onto gift giving for Mother’s Day and so on.

When discussing choosing niches with some of my online contacts that are new to publishing online, one of the biggest barriers is that they honestly believe that they are not an expert on anything. They are not confident that they know enough about anything to believe that others will regard them as an “authority”. They have a big problem actually seeing themselves as an expert on anything.

This is where we need to stop and think about our off-line lives, in addition to our on-line lives. Make a list about things you know about or are interested in. What life skills do you have? What experiences do you have, both in the business and social world?

What have you learned and what do you know about that you can share with others who have a problem that you could help solve?

Just sit down for five minutes and make a list of everything that comes into your head. At this stage no idea is a bad idea!

My “one minute list” reads like this, there would be more if I did it for five minutes:

Bullying
Having teen-aged daughters
Having a grand-daughter  (No! Not from the teen-aged daughters!!)
Eco friendly products
Gardening, growing my own vegetables and having an eco friendly garden
Keyword Research
Wheat free dieting
Backyard wildlife
Astrology
Teaching Business Planning
Keeping rabbits

There’s more I could add. No, I don’t have all the answers to parenting teen-aged girls, but boy, are they a market that has huge potential and it was thanks to my youngest daughter that I got an idea for a niche, that is doing nicely for me at the moment: The Hunger Games. A very competitive niche that I have managed to get into, thanks to narrowing that niche into very related but specific topics with keyword research.

Every one of us IS MOST DEFINITELY an expert at something and most of us are experts at many things. We just don’t realise it.

But once we DO realise, the trick is to turn that knowledge and enthusiasm into something that is realistically marketable.

If you have not done the list-making exercise, then go ahead and do it before next time. You should then have some ideas about topics and we will discuss more about how to take your ideas and change your thinking in order to be able to identify which ones have the potential to be marketable.

Filed Under: Niche Marketing Tagged With: , ,

Introduction to Niche Marketing – a New Series

April 30, 2012 By 1 Comment

Introducing a new series of posts on Writing Online about Niche Marketing.

If you are like me you arrived online wanting to try to make some money through writing. Various circumstances will have helped us to arrive at that decision.

Perhaps loss of a job through redundancy or illhealth? Needing to make extra income, in addition to your day job? Wanting to be a writer? Trying to fit in working around your family? Or maybe you just wanted to give it a go?

Whatever the reason, unless you already had some knowledge and experience of SEO, you were probably facing a steep learning curve.

I first started writing online, nearly four years ago this coming July. I had always wanted to be a writer and decided that, because my mobility had been affected by the onset of illness, this was the time to try my hand at writing. I wasn’t sure what I was going to write about or what I needed to do to get traffic or indeed how I could generate an income. So I blundered along for awhile. I knew nothing about SEO and keyword research, but I got lucky. I wrote a few pages on Squidoo and a couple of those pages started getting traffic.

Those two pages were about problems of which I had personal experience and the solutions I found to deal with those problems.

Hold that thought, because it is important and we will discuss it in further detail in future posts.

It was not long before I started picking up on phrases like “niche Marketing”, “narrowing the niche” and “niche specific”. Gaining an understanding of what this “niche marketing lark” is all about is crucial if you not only want to get traffic, but also make sales.

So what IS Niche Marketing?

Putting it very simply, Niche Marketing is identifying a group of people (your Target Market) who have a very specific problem and providing a solution.

A Niche Marketer is someone who has identified the problem and offers a solution. In many cases the problem is resolved by the purchase of a product, either in the form of information to solve the problem, or a tangible product that will also solve the problem.

To give an example: my daughter was bullied at primary school. As a result I developed a vast range of knowledge about bullying and one of the first pages I ever published online was about that experience and what we did to resolve it.

Parents visiting that page are part of a group of people with the problem that their kids are being bullied. My page offers solutions in the form of information about the problem, the action we took, the legislation that exists about bullying and how we resolved the problems. The page also offers more solutions in the form of books about bullying.

Here’s another thought you need to hang on to: the fact that my daughter was bullied and that I was very active in getting the problem solved, makes me an Authority on the subject of school bullying.

To be perfectly honest, providing you know enough about how to research keywords, I have found that it is easy to get good traffic but converting that traffic to sales is another matter entirely.

In this series about Niche Marketing, we will look at how you can identify niches, what you need to consider and how you need to develop a certain mindset that will give you a chance of being more successful.

Next time we will discuss how to choose a niche.

Filed Under: Niche Marketing Tagged With: , , ,