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[Editor's note: The following article illustrates a fundamental niche marketing principle: namely, the more tightly focused your niche, the more easily you will be able to rank for your keywords. Ranking equals potential traffic.]

By Steve Schafer

It seems like no matter what your business is these days, there are about 40 bazillion other companies in exactly the same business. How do you compete with that? You can try being so much better than your competition that all of the customers naturally come to you. That is hard to do. Not only is it hard to do, but even if you are a lot better than your competitors, how do you make sure everyone knows it? You have to advertise.

Even advertising can be difficult and expensive. As it turns out, more and more companies are choosing internet marketing, because it is not only cheaper, but it can actually reach more people. By far, the cheapest and most effective means of advertising on the internet is micro niche marketing. So what is micro niche marketing?

Let’s say that you own a pet supply store that specializes in pet clothing. You decide to facilitate online orders to widen your customer base. You want to show up #1 in the search engines for search terms that your potential customers are using to find products like those that you sell. If you were to focus on the term “pet supplies”, you will have so much competition in that niche that it will take you forever (and a lot of money) to even show up on the first page of the search engines, forget about #1.

You decide to focus a little more and do some research and you find that “pet clothing” has a bit less competition. You could even go narrower and focus on “ferret sweaters” or even “purple ferret sweaters”. The process of taking a wide niche and narrowing it down to smaller, more manageable niches is micro niche marketing. While it will not give you as many visitors to your website, the visitors that you do get will be a lot more focused on your products. There is no rule that says you can’t widen your niche once you have the more focused ones dominated.

Happy advertising!

Steve has been in the internet marketing business since 2003. He currently spend his time teach others niche marketing techniques and how to find the right internet marketing tools.

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By Scott Spooner

In an effort to compete head-to-head with market leaders, many niche marketers decide to slash prices to attract traffic. This is almost always a bad move. Why? In response to this tactic, the better funded competitor will simply match your price, and then wait until your diminishing margins take their toll. Sooner or later you’ll have to either raise your prices again, or suffer possible liquidation and a potential buy-out, as your cash dries up and your competitors start to circle your business like carrion fowl.

Here’s an example, from an unusual market. While driving across town yesterday, I noticed a billboard which was advertising a local “gentlemen’s club”. Now, there is nothing unusual about the promotion of these types of clubs in Los Angeles, but what caught my attention was the marketing position they staked out in their promotion.

Up until this billboard, all of these types of clubs positioned their sales copy around the beauty of their dancers, the quantity of dancers, the proximity of the club or, as in most cases, the arousal of the customer. Of course, this is what you would expect if you were in this particular market.

However, the billboard I saw yesterday took a different route: they focused on the price of the “lap dances”. In other words, they positioned their services as a commodity, and decided to compete on price.

Will this strategy work? Will this tactic draw more patrons to the club? Probably, yes, at least in the short term. But at what cost? What stops their competitors from engaging in a price war? More importantly, now that they have staked out the “low cost” alternative, how does this particular club ever change their future position in the mind of their customer? And, what does “low cost” convey in this particular niche market?

So, when you are considering the position you want to hold in the mind of your prospect or customer, think carefully before you opt for competing on price alone. This strategy may work well for a market leader like Walmart, but it is a risky strategy at best for most niche marketers. With so many marketing positions available to the smart marketer, settling on price should be your position of last resort.

For more information on how to pick a winning position, check out the book Posiitoning: The Battle for your Mind

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By Eric Fernandes

You have been hearing a lot of people promoting the fantastic opportunities and profits they claim can be had through something called “niche marketing.” But you’re a little skeptical and are wondering how exactly you should go about finding and researching a viable niche that you could develop into a profitable business-one that is not only real, but still has room for newcomers to succeed.

1. Start with you. Where do your existing skills and areas of expertise lie? Do you have job experiences you’ve enjoyed or interesting hobbies? You are far more likely to have the persistence and energy to work over the long term in an area that truly interests you. And building on an area you already know about will be far easier than starting from scratch to develop the kind of knowledge-base you’ll need to create a quality website and earn credibility.
2. Identify related keywords. Once you’ve identified some potential areas to explore you need to develop a list of “keywords” that describe or relate to these concepts. You can find help for this process at an online site called “Wordtracker” that will take your initial ideas and bring up an array of associated words and ideas that can help you define your interests in terms of products and services. You’ll be surprised at how quickly your keywords will multiply, maybe into the hundreds.
3. Explore the market. Next you want to test whether these keywords are also interesting to a significant number of other people-do they have a potential market. For this you’ll want another kind of online service that tracks the popularity of keywords among both suppliers and searchers. In other words, how often is someone searching using this keyword, and how many websites do they find out there when they look? Two sites that can give you this kind of data are “Product Idea Evaluator ” (P.I.P.E.) and “Site Build It!” Identify the keywords which have high demand (many people are searching) compared to the supply of existing sites providing the answers they are seeking.
4. Cost out your keywords. Take the top candidates you’ve identified as keywords having high demand and low supply. Sites like Overture and Google AdWords will give you estimates for what it will cost you to advertise using the keywords that describe your chosen interests. What you are looking for is leads to existing products that you would be able to market through an affiliate relationship. This is where you begin to determine what the financial potential is of the niche you’re looking at.
5. Who’s ahead of you? Explore the sites and offerings of the people who are already in business in the area you’re considering. Are they as up-to-date and attractive as they could be, or are they sagging a bit and showing signs of neglect? Consider ways that you can enter this market competitively-with something fresh and unique to offer. Truthfully, it’s difficult at this point to find a completely unexploited online niche with strong profit potential. But there are still areas that have been underdeveloped and have room left for an imaginative and energetic new enterprise.

If you’ve made it this far, you are ready to start building your all-important web presence. The key to efficiency at this stage is to create solid, informative and well-targeted content that will draw people to your site. If you succeed in providing the right information expressed in the right way, more and more people will find you and your search rankings will rise organically. At this point, your site will have developed the kind of value advertisers will pay to be associated with. And you will have found your niche-hopefully a rich one!

Do you want to start a profitable business online, achieve financial independence, and become successful using niche marketing, then you need to visit: http://startaprofitablebusinessnow.com and get your online business up and running today!

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Technorati Tags: niche market, niche market research, niche 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 to Business Ball intact (http://www.businessball.com/).

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There is much discussion these days about social media and whether or not it will be around in a few years.

Watch this short video and decide for yourself.

If you believe that social media is the wave of the future, then the next questions are:

* how can you leverage social media to better reach your market?
* how can you use social media to help you find your audience?
* how can social media help you discover niches and micro-niches?

We’ll explore these questions in future posts. In the mean time, what are your thoughts about the future of social media?

Click on the following link to learn more about the book, Socialnomics.

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Technorati Tags: erik qualman, Marketing and Advertising, niche marketing, niche markets, social media, social media revolution, Socialnomics

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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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So much is being written these days about building web traffic to your site. A quick search on Google for the key phrase “building web traffic”, results in over 45MM pages  alone.

Once you cut through all of the clutter, however, you will find that building traffic comes down to the following four concepts:

1. You must carefully identify which keywords your prospects are using when they search.

2. You must learn the basics of SEO – both on-page and off-page – to begin the ranking process.

3. You must focus on providing quality content on an ongoing basis.

4. You must seek out, and obtain, quality back-links from relevant web sites within your niche.

There are many strategies, both paid and free, for implementing the above four steps, but these are the four steps you’ll have to master if you want to see your traffic numbers increase.

******
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By Scott Spooner

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By Scott Spooner

This year I find myself thinking about what I want to accomplish. As Internet marketers, we have many business models before us: product creation, affiliate marketing, CPA marketing, joint ventures, and product launch marketing – the list goes on and on.

If we are smart, each of us will focus on one, or maybe two, of these strategies and then get busy with setting up efficient processes that will generate both profits and a long term business model. Before we are finished, however, we must also decide the approach we want to take in developing a market position. In short, we need to decide if we are David or Goliath.

In this example, David is a niche marketer. He or she has limited capital, lots of ideas, and a desire to gain a foothold within a niche from which his or her sales can expand. While David may want to dominate the niche, he or she understands that every journey has a beginning, and that beginning starts with a single step.

Staring David in the eyes is Goliath. Goliath is a large well-establish company, with an authority presence in the marketplace. Goliath has lots of capital, time, resources, and ideas. Goliath’s strength is also his or her weakness.

The Goliaths of the world tend to be cumbersome and slow to seize opportunities. David is better positioned to take quick action; but sometimes needs to be prodded into taking that action.

I mention all of this because, as we look everywhere we see many Goliaths; the big corporations that are generating lots of sales and revenues. Too often, the Davids of the world try to emulate the Goliaths, both in form and function. We set our eyes on branding our products, services and companies, instead of attacking a poorly defended niche to gain our foothold.

Ultimately, most Davids lose the battle simply due to lack of capital and resources; that is, we simply can not compete head to head with the Goliaths of the world, and we burn through our time and money in the process of doing so. Goliath wins because he or she has the capacity to outlast David.

The answer for David is to realize that he or she is, well, David. Do what David does best. Find your opportunities, take action, and strike. Re-set, and strike again. Gain a foothold, then another then another. Allow the branding to occur as a result of your interlocking niche building, and not the other way around.

So, as 2010 unfolds, consider your marketing approach: are you a “David” (niche marketer, nimble and focused), or a “Goliath” (capital and resource rich, with branding in mind). If you are a “David”, then set your marketing and business strategies to make the most of your strengths, while minimizing your weaknesses.

Here’s to a prosperous year.

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