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Archive for the ‘niche marketing tools’ Category

Make More Money with AdSense

It’s not very often that I can offer you a powerful tool that can actually help you make some money, AND that is free of charge. This tool comes in the form of a PDF report, and it explains, clearly and in detail, how to increase the AdSense revenue on your blog.

There is nothing to purchase, and no sign-up is required.

The author of this PDF is Michael Campbell. Michael has outdone himself by offering this downloadable PDF. This report is the result of many months of research, and the finished product is simply fantastic.

As excerpted from Michael’s blog:

I overlaid hundreds of heatmaps, clickmaps, web usability studies, eye tracking reports and ad placement suggestions from the bigger ad networks. I then created 30 templates based on this data, and tracked the amount of ad revenue generated, depending on ad position.

The result is a set of nine heatmaps that show you exactly where to set up your AdSense ads on your blog. This is powerful information and it won’t cost you a dime. If you are looking to increase your AdSense revenue, you simply must have this PDF.

To get your PDF, click on the following link: The Ultimate Heatmap

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Mobile Payments Now Accepted at Starbucks

Mobile Marketing comes to Starbucks

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Mobile marketing continues to evolve as retailers test the boundaries of consumer behavior with new and innovative purchase technologies. The latest salvo has come from Starbucks.

After reporting success success with its Starbucks Card Mobile payment pilot program in select San Francisco, Seattle and Target the premium coffee retailer is now ready to extend the program to nearly 300 company-operated stores in New York City and Long Island.

According to Starbucks:

“Starbucks Card Mobile for iPhone and BlackBerry lets users pay for their coffee by holding up the 2-D barcode on their smartphone to the scanner at the counter. The application allows customers to manage and reload their Starbucks Cards as well.

Customers have responded positively to the mobile payment option, Starbucks reports.”

The trend is catching on. Starbucks reports that “one in five of all in-store transactions are paid for via Starbucks Card (mobile or physical), and more than $1 billion will have been loaded on to cards by year’s end.”

So, as mobile marketing strategies merge with mobile payment options, consumers will become ever more dependent on their smart phones for locating and purchasing goods and services.

Love it, or hate it, mobile marketing is here to stay; and it is already becoming a game changer.

How will your company compete in this new environment?

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Incorporating Infographics into Your Marketing Strategy

Information graphics: a marketing strategy

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Have you ever considered using Infographics as part of your marketing strategy? If not, you should.

In a recent post, the folks over at Social Media Today took a hard look at the use of infographics and came up with 12 “take-away points for businesses.

Take-away points include how to conceptualize and develop an infographic, the role of research, and how to get your infographic spread around the Internet.

The bottom line is that the use of infographics helps convey more information, and allows the reader to retain a higher percentage of that information, than if the writer omitted the graphics.

As niche marketers, we have a tough job just commanding the attention of our prospects. The use of visual aids, like infographics, just might make that job a little bit easier.

Read the entire SMT article here: Infographics as Marketing Strategy: 12 Take-Away Points for Business

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Niche Marketing Aptitude Test – Your Road Map to Success

Niche Marketing Gold

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[Editor's note: Today's guest article offers a 10-question "aptitude test" that will help you focus in on the areas of your niche marketing efforts that need attention. Taking this 3-minute test will pay off in terms of sizing up your compeition and gaining an advantage over them. ~Scott]

By

Why is niche marketing so hot now? If you’re in business one fact comes with the word recession and that word is competition. Would you like a way to jump ahead of your competition? If your answer is yes then you need a way to increase your niche marketing aptitude. The niche is your answer and solution in a time of growing competition.

In tough economic times, with tight money and stiff competition, it’s essential to find ways to get an edge on your competition. There have been truckloads of articles, books and newsletters on how to improve your niche marketing skills. Finding your niche is job one for every business who wants to succeed long term.

To increase your niche marketing aptitude, take the revealing quiz below, it acts as your microscope and road map to a stronger niche marketing aptitude. The importance in having it gives you a sense of confidence in the middle of stiff competition.

This is not one of those articles you passively read and then toss aside forever. This is an active involvement article. Meaning, to get the best results from reading this you must take action. How? By taking the test and answering the questions honestly. The answers will help you quickly form a solid niche strategy.

To get the maximum benefit, keep taking the test until you can get a perfect 10. The 3 minutes spent with this quiz will be worth their weight in gold to your financial future. With the enormous number of me-too products, services and businesses in the marketplace, it’s essential to keep your niche aptitude strong and vigorous.

If you fail to find ways to separate yourself from your competitors, you risk getting lost in the crowd of competition. This is especially true if you’re a small business with limited capital and resources to work with. Finding your best niche requires focus and a strong knowledge of who your target market is and their current needs.

You often see a business develop a product or service, enjoy a burst of sales success, then suddenly sales fall flat or even nosedives. Your first impression goes to the economy, competition or limited capital. Those may have added to the problem, but the core problem goes back to the niche marketing aptitude of the owner and management.

Often a failing business didn’t have a sales, money or profit problem, they had a hidden niche marketing problem. For example, most failing businesses had a weak, unfocused or changing niche market long before they noticed the other obvious problems.

To increase your niche marketing aptitude take the Niche Marketing Aptitude test below: Give yourself 1 point for each yes answer. Take it for each new business, product or service you create or obtain. Continue taking it until you reach a score of 10. Your goal should be to maintain a score of 10 for each business, product or service you control.

  1. Do I know who the next 3 competitors ahead of me are?
  2. Do I know what my competitive advantages are over them?
  3. Do I have them written down? And do I constantly try to add to them?
  4. Can I name at least one new problem my target customers are facing that I can solve through my product or service this week or month?
  5. What extra service can I provide that my competition can’t provide?
  6. What ways can I speed up service to my customers without sacrificing quality?
  7. What ways can I get my satisfied customers to recommend me to others?
  8. Do I aggressively seek comments, complaints or questions from my customers?
  9. Do I know my competitors latest competitive advantages over my product or service?
  10. Do I aggressively seek and test new ideas while holding on to what works?

Roy Primm helps you improve your niche finding and development skills with Free Niche Idea Course. Conquer and dominate your market by finding hidden niches. Dozens of the latest tips and ideas. Plus get free “Niche Improvement Chart” your At-A-Glance road map to increasing your niche finding skills. Don’t wait go now to TheNicheMan.com

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Roy_Primm
http://EzineArticles.com/?Niche-Marketing-Aptitude-Test—Your-Road-Map-to-Success&id=1884702

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5 Steps to Reaching a #1 Ranking in Google

Google

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By Scott Spooner

The goal of niche marketing, and niche marketers, is to identify a niche with both plenty of search traffic and an acceptable level of competition. There are plenty of tools available – both paid and free – to help you uncover these niches. But, what do you do after you have discovered your own perfect niche?

This is where “rank building” strategies come into play; the goal of which is to rank your site, blog, or post, high enough in the search engine rankings so that you will be found. These strategies range from Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to Pay-Per-Click (PPC), and everything in between.

PPC gets you on top of the search engines quickly, but you have to have a considerable ad budget to keep you there. SEO won’t cost you anything but time (unless you outsource the activities), but it could potentially take you a long time to obtain a high ranking (for a competitive keyword), and longer still to maintain that position.

Following is a summary of how I am able to take competitive keywords, focus them on a blog, and achieve #1 ranking positions in Google. I’ll assume that you don’t have an advertising budget, are willing to learn a little about SEO, and can afford to spend some time to develop your rankings. I’ll also assume that you have a blog, or similar platform with which you can post your content.

The Five Steps

  1. Keyword Research – This is a very important step; and one that many fail to do correctly. Once you’ve picked your niche (or potential niche), grab your favorite keyword tool (depending on my needs, I use Market Samurai, Micro Niche Finder, or Google’s free keyword tool), and do some keyword research. Look for keywords that are getting at least 80 searches per day (2400 per month), with no more than 30,000 competing web sites. Once you find 4 or 5 of these keywords, build your blog around them. The trick here is to narrow your focus; I try and develop niches that are “narrow, but deep”. You are trying to get a foothold in the search engines, and not “be all things to all people”.
  2. Content Creation – With your keywords in hand, it is time to start creating, or gathering, your content. Remember to focus on the keywords that you found in step #1 above. If you are having trouble coming up with your own content, consider searching the content of video sites (e.g. YouTube), article sites (e.g. EZine Articles), and other blogs in your niche. Whether you create the content yourself, or repurpose it from other sources, make sure that it is focused on your keywords. Again, narrow, but deep.
  3. Blog Posting – As you gather content, you’ll want to post that content on your blog. The secret here is to post consistently and on a regular basis. Give your readers a schedule to look forward to and, at the same time, give the search engine spiders something new to crawl each time they stop by. Obviously, the more you post, the quicker your site will develop, and the faster your rankings will occur. But don’t get hung up on it: whether you post once a day, or once a week, pick a schedule that you can maintain. Finally, make sure you are using your keywords in your posting tags. This will help the search engine spiders better understand what you are posting.
  4. Social Book Marking – After every post, bookmark your post throughout the social media sphere. I will typically bookmark my posts on Digg, Propeller, Reddit, and StumbleUpon. I’ll also create links on my Facebook and Twitter accounts. This step is very important because each of these bookmarks creates a back link pointing back to your blog. SEO experts will tell you that the number one “off page factor” in improving your rankings is the quantity and quality of your back links. Social book marking sites offer these quality links for you. Pick the social media sites that you like and start book marking. One last note here: use your keywords as your “anchor text” (the text that you see) when creating your back links.
  5. Rank Tracking – Install an analytics package on your site (I use Google Analytics, which is free). Keep track of the traffic arriving at your site and monitor: 1) where that traffic is coming from; 2) how they find you, and; 3) what keywords they are using to search for your topics. You can not fix what you haven’t been measuring. So, measure how well your keywords are performing and use those measurements as a guide for improving your long term ranking.

The above will take some time – and that is O.K. The search engines give a certain amount of credibility to sites that have been around for some time. This all works to your advantage. Just focus on your keywords (remember: narrow, but deep), and think about creating, or gathering, content.

In summary, you don’t need expensive tools or programs; in fact, you can complete each of the above steps using free tools available on the web. What you do need is to be prolific, persistent, and patient. Remember always that Internet marketing is a process, not an event.

The only question that remains is: when will you begin that process?

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4 Vital Steps on How to Make Money Online With Niche Marketing

Wordle Cloud of the Internet Marketing Blog - ...

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By Dave Fuller

Everyone talks about Niche Marketing and thousands if not millions of people are either making money online with it or want to make money online with it. For those new to Niche Marketing, we describe it as taking a little piece from a big pie. As an example the weight loss industry is the large pie and the piece of the pie or “niche market” could be loosing weight with natural juices. The more narrower you get the tighter the niche market and you will be focusing more on one group of people as oppose to something so borad like weight loss.

Here are four easy steps that will help you make money online with Niche Marketing:

  1. Keyword Research- Researching the right keywords is so important that if you do this wrong or don’t do the right amount of research, your niche site may not appear in the search engines and you may not be targeting the right group of people.
  2. Article Marketing- A great article with the right keywords can get you a long way. You will need to write an article that will not only help the reader get what they want out of it, but it will also need to have that keyword to attract more viewers to your website.
  3. Monetization- This is the whole reason why we are into niche marketing. Some of us forget that we can add banners, ads, and products on our website to monetize it and are missing out on a huge chunk of money. You can promote products or services to your readers according to your niche market and keyword research.
  4. Promotion- There are so many people that want to make money online and are entering the niche marketing industry that you absolutely must promote your sites. Whether it is through article marketing, back linking, or however, you must get more people to look at your sites.

All of these are all very important steps that will determine the profitability of your site and they must all be used correctly. Everyone wants to make money online in and industry so large like niche marketing, but not many of us know what it takes to start and maintain a great niche site.

I hope you found these steps valuable to your niche marketing business. To find out more on niche marketing and starting an online business you can visit me at Make Money online with Dave.

For more information on how to execute these 4 steps more accurately, click here.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Dave_Fuller
http://EzineArticles.com/?4-Vital-Steps-on-How-to-Make-Money-Online-With-Niche-Marketing&id=2896875

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How to Make More Money With Mobile Marketing

mobile marketing

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By Andrew Rossillo

You could have the finest product line or set of services in the marketplace, but if you fail to market your offer right, no prospects will ever see or hear about it. Even if you are employing one of the latest online marketing tools, the outrageous rate of saturation of today’s marketplace means that people are constantly bombarded with a virtually infinite amount of marketing and advertising messages throughout the day. This makes it even more of a challenge to reach your target audience.

Because of this onslaught of marketing and advertising, our brains have actually become programmed to filter out a great degree of the messages that are fired at us. What new marketing tool consistently passes through our marketing and advertising filter? Mobile marketing and the awesome power of text messages! One of the reasons why businesses are experiencing great success with mobile marketing is because it features a fraction of the competition than other media-Internet and email tools are engrossed in a jam-packed and highly competitive environment.

For example: An email message usually has around a 10 percent success rate of actually being read. Text messages, however, feature over a 90 percent success rate of not only being read, but being read within the first 30 minutes of being received! While getting your marketing message out is important, having your message actually read is key to your business or organization experiencing record-breaking sales. What adds even more potency to this special type of marketing? It’s the only marketing media that reaches prospects and clients while they are on the go! Mobile marketing and text messages allow you to automatically update, announce, invite and communicate when you want and how you want!

Top Mobile Marketing Benefits:

  • Generate leads that you can continuously market to
  • Build a mobile database for lucrative follow-up
  • Reach customers instantly
  • Build relationships with customers
  • Learn more about your customers through surveys, polls and demographic info
  • Drive traffic to your business with the use of coupons, special deals, and event promotions

Your Chance to Be a Wealthy Pioneer

Very few businesses are actually taking advantage of mobile marketing right now. That’s because this type of marketing is where Internet marketing was back in 2000. That means you can get a gigantic head start by incorporating mobile marketing within your business today. Plus, you can easily integrate mobile marketing and text message marketing within any offline and online marketing campaign. Of course, this type of marketing is substantial enough to form a standalone marketing campaign.

If you’re questioning the type of potential you have with text message and mobile marketing then consider that there are 270 million mobile subscribers in the U.S. alone, and 91 percent of them are said to keep their phones within just a few feet of themselves 24 hours a day throughout the year! In addition, text message marketing has an incredible reach of almost 5 billion compared to Internet marketing’s reach of 1.7 billion.

Lucrative Lead Generation

Every time a prospect or customer opts into one of your text message offers (e.g. to get informational updates, coupons, discounts) that creates a lead. You now have the means to market to that person as much as you’d like. Take this opportunity to upsell, build belief in your business, provide additional value, increase attendance at events and just about anything else you can think of.

This is made even easier with the accompaniment of super simple database options that allow you to file all of your leads, so you can send out a blast to your entire database or use simple filters to send out to select groups within your database. Build a herd and market like there’s no tomorrow.

Plus, mobile marketing offers one of the most significant ROI’s possible among today’s leading marketing and media tools. Text message marketing is like having hundreds of obliging little marketing assistants hustling around doing all the work for you. All you have to do is press a few buttons and you’ll have instantly reached out to your entire database of leads, customers and prospects-with a 90 percent success rate of being read!

Andrew Rossillo is the primary copywriter and co-owner of Business Ball; a comprehensive business resource website. We’re all about helping as many people as possible, so please feel free to post our article on your website. We simply ask that you don’t alter the content and that you leave our link intact (http://www.businessresourcesdaily.com/).

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Andrew_Rossillo

http://EzineArticles.com/?How-to-Make-More-Money-With-Mobile-Marketing&id=4698379

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Social Media Aggregation – The Next Big Thing

Social media network

Image via Wikipedia

By Alain Portmann

A single site that aggregates content from a variety of social network sites would be a blessing for consumers; who signed up for a variety of social-networking sites from MySpace and Facebook to LinkedIn and Flickr cannot keep track of them all. This development parallels the Instant Messaging space, which saw the launch of Trillian, a proprietary multi-protocol instant messaging application for Windows created by Cerulean Studios.

Google is funding a project dubbed “Socialstream” which could be the world’s first unified social network, aggregating all existing social networks into a single interface. The reality is that Google’s social network offering has not taken off. Google’s lone current social network offering, Orkut, is not ranked in the top ten by Hitwise for U.S. social-networking sites. But Google is not alone in the race to deploy the first aggregated social network. Blue Swarm a startup in private beta, and Wink have some features to aggregate social networks. Also, Mozilla is developing a social-networking browser that compiles different social networks.

The advent of an open source social network would undoubtedly impact the entire social media segment, forcing social networks to begin addressing churn and reactivation of dormant users. A unified social network would cash into the chronically unfaithful of social media. Nielsen figures confirm that network promiscuity is a factor, showing that 444,000 Britons visited all three of the leading rivals MySpace, Facebook and Bebo this year. The dangers of network promiscuity are illustrated by the fate of Friendster. The social network accrued more than 20 million users after its launch in 2003. In 2006 that figure had fallen to less than one million as users migrated to sites with better tools.

An aggregated social network would also allow for the application of collaborative filtering to social media. By aggregating from a larger set of information the method of predicting (filtering) the interests of a user by collecting taste information from many users (collaborating) would be facilitated.

The trivialization of publishing brought on by social media is creating thousands of “publishing bubbles” which when aggregated can become incredibly powerful. John Blossom from Shore provides further perspective.

“Social media is challenging search engines as a starting point for finding answers to questions in part because people come to trust the insights and expertise of specific communities to provide both their own insights and insights from their own research. Answer-oriented communities such as Yahoo! Answers, WikiAnswers and LinkedIn Answers provide audiences the ability to vote on answers to specific questions – a competitive aspect to publishing that helps to both aggregate potential high-quality content and to rank its value.”

Alain Portmann, Web Liquid

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Alain_Portmann
http://EzineArticles.com/?Social-Media-Aggregation—The-Next-Big-Thing&id=2206797

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Social Media Benefits Niche Marketing

Image representing YouTube as depicted in Crun...

Image via CrunchBase

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.


Related videos:
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Social Media Revolution

Social Media Revolution: Is social media a fad? Or is it the biggest shift since the Industrial Revolution? This video details out social media facts and figures that are hard to ignore. This video is produced by the author of Socialnomics.

Niche Marketing: Finding Hot Markets

NicheTrends.net If you’re stuck trying to find niche ideas for your niche marketing, here are some free tools that I use to find hot trends that may help you as well. You can also download a free report of the hottest niche marketing trends of 2008 a…

Niche Marketing: Niche Market Research

NicheTrends.net The key to niche market research is finding the needs of your target market. Watch over my shoulder as I dive into market research for a niche. Need more ideas? Download a free report on hot niche trends on http

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Time to Embrace Social Media

Example of Facebook Fan Page.

Image via Wikipedia

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.


Related videos:

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?

chris.pirillo.com – Blake Cahill recently interviewed me, and I thought you might find my answers somewhat interesting. If you wanna know what I care about most, let me lay it on the line… and please post a video response with your own take on Soci…

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