The Niche Marketing Blog

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Social media sites are quickly becoming powerful tools for the niche marketer. Facebook has recently announced reaching 500 million users. YouTube is now streaming two billion videos a day. Twitter is expanding at a faster and faster clip.

These, and dozens of other social media sites, have turned the social media experience into a boon for the savvy niche marketer. How? Each of these social media sites have “search function” capability. This allows marketers to focus and follow conversations within their niches.

Keeping current on the latest trends, releases, and topics is powerful in itself. But, the real power lies n the niche marketer’s ability to interact, to comment, and to respond to the stream of information in which they are competing. This gives the astute niche marketer the edge by creating opportunities to be seen and heard by prospects.

If managed correctly, the niche marketer can be viewed as an authority, or expert, in their chose field, and this positioning can drive traffic back to a home page.

What does all of this mean for you? Quite simply, if you are not engaging in social media to help sell your products and services, you are leaving lots of money on the table.

Today’s tip: figure out who your target market is and use social media to connect with them.

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Niche Marketing: Finding Hot Markets

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Technorati Tags: business, Facebook, marketing, social media, Social network, target market, Twitter, youtube

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What do Starbucks, Sports Authority, and Jack in the Box all have in common? They all are successful, national brands. They also have recently embraced social media as part of their marketing campaigns.

Starbucks and Sports Authority are developing campaigns using “location based” media (such as Foursquare.com), and Jack in the Box has developed a “fan page” on Facebook where they can communicate their latest promotions via their fan base.

Hundreds of businesses, both large and small, are following suit.

Whether you publish a blog, or have a “brick and mortar” retail location, you can no longer afford to ignore social media and it’s power to both create a community of followers, and nudge those followers to your blog or store.

But, with the dozens of social media sites popping up, where do you start? My recommendation is to visit several of the better known sites (like Facebook, Twitter, Digg and StumbleUpon) and see which ones “fit” your personal style.

For instance, if you are interested in bookmarking sites in your industry, consider the social bookmarking sites (like Digg, Reddit, and Propeller).

If writing short posts is more in tune with your lifestyle (called “micro-blogging”), then consider Twitter.

If you just want to jump in with both feet – and mix it up with 400 million of your closest “friends” – then Facebook might be the place for you.

In any case, get in the pool and start paddling around. You’ll find that the water is just fine.

Once you’ve settled on a small list of social media sites that interest you, set up an account with each and begin posting; post about yourself, but also post about your industry and your business.

One word of caution here: don’t get into social media sites thinking that you are going to get very far by selling your products and services – that will come later. Simply become part of the conversation and and listen for frustrations and “pain points’. Offer advice. Point people towards solutions that you have found.  Be seen as an expert. Lead the conversation. If you have something useful to say, people will start looking forward to your posts, and then will want to learn more by stopping by your blog or store.

So, you’re now ready to take your first step. It is a good step to take. In future posts I’ll explore more of the social media sites, along with some tips and tricks for  building a loyal following.

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Social Media in Plain English

commoncraft.com A simple story that illustrates the forces shaping social media. This video comes in an unbranded “presentation quality” version that can be licensed for use in the workplace. http

What is Social Media?

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Technorati Tags: Digg, Facebook, Reddit, social media, Social network, StumbleUpon, Twitter

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By Scott Spooner

In 1971,  British rock group, The Who, released their seminal album, Who’s Next, which featured a song titled Going Mobile. This was a song about a guy who decided to give up his rooted existence and go on the road.

39 years later, it looks like he’s got lots of company.

Recent research indicates that, on a daily basis, more people are accessing the Internet via their smart phones, than there are people emailing. That’s an astounding figure considering that smart phones weren’t even around a decade ago.

So, “mobile” has arrived and while not all pieces of the mobile landscape have been figured out, the smart business owners are already looking to mobile marketing strategies in an effort to get ahead of the curve.

What can you do to begin the process for your own business? Start by making sure that your web site is formatted for mobile devices.  If you are running a WordPress blog, it is a fairly simple process of installing one of several available plug-ins. I use WPTouch, but you can choose whichever one suits your tastes.

If you are running a web site, you will have to get into a little more programming. Contact your web site administrator and talk with him/her about adding some code that will allow the site to be formatted for mobile devices. Be aware that you will mostly likely have to set up an additional hosting service for the mobile site (I will cover this in another post).

Whatever you do (or do not do), understand that “mobile” is not only here to stay, but will most likely be the dominate platform of the near future.

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By Zachary Wilson

1. Not knowing what you don’t know
Its easy to do online surveys these days. Too easy. It may be so cheap and easy that you do it without understanding the basics and end up with misleading answers that send your business down the wrong path. This is worse than never doing any research in the first place. Spend a little time and get to know what you don’t know about market research. A basic review of the following topics is a great start.

• Sampling and sampling error
• Quantitative vs. qualitative research
• Question bias / question design
• Response rates / confidence levels
• Questionnaire coding
• Why people take surveys (social contract)

Some great books on these subjects are:
“Mail and Internet Surveys: The Tailored Design Method” by Don A. Dillman
“Asking Questions: A Definitive Guide to Questionnaire Design” by Norman Bradburn, Seymour Sudman, Brian Wansink

2. Not eliminating sampling errors
Now that you know what sampling error is you can understand why it is critical to conducting meaningful market research. Many of the online surveys you see today are full of potential sampling errors. Don’t be one of them. Take the time to develop a good sample and then make sure you get as many of those people as possible to your survey. This is probably the biggest difference between professional market research and your do-it-yourselfers. The pros take the time and money to develop good samples and then make sure that they get good response rates. You can to if you put in the effort.

• Always use a true random sample
• Tracking your respondents (PINs)
• Program the survey to eliminate duplicates and respondents with bad intentions
• Check the data for oddities (clean the data of illegitimate records)
• Use incentives (does not have to be monetary, see social contract)

3. Making decisions with inaccurate information
If you never understood any of # 1 and # 2 it is a good bet your survey is useless. Worse than that you may think it is telling you what to do with your important business decisions. Making decisions with inaccurate information is worse than taking a guess.

4. Writing bad questionnaires
You might get everything else right and then go and write a bad questionnaire. Lots of online surveys have at least one bad question. What is a bad question? It’s any of the following:

• Biased questions
• Unanswerable questions (impossible to know the answer)
• Questions with two meanings
• Hard to understand questions (way to long, strange use of words)
• Dumb questions (asking about something the researcher should already know, or has already asked)

5. Programming a hard to take survey
After you have spent all that time creating a good sample and writing good questions don’t ruin it by programming a hard to use survey. One of my top gripes is forcing respondents to complete every answer. Too much of this is going to get you either a contrived answer or the respondent leaving. Neither is good.

• Don’t force non-critical questions
• Don’t have non-standard buttons
• Don’t use non-standard technologies (java applets, etc.)

6. Going cheap
Both the good and bad thing about online market research is that it can be much less expensive than in the past. The bad of this is that it is just too easy to conduct flawed market research. Many of the above items cost time and money (sampling, questionnaire design, etc.) Spend the time and money to do it right. Even better hire a quality market research firm to do it for you. Either way you will save money in the long run by conducting quality market research.

7. Confusing social networking with quantitative market research
Talking with lots of people (social networking) might gain you valuable qualitative information but it is not quantitative market research. The difference is qualitative information rarely represents all of your audience and gives you individual opinions and ideas. Quantitative research on the other hand is designed to represent all of your audience and gives you answers that you can know reflects all of your customers. Don’t confuse the two. Social networking can be useful but understand its limitations.

8. Being overly “cute” with the survey tool
Your market research is supposed to gather meaningful information about your target audience. It is not supposed to impress them with all the high technology you can master. Keep your survey technology as simple as possible to reduce excluding respondents that are not up to speed with the latest and greatest.

• Keep Flash and JavaScript to a minimum (use them but not in critical areas, always provide alternatives.)
• Use tried and true web technologies

9. Relying on only one source of information
Market research is a snapshot of opinions at a certain time. If your research results in wildly different answers than you were anticipating it is wise to confirm these conclusions with more data.

• Conduct another survey
• Look for corroborating data

10. Ignoring your market research
If you go to all the trouble to conduct a good study then have a plan to do something with that information. Too many organizations will conduct market research for one reason or another and when they get information back just sit on it. Don’t be the one who ends up saying “Wow, if we had just done what our market research told us we wouldn’t be in this bad position”. Before you conduct any online research have a plan as to what you will do with it.

Zachary Wilson is Vice President and Web Manager of Wilson Research Group (a small Silicon Valley market research firm) and has been conducting online surveys for over 10 years. This article targets those who are not market research professionals but want to conduct professional surveys.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Zach_Wilson
http://EzineArticles.com/?Top-10-Mistakes-in-Conducting-Online-Market-Research&id=2552698

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Technorati Tags: market research, Qualitative research, Quantitative research

Image by awmalloy via Flickr

By Scott Spooner

From niche marketing misconceptions, to the power of simple, small business ideas, here is the latest niche marketing news from around the blogosphere.

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Technorati Tags: internet marketing, Market segment, niche market, niche marketing, niche marketing news

by Scott Spooner

Google has recently added “social search” to its ever expanding catalog of “Google labs” experiments, and this is great news for on- line organisations which are involved in niche marketing.

For people who are comfortable with, and rely upon, seo strategies, “social search” will come as a welcome supplement to your SEO toolkit.

Search engine optimization was once defined by paid and organic search parameters. However, as the Internet has evolved, newer search platforms have become crucial Internet marketing tools. These tools include well known properties like YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and alternative social networking websites.

Here are but two examples of the way newer search platforms are making their presence felt.

Surprising to some, YouTube is presently ranked as the number two search engine online. The sheer volume of videos served up each month by YouTube accounts for this high ranking.

Additionally, both Google and Bing just announced that they are indexing – and thus displaying in search results- Twitter posts(tweets) , leading many internet business owners to rush towards having a comprehensive “Twitter plan” in place as soon as possible.

It is due to the emergence, and prominence, of these newer search platforms, that “social search” is being developed. Indeed, these recent developments have many ‘Net watchers speculating about whether social networking will be the next big thing in internet niche marketing.

That brings us back to Google and their newest experiment.

At the Web 2. Summit(2009) Marissa Mayer announced latest experimental feature offered by Google, noting that it is aimed at improving the user’s search results by including web pages created by that user’s social connections.

This is how Marissa Mayer describes this new experimental lab:

“Due to the ever- increasing popularity of social networks, we’ve been thinking about how your social network could influence and improve your search results. Social Search does just that by surfacing content in your search results that is written by your friends or people you follow. That way, you get the best resources from the web overall, plus the best results(blogs, reviews, travelogues) that are relevant to you, since they were written by people you know. Social Search will be launching soon on Google Experimental and Google Labs. ”

In brief, social search is all about developing greater relevancy to the individual user who is conducting a search through Google.

That’s wonderful for the individual user. But, what about the internet marketer who is attempting to gain a better foothold in their niche? Well, this new function could prove to be a boom for the savvy niche marketer that is already mining the internet social networks.

Businesses owners who have established followings on Facebook, Friend Feed, Twitter, YouTube, and similar sites will now be able to search targeted key phrases on Google and monitor the buzz(or lack thereof) around their company and/or products. Trend spotters will be able to identify emerging trends to capitalize upon, or potential problems that need quick remedies.

Just think what this means to the internet niche marketer: real- time, direct access to the thoughts, posts, and musings of those in your social(and for the smart marketer, that can be read as “business”) networks.

So how does the feature presently work? Let me state right off the top that, because of issues relating to privacy, social search is set- up as an opt- in feature, and is directly connected through Google Profiles and Gmail. So, to participate, you’ll first want a Google account.

Once you’ve created your account, you add links from your Twitter, Friend Feed, and similar pages, to your Google profile. Google will then explore those links to identify your followers and the content they produce; content derived from their blogs, photo albums, videos, and reviews.

Then, the following time you’re searching at Google, if your search query returns helpful results from your social connections, Google will display the results at the bottom of the search results pages.

To view how this function works, log into your Google account, and then type your query at Google. com. If you don’t see a OneBox at the bottom of the search results pages, click on “Search Options” and select “Social” to include the results to your social circle.

Now, you may be wondering just who is included in this new social network. A Google help center page tells us that the network includes:

• people you’re connected to through social services(such as Twitter or Friend Feed)
• people that you’ve listed in your Google profile
• people in your Gmail(or Google Talk) chat list
• People in your Friends, Family, and Coworkers contact groups for Google

Additionally, Google Reader subscriptions can be added, so it’s now simpler to search Google Reader.

Keep in mind, these connections are on an opt- in basis, and you’ll be able to include, or exclude, any group or social service that you wish. If you fail to opt- in, your social networks won’t be included, and you will not see their content in your search results.

So, have a consider this new experimental function. Get good at using it, because it’s likely that your competitors will likewise.

Technorati Tags: niche marketing, social search

In this Snowcast ( http://snowcaplabs.com/blog ) Loren demonstrates some simple techniques to finding “keyword seeds” and expand them to get hundreds (or thousands) of keywords relevant to a given market niche.

Using freely available tools, such as the excellent (and free!) Keyword Tool available from SEOBook (http://seobook.com), we see just how easy it is to learn a lot about the web traffic available to your markets.

For more web marketing screencasts, advice, and consulting, check out http://snowcaplabs.com

Duration : 0:9:58

Read the rest of this entry »

Technorati Tags: keywords, market research, niche marketing tools, niche markets

By now you know that the secret to successful online marketing lies in selecting a set of keywords that are closely associated with your niche. The tighter the relationship between the keywords which you are optimizing for, and the niche market you are in, the more targeted the traffic will be that arrives at your site or blog.

Picking the correct keywords is part science and part art; and there are many keyword research tools available to assist you in making your decision. I have written about keyword research tools in other posts, so I won’t take up your time with a review of them here.

Today’s post looks at a slightly different aspect of keyword research and selection: picking the “buying” keywords.

It is estimated that upwards of 85% of search keywords are for “information gathering” purposes only; that is, the user is not looking to make a purchase at the moment. Maybe they are still deciding on the topic, the product, or the brand. Maybe they are just interested in the information for more academic purposes. Whatever the reason, to be a successful Internet marketer, you’ll have to discover, and then focus your efforts upon, the remaining 15% of the search terms; what we will call the “buying” keywords.

This can be a daunting task; one that will take several hours to get through. However, it doesn’t have to be that way.

Mike Mograbi, Mike Chambers, and “Matt”, have developed a product called Buyer Keywords Generator. This product is designed to search out and identify targeted buyer keywords for your niche. This is a well designed and efficient product that will save you hours of work. I could go on and on telling you the benefits of owning this software – but, that isn’t the purposes of this post. If you want to learn more about Buyer Keywords Generator, click on the following link:

Buyer Keywords Generator

What I do want to share with you today is a set of 90+ short videos, named Buyer Keyword Profits Exposed, which is also offered by the Buyer Keywords Generator team. This FREE set of videos discusses such topics as: the three phases of the buying cycle, how to identify buyer keywords, expanding your buyer keywords, how to find buyer keywords, where to find buyer keywords, where to find the best niche sites, how to generate buyer keywords from the search engines, and much more.

You don’t have to purchase the software to gain access to this set of videos; although, you might find it more efficient to spend a little money in order to save a lot of time. Either way, the choice is yours.

Here is the link to sign-up for the free set of Buyer Keyword Profits Exposed videos:

Buyer Keyword Profits Exposed Videos

Scott

Technorati Tags: Buyer Keywords Profits Exposed Review, niche market product reviews, niche marketing tools

OK, so you are interested in niche marketing and you have read over and over about how important it is to find a profitable niche. But, where do you start? Many of my clients get stuck right there: they can not seem to zero in on a profitable niche.

The truth of the matter is that profitable niches are to be found all over; and ideas for locating them are just as plentiful. Yahoo Answers, eBay, and Amazon are good places to start looking. So are the search engines of Google, Yahoo, and Bing. But, with so many choices, it is easy to get overwhelmed.

Here’s one answer that will make niche finding easier for you. Internet marketer, Cindy Battye, has developed a web site named Daily Niche Idea. Each day of the week, she offers up a researched niche that fits in with the week’s theme (e.g. the weekly theme might be “babies”, and each daily niche idea will then be related to the baby niche).

Each daily niche idea includes estimated search traffic and pay-per-click (PPC) bid pricing. Each niche idea also includes an affiliate product, the home site for that product, and the commission paid (in U.S. dollars).

So, you get a weekly niche theme, daily niche ideas, and affiliate information. By the way, did I mention that all of this is FREE? So, how can she do this, you ask? Well, she also sells an upgraded membership where you can receive increased commissions, full re-branding rights, and more.

But – and here’s the important part – you do not have to take her up on her paid program. If you choose, you can remain a free member and just take advantage of the free daily niche ideas.

So there you have it. No more reasons to be stuck not knowing what niche to go after, and no more excuses about not having the money to do niche research.

Here’s the link to Cindy’s site:

==> Daily Niche Idea

Scott

Technorati Tags: Cindy Battye, Daily Niche Idea, niche marketing, niche marketing tools

Self proclaimed “super affiliate” Jeff Johnson runs a blog named Underground Training Lab. Jeff mostly writes about affiliate strategies and SEO techniques, offering quality content and tips that any niche marketer can use immediately.

Jeff combines both text and video, giving the reader delivery options. As with most quality blogs, Jeff also offers RSS feeds so that you can stay up with his latest postings. If you like what you see, you can also follow Jeff via Facebook and Twitter.

While you’ll find a sprinkling of offers on this blog, most of the content on the front page is free for the reader. This is a good source of information for affiliate marketers who want to learn new techniques and maybe pick up some extra sales.

You can find the Underground Training Lab blog at the following link:

==> Underground Training Lab

Scott

Technorati Tags: niche marketing, niche marketing tools, Underground Training Lab, Underground Training Lab review