Every internet marketer knows the importance of discovering good and profitable
niches. Many internet marketing gurus have a very simplistic way of teaching
about niche discovery. The sum total of some gurus’ teaching on this can be
summarized as:

1. Choose a topic that you like, have experience or are interested in.

2. Take the main keyword from this topic and plug it into a keyword research
tool.

3. Look at the search count. If it is about 30,000 per month, it’s a good niche.
If it is below 30,000 searches, there is very little market and therefore it is
not a good niche. If it is way above 30,000 searches, there is probably too much
competition and therefore it is risky to enter this niche market.

That’s it. Based on those three steps, you are supposed to find a niche. What’s
wrong with such a teaching?

Firstly, there is no research into the competition. No step is taken to discover
how strong a competition you face in that niche.

Secondly, there is no research into long-tail keywords. Long-tail keywords are
defined as keyword phrases of at least 4 words (the more words, the better).
Every marketer knows the importance of long-tail keywords. Long-tail keywords
can lead you to lucrative sub-niches.

Thirdly, there is no research into the tendency of the searchers to buy. It’s
not only a matter of whether the searchers have money or not. Some people in a
particular niche market may have money but are not intending to buy anything.

So here’s how the gurus really do their niche and keyword research:

1. Examine your own interests, abilities, knowledge, experiences. Anything from
these may be a potentially good niche to market to.

2. Identify what’s hot in the market i.e. what is currently the most
talked-about thing, what’s buzzing or new in town. Is this a potential niche?

3. From the above two steps, identify potential niches. Then run these potential
niches through these ‘filters’:

a. Are people in this niche ready to buy and not merely information seekers or
looking for freebies? For example, ‘how to score an ‘A’ in your SAT examination’
would probably not be a very lucrative niche because it would interest only
students who may not have the money to buy anything much.

b. Is there a problem that the people in this niche cannot solve themselves? Any
niche involving technical expertise would nicely fit into this criteria. For
example, ‘how to solve Windows Vista registry problems’ would likely be a good
niche because very few people are technologically competent enough to deal with
these problems.

c. Do the people in this niche have an urgent crisis that needs to be overcome?
The more urgent the better. For example, ‘how to stop your teenager’s drug
habit’ is an extremely urgent crisis that begs for answers.

d. Is there an ‘evergreen’ need in this niche that is not a just a fad? ‘How to
improve your golf swing’ is an evergreen need compared to ‘strategies for World
of Warcraft’ (World of Warcraft is a PC game). Once the fad for World of
Warcraft is over, the market in this niche disappears.

Obviously, the more ‘yes’ answers you get to the above questions the more
potentially profitable a niche is.

4. Once you have identified a potentially profitable niche based on the steps
above, it is time to look for some long-tail keywords. These long-tail keywords
will reveal some sub-niches which you can further profit from. For example, if
you type in ‘golf swing’ into Wordtracker, you would get a whole list of related
searches. Look for keyword phrases with four words or more. Some of them are
‘stack and tilt golf swing’, ‘biomechanics of golf swing’, ‘what is the proper
weight distribution during the golf swing’ etc.

5. To find out how much competition there is in this niche, simply type in all
the keywords you have into Google’s free keyword analysis tool. This tool will
give you the estimated advertiser competition (which is the same as marketer
competition), average search volume for the previous month and average monthly
search volume. The great thing is that this tool also gives you synonyms for the
keywords which means you get more keyword suggestions. You identify keywords
with as little competition but as many searches as possible.

The steps above represent a much more complete way of niche discovery. You will
not only find profitable niches but also the relevant keywords that go with
these niches. By doing this you make a solid start in your niche marketing.

affiliate marketing is a great way to make money online, and even if you don’t have a list of customers who buy every time you email them, you can still make money with affiliate marketing with this cool tactic that I use. I actually have taught my mom to do this in several niches and she uses it to bring in a couple thousand dollars a month. She’s wanting to retire and works a full time job, so I knew I had to come up with something she could do fairly easy.

First, you’ll need to pick a pretty broad niche. Like health, hobbies, etc. Yes, you can even use Internet marketing. That’s actually the niche I use this tactic for.

So, once you have your niche, you need to make sure their are plenty of digital products for your niche. ClickBank and PayDotCom are the two biggest affiliate sites where you can find tons of digital products you can sell as an affiliate.

Pick 1 digital products to start out with. You’re either going to have to buy it or ask the owner for a review copy because you’ll need to write a review for the product. Now this is really important. You’re not writing an ad for the product, you’re writing a review. My suggestion is to go to a place like http://www.EzineArticles.com and read articles about how to write a review before writing your first one.It’s really not that hard, so don’t let that discourage you. Once you get your first one done, all other ones you write will be super easy.

Once you have your product reviewed, and the review written for it, it’s time to create a blog, and post the review to your blog. Make sure you create links so that once the person reads your review, they can buy the product. These will be your affiliate links. I highly recommend getting your own domain name and installing a blog on it.

Okay, so you’ve got a blog with your product review. There’s only one problem. No one is coming to your blog, right? Well here’s where the secrets come in. Just kidding. The secret is there are no secrets. Just tactics you have to learn.

So the first thing I do is use an RSS submitter tool, and submit my blog rss feed to the directories. This will give you some instant traffic.

The second thing I do is pay an article writer to write an article for me on the topic of the product I have reviewed. Once you have your article, there’s one more step you have to take before we use the articles, and that’s keyword research.

You need to find easy to rank for keywords that are related to your product. An easy to rank for keyword is simply a keyword that gets good searches but doesn’t have a lot of competition. There are a lot of software programs online that will help you determine easy to rank for keywords. You’ll need 2-3 easy to rank for keywords per product.

Once you have those, make sure to take one of them and use it to link back to your site in your resource box. This will give you backlinks for that keyword because we’re going to be submitting the article to article directories. Backlinks are important and submitting articles is a great way to get them.

Take your other keywords you have, and use other ways to get backlinks for them. Either have more articles written or learn more ways to get backlinks. Believe me, there are tons of ways to get backlinks and many of them are free.

Once you’ve done this, rinse and repeat with a new product….

What does all of this accomplish?

If you keep writing reviews for your products and putting your affiliate links in the reviews, you’ll make sales on those products by driving traffic the ways I’ve told you. There are tons of ways to drive traffic, but this is the easy method. You’ll get some instant traffic, but by using the backlink tactic, you’ll also get long term traffic as your reviews start ranking for their keywords.

Let’s talk about traffic to your site.

Without traffic, you lose.

Therefore, no matter what your business model is, traffic is the
major issue. In this article, we will talk about Google AdWords
pay per click (PPC) advertising which is a way
for you to get targeted traffic to your website. If you’re new, there
are traps.

The first tip has to do with doing your ad
campaign right. When you create a new “ad campaign”, it is better to
make a number of smaller ad groups within that campaign. One of
the big mistakes that you could  make is creating a
single ad group and filling it up with hundreds if not thousands
of keywords. It’s better to come up with a few different
categories that describe your business and focus on creating
groups of very tight keywords for each group.

Secondly, learn how to write a killer Ad and get them to click on it.
With the limited number of characters allowed for the ad copy,
one of the best ways to come up with attention grabbing copy is to
learn from the classified ads in newspapers and magazines.
Browse through the classifieds and take note of any ad that really
grabs your attention and ask yourself “why” it works.
When you write ads that get more clicks, you grow your
click through ratio (CTR) and  lower the minimum bid that
you pay for each click.

The third tip has to do with testing and tracking your ads.
Be sure to create lots of ads and rotate them evenly to test which
ones result in the best CTR. You will need to run the test so
that each ad gets at least 50 or so clicks. Otherwise, the test
will be invalid if you base your decision on just a few clicks.
When you  first set up your campaign, be sure to select the
option to “rotate your ads evenly” because the default option is to
allow the system to automatically optimize showing your best ad
more often. In this case, you’ll not be able to run an
accurate split test.

It’s a steep learning curve for becoming proficient at Google
AdWords. If you don’t give up, however, and master the system,
you will be rewarded with targeted traffic to your webstite.

If you have additional tips, please leave a comment.

Make it a Great Day!

Bob

If you want to learn how to get more traffic to your squeeze page for FREE then this right up your alley. In this article, we will discuss Article Marketing and Forum Marketing. After reading this article you should be able to implement these free strategies into your current methods and shoot up the traffic to your squeeze page.

Article marketing is the process of submitting unique written content usually at least 400 words to article directories. It is a great traffic tool if used correctly; it is especially great because it is free. Usually when someone uses article marketing they use it to promote an affiliate product, but for List Building it is even better. This is because the reader is able to get something for free, which enhances click through and subscribers. Article marketing is a great method to attract subscribers to your squeeze page, but not the only free way.

Another method that can be used is to use forum marketing. This is an easy and fast way to get your squeeze page out onto the internet. For whatever your niche is on there are dozens of forum websites that one can exploit for their benefit. When searching the forums, look for threads that you can participate and not SPAM in, this is crucial. If you spam the threads, then people will not see you as a knowledgeable person on your niche and click on your signature link. The signature link is a link of some sort that is posted with every post that one makes; this is where you will put your link to your squeeze page. Try to post around 10-15 posts a day that are relevant and use full to the current conversation within the thread; this will raise your Google ranking and also bring traffic to your squeeze page. Forum marketing is another great method to build your double opt in subscriber base, video marketing is one last great free way to receive targeted traffic.

List Building will put you on your path to financial success and to the freedom that you deserve, especially when one can use free methods that are very easy to implement into your list building efforts. Whether you are using article marketing or forum marketing, or both there is no limit to the amount of targeted traffic you can receive and above all, for free.

Now, take action and reap the benefits!

Bob Kimball

Good morning from the Mid West!

I’m sharing with you today the results of a personal survey I conducted recently. I sent emails to 25 Affiliate Marketers who have become ‘successful’ . I asked one simple question. “What is the most important tool necessary for success as an affiliate Marketer.”

Here are the top 3.

Tool #1: Your Own Website

Build a good, credible and professional looking website. Your website is the jump off point of all your marketing efforts. Build a user-friendly website, which will appeal to your prospects and encourage them to click on the links to the products and service you are promoting and make a purchase. Concentrate your efforts on building a website that will cater to what your prospects need.

Make your website full of original, relevant and useful content. Content is still king and will not only build your credibility, but will also help you achieve a higher search engine ranking. . Establish yourself as a credible expert in the field by posting relevant and useful articles. Forging a good reputation is the first step in building up a loyal, responsive consumer base.

Tool #2: Incentives

In order to receive, you must give. In other words, over-deliver, frequently, and you’ll get what you want. Building an opt-in email list is one of the best ways to gather prospects. Offer a free membership or an ezine . Better yet, offer good, quality gifts to your prospects to encourage them to subscribe to your newsletters. You can present free software, access to exclusive services and other freebies that will be helpful to your prospects. You must acquire a
business mentality here. If you have a product that perhaps you could sell
for $7 or $17 or even $27, you could leverage that into thousands of eager,
responsive subscribers who will await every future offer from you, by simply
‘giving’ that product to them in exchange for their name and email address!

Tool #3: Traffic to Your Site

Driving targeted traffic to your website is a must. The best website ever created is worthless if nobody ever sees it! Getting folks to your site should be your first and continuing priority. Launch an aggressive reciprocal link campaign. Contact webmasters of similar websites with your best offer in exchange for a backlink to their site. Create a signature file and visit forums that are filled with folks and respond to their questions. DO NOT ATTEMPT TO SELL DIRECTLY IN THE FORUMS. You’ll lose any cred you have ever created. Trust me here.

One of the best ways to create a never-ending flow of good back-links – at no cost at all – is by submitting articles, with your website’s link at the resource box, to e-zines and free article submission sites. The more sites you submit your articles to, the better your link popularity is. Make your articles original, relevant and useful so that more websites will pick it up and post it.

In Conclusion

Now, get to work. Nothing worthwhile is ever easy. You’ll continue to learn.
Always try. Never give up. If your dream is a worthy dream, persistence in the chase will be the single most important factor in catching the dream. Give to all those you meet. You will reap rewards from giving.

Make It A Great Day!
Bob
P.S. Have you got any to add to this?