Niche Marketing Secrets in Plain English

The thing to bear in mind is that these aren’t "magic methods" that will automatically flood you with profit. There are no such methods. These niche marketing secrets are just simple and straightforward, and if you're persistent with them, you'll grow your online income WITH TIME. Remember, it takes time. Don't expect to be able to retire in the next two years the way some people promise you. That's rubbish. So here are the niche marketing secrets.

NICHE MARKETING SECRET #1: THE ART OF PRESELLING

Of all the niche marketing secrets, the absolute most important one is the concept of "preselling". Preselling is the art and science of building credibility for yourself in the eyes of your visitors. It should be the ESSENCE of your business. It is so basic (and powerful) that it applies to any kind of business, not just internet marketing. Your business is almost guaranteed to fail if you don't presell.

Preselling means making your site so informative that it is a benefit to your visitors even if they never buy anything from you. Your site should have articles discussing various subjects within your niche. And then, within each article, you insert links to the product(s) you're trying to sell.

So as your reader is soaking up the valuable info you're providing, he or she comes across a link to a product that is relevant to the topic you're discussing. Clicking on the link now comes very naturally for your reader. And your reader in a more TRUSTING frame of mind.

The absolute worst thing you can do is promote your products right off the bat to your visitors. You might feel tempted to do so, to get the sale right off the bat and earn your money. But it simply does NOT work. Your credibility will be ZERO. As soon as your visitors smell a sales pitch they'll leave and click elsewhere.

Your site should look like an information service, like a place your visitors can come to for helpful info when they need it. That's the preselling. Then, when you happen to mention your products as being helpful to them as well, your visitors will be more trusting of your recommendation.

Preselling is probably the most overlooked and misunderstood of all the niche marketing secrets.

So don't be a "ventriloquist dummy" marketer. Don't just spout off the selling lines of your product manufacturers. Just don’t. That will make you sound shallow and airheaded to your visitors. They won't trust you. And if they don't trust you, they certainly won't buy from you.

And here's another reason why this niche marketing secret is so important: Google (and perhaps other search engines as well) doesn't like you if you don't presell. It was recently revealed that Google assigns people to police the the Internet to see which sites deserve to be part of the engine's search rankings. An employee of Google disclosed the guidelines Google gives to its policemen. Here is a portion of what the guidelines state:

"We differentiate between affiliates that produce extra service, value, or content, and those that simply are duplicates of other sites, set up to boost traffic to other sites and earn a commission for it. The former ones are not Offensive and should be rated on the merits to the query. The latter ones are Offensive..."

In other words, sites that don't PRESELL are considered "Offensive" by Google.

The guidelines continue: "Do not call a page affiliate spam when an affiliation is only incidental to the message and purpose of a website."

What a huge niche marketing secret Google tried to keep from us! Now we know Google wants your website to look like an information service that benefits your readers even if they don't buy from you, and your products should be mentioned only as an aside, or should be "incidental" to your website content.

So the niche marketing secret here is that not only will your visitors not trust you much if you don't presell, but Google won't even RANK you if you don't presell.

If you're not willing to presell, then don't read any further on this page and forget about having an online business. None of the other niche marketing secrets below will be of any use to you without preselling. The majority of online businesses fail because they either don't presell effectively or don't presell at all.

So make sure you take some time to think about and understand this niche marketing secret really, really well.

And if you feel you don't know how to write well, Ken Evoy has written an excellent "how-to" book titled Make Your Content PREsell . Evoy is, in my opinion, the finest preselling writer I've read. Also, if you would like to enhance your understanding of this niche marketing secret, you can download and save this free e-book on the psychology of preselling .

NICHE MARKETING SECRET #2: FINDING A PROFITABLE NICHE

Finding an area that can make you good income might seem a little tricky, but it isn't that hard. One thing that's important is to avoid markets that are clearly saturated, meaning there are so many people in them that you stand little or no chance of success because of the high competition.

You may think you'd be really good in a particular area, but suppose it's an area that already has, say, one million websites promoting it. The thing is this: Most people looking for a particular product or service use a search engine to locate it. The only way you're going to get visitors to your site is if it appears among the first few search results in a search engine, i.e. the first 30 or so. So we're talking about the first 30 out of ONE MILLION sites. Basically, other than maybe your pet dog, nobody will ever see your site.

This niche marketing secret is so basic that you'd think everybody would know it. But still many people feel so lured by the Web's "big industries" that they think it's easy to profit from them.

You may feel really tempted to get into, say, such thriving Internet businesses as online pharmacies or online casinos, but the fact that they’ve become so huge on the Web will make it extremely difficult for you to stay ahead of the immense competition. For example, if you enter the search term "online pharmacy" into Google, you'll get over five million results (as of the time of this writing).

Now granted, some of those are pages that simply mention online pharmacies and are not pharmacies themselves. But that doesn’t matter because the fact is you still need to get into the top search results regardless of what kinds of results they are.

So unless you have a brilliantly new idea (a niche marketing secret nobody else knows) on how to market a pharmacy, this probably isn’t going to be a profitable niche for you. So the question is, how do you find a low-supply, high-demand niche? How do you research it?

The basic procedure behind this niche marketing secret is simple. You just look up specific keywords on the search engines and obtain two stats: 1) the number of people who’ve searched using that term, and 2) the number of search results that come up for that keyword. This is just what you learned in your high school economics class: demand and supply. You want high demand and low supply, right? That’s where your income potential is. Stat #1 tells you how interested people are in that topic, and stat #2 tells you how many available sites there are for it.

So this niche marketing secret is just a matter of knowing the supply and demand for the niche you're thinking of doing business in.

But while the idea is simple, the research process can take an excruciatingly long time if you do it manually. And the vast majority of people don’t have the time to do it manually. Luckily there are tools and resources you can use that do the research for you.

There are free online keyword research tools you can use, but the saying "what you pay is what you get" applies here. These tools are useful only to give you general ideas on niches. They don’t do any extensive brainstorming for you. This means that when you enter a keyword, you’ll get the basic stats (number of searches for that term and number of available sites) but these tools won’t research further for you to find out all the "sub-keywords" related to your general keyword.

You want your web business to make you money off as many subcategories of your niche as possible. Your site as a whole will deal with a niche, and then each page of your site will deal with a sub-keyword within that niche. The more profitable subtopics you have, the more money you make. It’s that simple.

Effective full-scale keyword research is extremely important to the success of your online business and for staying ahead of your competition. The free keyword research tools are very limited in this respect. They don't get you the most out of this niche marketing secret.

Now if you happen to be on a VERY tight budget for starting your business, then you can go ahead and use the free tools. You can go to NicheBOT or to Digital Point to get general keyword stats.

If you want to get premium keyword research, one way is to get a membership with the keyword research service run by James Jackson.

This service researches thousands of keywords and members receive monthly stats on the most profitable keywords for that month. People like Jackson have the time to do all the research because this is what they do for a living. It’s their job. They aren’t like you and me. People like you and me do other things for a living and simply don’t have the time to do that much research. You might find it worthwhile to join Jackson’s keyword research service . It doesn’t find sub-keywords for you, but it does bring you a massive selection of well-researched niche keywords, so that you’ll get a lot of keyword suggestions you hadn’t thought of before.

Site Build It! is a business builder software that, among many other functions, brainstorms for you to find dozens or even hundreds of sub-keywords related to the general keyword that you put in. SBI! is a comprehensive service that takes you step-by-step through building a business from scratch, and its first step is your keyword research.

Another very good way to find your profitable niche is through Nicheology . Their niche marketing service is rather unique. Every month they come out with two fully-written, complete e-books, each focusing on a particular niche that has high profit potential. And neither infobook is copyright protected. A Nicheology member is free to download these infoproducts and sell them at 100 percent profit, or break them up into several articles for publication in e-zines.

My recommendation would be that you not simply resell a Nicheology infoproduct "as is", because many other members will have them and then many people will be selling essentially the identical infoproduct. If all you plan to do is download, duplicate, and sell the e-book without changing it, you’re not likely to have much success.

Instead, use the infomanual as a STARTING point for yourself. Expand on it. Research each subtopic within the book and then supplement the book with your own original content. Once you’ve made substantial changes to each e-book, you can go ahead and copyright it under your name, and now you have a UNIQUE and highly marketable infoproduct to earn money with. Or use the Nicheology e-book as a preseller for your niche business. These are the real ways that Nicheology can be a benefit to you. It can be your own personal niche marketing secret. You can find out more about Nicheology here .

NICHE MARKETING SECRET #3: FINDING A GOOD AFFILIATE PROGRAM

This niche marketing secret only applies to you if you don’t plan on creating your own original product, but want to sell on behalf of another company. Here are the basic criteria to look for in a good affiliate program:

1) Good online tracking of your sales. You should be able to log onto the company’s website and find out the number of visitors that have clicked on your affiliate links and the number that have actually made purchases.

If the affiliate program you’re considering is free to join, go ahead and sign up and then take a look at your affiliate back office page. If you don’t see tables for at least those two stats (number of visitors and number of sales), then you probably shouldn’t promote that company’s products. But if you decide against selling for them, have the courtesy to delete your affiliate account and not just leave it in their system. And besides, if you don’t, then you might receive regular affiliate e-mails from them.

2) Efficient payout system. This is a rather obvious criterion. You want to make sure you’ll get paid for your sales, right? Affiliate Programs Directory has reviews of many affiliate programs, and also gives ratings of each program’s payout efficiency.

3) Quality customer service. You’d better be sure that their customer service is good, because if you refer your visitors to that company and they end up being treated badly, their blame will fall on you. And they’ll never trust you or your product recommendations again. Remember, what’s good for your visitors is what’s good for YOU.

The best way to find out how good a company’s customer service is would be to phone or e-mail their service department yourself and ask questions about their products or services. Are they easy to reach? Do they reply promptly? Are their answers helpful? Are they friendly and courteous? There’s nothing quite like first-hand experience to find out.

The next best way is to find online reviews of their customer service. One of the best e-commerce research tools is Search It! You can make it search specifically in online publications or discussion forums, among many other things. And it’s free to use.

4) Quality products and/or services. You’d better make sure you’re selling something with high quality. Again, the free online tool Search It! will come in very handy to find reviews. A good idea also is to buy the product or service yourself to see how good it is. And owning the product or service yourself and then writing your own personal review of it on your website makes for excellent preselling (remember: It all comes down to preselling).

NICHE MARKETING SECRET #4: CHOOSING THE RIGHT WEBHOST

The absolute MINIMUM webhosting features you need are high uptime, good bandwith, and an autoresponder. That’s if you plan to be an affiliate that redirects visitors to your affiliate company’s page to make a purchase. If you intend to sell products directly from your website, then you’ll also need a shopping cart feature.

High uptime simply means that your website is almost always up and functional. Your webhost domain shouldn’t have a lot of downtime due to technical glitches or routine maintenance tasks. Any service that has less than 99 percent uptime is of poor quality. Bandwidth is the amount of visitor activity it can handle at any one instant. You don’t want a webhost that’s easily overloaded when you get a lot of visitors. An autoresponder is something that automatically e-mails your visitors after they type their addresses into your site. We’ll discuss later why you must have an autoresponder on your site.

Remember, these are MINIMUM requirements, the "bare bones" for an online business. If you get a webhost with only these features and little else, it’s going to be very challenging for you to get ahead of your competition. One of the reasons why so many web businesses fail is that their webhosts don’t have the additional tools needed for successful marketing.

There are many cheap webhosting services (by cheap I mean less than $10 per month), but these webhosts provide you with little more than the bare necessities I’ve just mentioned. You should only go with one if you are on an extremely tight budget. If you feel you must, then the best cheap webhost is BlueHost . Their bandwidth and hosting space are surprisingly high for the price, and their uptime is very good.

But if you want to have the edge over your competition, you should consider investing a little more to get the best webhost possible.

The webhost with the most comprehensive features, the host that will give you a big advantage over your competition, is the Site Build It! package. There’s simply nothing else like it. SBI! doesn’t just give you excellent webhosting. It’s a complete business creation and management product, and it’s geared toward beginners. I’ve already mentioned that it does extensive keyword and profitability research for you. It also does just about everything else you need, such as search engine optimization (which we’ll talk about later), in-depth traffic analysis, advertising analysis, tracking your search engine rankings, etc. You basically get all the niche marketing secrets in a single tool.

If you want to see hard proof of SBI!’s results, take a look here .

Anyway, whichever webhost you choose, make sure that it gives you your own domain name. The WORST choice is one that just makes your site a subdirectory under the host’s own domain name (like www.yourwebhost.com/yoursite). That looks very shabby to visitors and makes your business look like some backyard pursuit. Your visitors won’t have any confidence in your business. You need to look independent and established. So make sure your web address has the form www.yoursite.com.

NICHE MARKETING SECRET #5: BUILDING A WEBSITE

If you have a working knowledge of HTML then this is no "secret" at all to you so you can just skip ahead if you like. If you know HTML then it’s up to you if you want to design your website from scratch or work on pre-existing templates. You can obtain pre-existing templates from templatemonster.com .

Now if you don’t know HTML, it’s no problem. There are a number of ways you can still have a website created. One way is to hire somebody to do it for you. You can hire a college student who’s studying website design. You shouldn’t have to pay this person more than $10 an hour. Or you could even hire a high school kid. That way you can pay just $7 an hour. Just put up a flyer on your local college or high school bulletin board saying you need a student who can create a website for you. But you have to be careful with hiring a student, because you may not get a website that looks as professional as you like.

You can find professional website designers online at elance.com , but this is an expensive option.

Actually, there are products that make it really easy for you to create excellent-looking webpages on your own even if your HTML knowledge is ZERO. Site Build It! makes it easy for you to build your own webpages. It walks you through the process and all you do is click buttons and type in your text.

If you want a product that just creates webpages without doing webhosting, a great webpage creator is First Website Builder . It also lets you create webpages without knowing HTML and is quite nicely priced, too.

NICHE MARKETING SECRET #6: OPTIMIZING YOUR SEARCH ENGINE RANKING

No, it doesn’t involve any fancy deciphering of search engine algorithms. That would make it way too much of a niche marketing secret. If you’re a tech genius you can try it, but otherwise it’s really excruciating for "ordinary" folk (99.99 percent of people) to learn that sort of thing.

Actually you can greatly improve your chances with the search engines without any technical knowledge. There are ways of scattering a keyword throughout a webpage that make it optimal for scanning by search engines.

Basically you should try to have a higher occurrence of your keyword in the opening and closing paragraphs of your webpage than in its body. But don’t over-mention the keyword because the search engines will detect that and see it as some kind of trick on your part. Then they’ll treat you unfavorably. So there’s a delicate balancing game involved. Your keyword (and variations of it) should occur at the right frequencies in the right places. That’s the real niche marketing secret here.

Site Build It! analyzes your webpages as you build them and tells you what you need to do to improve its search engine chances.

Whatever you do, there’s one trap you should never fall into. There are softwares being advertised that claim to get you top search rankings automatically by playing tricks with the search engines. These cheating tricks include, among other things, creating hundreds or even thousands of junk pages loaded with keywords to lure the engines. DON’T BUY THEM. The search engines know all about these softwares and can detect them. And when they do, they ban your site completely from their rankings.

NICHE MARKETING SECRET #7: AUTOMATING YOUR WEBSITE

Earlier we mentioned the need for autoresponders. Most visitors don’t buy anything from a website on their first visit. So when they leave, your site will be one of many that they visited, and they might not remember you or come back to you. So you need a way to make yourself stick out in their minds.

The way to do this is to set up your website so that it asks visitors for their e-mail addresses and then automatically mails them materials from you. Now, you have to give your visitors a reason why they should let you have their e-mail addresses. Successful marketers put out regular newsletters with valuable up-to-date info about their niches. So have your visitors subscribe to your free newsletter. Your website takes their addresses and automatically sends your regular newsletter to everyone on its mailing list.

Your newsletter is your opportunity to build a relationship with your visitors and make them trust you. In each newsletter you give valuable content to them, and in your text you happen to give in-context links to the products or services you offer that are relevant to the topic you’re discussing. Does this sound familiar to you? It should. This is preselling. Your automated newsletter is part of your preselling process.

Or you could write up a five-day or seven-day info course related to your niche and have your visitor subscribe to it on your website. Then your autoresponder simply e-mails a new installment of the course every day or two to that person – and you don’t have to lift a finger.

Actually, this niche marketing secret is commonly used by non-Internet marketers as well. You've probably seen companies mail out regular newsletters and info materials to advertise themselves. So this niche marketing secret just adapts an old practice to the Internet.

It’s a known fact in business that 80 percent of your income comes from repeat customers. So your automating (preselling) system is crucial to getting that 80 percent.

Site Build It! has a first-rate newsletter/e-zine creation and management feature as part of its package.

NICHE MARKETING SECRET #8: VIRAL MARKETING

The idea behind viral marketing is this. Let’s say you somehow give your web link to five people. Then each of those five sends your link to five people, and then each of those sends it to five people, and so forth. After, say, just four "generations", the number of people who have your link is 5+25+125+625=780. This is similar to the way a disease spreads, which is why viral marketing has its name. Now if just half of those are curious enough to check out your link, you get 390 unique visitors to your website. Of all the niche marketing secrets on this page, viral marketing may not be absolutely essential but it can be a huge boost to your success.

So viral marketing is an extremely powerful way to generate traffic to your site. How do you get your link to multiply like that? An excellent way is to write up an e-book about your niche. Soak it with useful info, and then put your link in various places where it is relevant to the topic being talked about (as usual, preselling). Then give it away for free. Let any and all visitors to your site download it, and encourage them to e-mail copies of it to their friends. This niche marketing secret has proved enormously effective for many highly successful net marketers.

The previous niche marketing secret we discussed also helps with viral marketing. If your newsletter is really useful and informative, your readers might forward it to friends who they think would benefit from it. Then those people get your links too.

One way you could use the infomanuals at Nicheology would be to choose one of the niches there and make changes to the e-book they give you for it. And then scatter in some in-context links to your site. Then give it away as a free download.

This niche marketing secret is something unique to the Internet age.

If you’re giving away a free e-book, then you obviously aren’t worried about security or piracy, so you don’t need an e-book compiler with fancy security features. In this case you can just use one of the free compilers. You can get a good free e-book compiler here .

SOME FINAL THOUGHTS

So there you have them: the niche marketing secrets. You don’t need many resources or many marketing toolkits. The resources mentioned here are enough. Don’t get distracted by the many other marketing courses or resources out there. I’m not saying they aren’t good, just that you need to focus on only a few. And here you’ve been provided with enough for you to start your business.

If you would like more detailed explanations of the marketing tactics we've discussed, you can download and save this free course on niche marketing secrets for affiliates if you plan on having an affiliate business or download and save this free course on niche marketing secrets for service sellers if your Web business will be offering a service.

With time, as your business grows, you can start diversifying and looking at other resources to enrich your marketing as you please. You now know the niche marketing secrets and you know where to find the resources you need. So good luck.

Mark Kurban

Copyright 2005