Tag: marketing
How to Test Niche Markets
Looking to start making money from a new blog or website? Often the best way to do this is to create a product or to sell an affiliate product – and often the most popular type of product for marketers is a digital product.
Digital products include eBooks, online courses, reports and other files and software. The great thing about these is that they have no overheads, no delivery and no storage costs; all of which means you can start making money and keeping the profit as soon as you have an audience. There’s no manufacturing to consider and you won’t need to hire a warehouse.
But while this might sound like a license to print money, it’s important to consider the amount of work involved in creating a website or blog and building a big audience for it. The very real danger here to consider is that you could spend years creating a website and building it up, only to then find that you can’t make any money from it anyway!
The brilliance behind this is that it lets you start testing your niche right away, before you’ve invested lots of time creating your own niche or building up your audience. This is what you call ‘verifying’ your business model, before you spend time and money creating it.
How to Get Started
To get started, you can find things to sell and sell them however you wish. What you’re then going to do is set up a landing page and try running Facebook ad campaigns to direct some relevant traffic there.
A good eBook should only set you back a few hundred dollars at most and you will be able to recoup this over time. Why not create a few landing pages with a few different products to test which markets are ‘hot’ before you spend lots of time and money creating your own audience?
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Originally posted 2018-02-27 15:42:00.
The Top Types of Website/Blog You Hadn’t Considered Creating
If you’re planning on creating a website or a blog, then there’s a good chance you’re considering one of the major niches like ‘fitness’, ‘making money’ or ‘dating’.
The only problem is, these ‘big’ types of blogs are very overcrowded and if you create a new site in that niche you’re going to be going up against a lot of already established competition.
So the question is: how do you stand out with something completely new? And what other types of blog are there that you hadn’t considered?
Instead of going with a very generic and very derivative topic, why not try making something entirely new so that you will be more memorable for your visitors and so that you’ll be able to monetize in more creative ways? Read on and we’ll take a look at some of the top types of website and blog that you perhaps hadn’t already considered…
Fan Sites
Creating a fan site is a great strategy for a number of reasons. For starters, there doesn’t tend to be that much competition – particularly when compared with the bigger niches. At the same time, creating a fan site means you’ll be creating content for a highly committed and passionate audience that likely has a strong community. Head over to the ‘Doctor Who’ Google+ pages and you will see there are people there ready to eat up new content.
Career Content
Don’t have a hobby or interest? You probably at least have a job and probably that job is something that many other people share. There’s all kinds of information you can create in this field!
Education
You can create a lot of novel type of content in the education niche. This can range from teaching other adults a new topic as you learn it, to providing research materials for students. Or why not go one step further and create a website for children? Do bear in mind though, that this will mean selling to the parents rather than the children themselves.
Entertainment
Not every website has to be serious! While it’s harder in some respects, you can potentially be very successful with a website that’s funny or that publishes fiction. Just look at things like XKCD!
Broad Niches
A niche can also be broad enough to encompass multiple other niches. Think of magazines like ‘Men’s Health’ or ‘Wired’. These focus on a lifestyle rather than a strict niche and cover lots of topics together as a result.
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Originally posted 2018-02-27 11:57:00.
Learn to Master Your Niche Research Skills
If you want to succeed in any given niche, then you need to offer something different that the competition isn’t already offering. This is how you stand out as different and memorable and this is how you make links ‘clickable’ and sharable.
But coming up with new content is hard. Especially in a crowded niche where there are thousands of new articles published every day!
Moreover, you’re going to have to do your research if you want to appear accurate, reliable and trustworthy too. So how do you go about mastering your research skills so that you can really stand out? You read on, that’s how!
Your Inspiration
The more information you take in, the more inspiration you put out. Without meaning to get too philosophical here, most psychologists now agree that there’s no such thing as a truly ‘original’ idea. Instead, our ideas are created when we combine different ideas we already had.
So the more information you are taking in on a regular basis, the more bits of data you will have available to recombine into something brand new.
And this shouldn’t just mean reading on the topics that you’re writing about either. Reading on different topics is also important as this way you can bring related knowledge in from other fields or combine subjects in order to come up with something completely new.
What’s more, reading other blogs and websites can give you ideas for structuring articles or spinning them that you can apply to your own work in new ways. Like that article on how to dress like a bodybuilder? How about taking it and applying it to your own niche for an article on ‘how to dress like an entrepreneur’?
Great places to get ideas and material then include:
- Websites
- Blogs
- Magazines
- Books
- TV
Subscribe to some RSS feeds and keep reading!
Looking for News
It’s also important to try and stay up-to-date by following the latest news and developments. This sometimes means going straight to the source, which can mean reading journal studies (look for them on Google Scholar) or looking at press releases (you can find sites that collect and publish these).
Taking it Further
The truly unique and interesting stuff though comes when you start going deeper and really researching into your topic. Often this begins with asking the right questions. When you next read an article telling you about a new discovery for instance, ask why that’s true. Why does that new workout routine work so well? And what if you were to turn it up a notch or introduce a new element?
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Originally posted 2018-02-26 09:51:00.
The Biggest Impacts of Choosing a Niche
When you pick the niche for your new site, you are actually picking much more than just a niche. This decision isn’t just going to affect what you’re writing about for the lifetime of your new business – it’s also going to impact very nature of your business model and the very fabric of your website…
It can’t be overstated just how important this is for the eventual success of your blog as a whole. So to demonstrate just what a profound impact this one decision will make, read on to see some of the top areas affected by your choice…
The Look
When you choose a niche, this will almost certainly impact the design of your logo. In turn, this is likely to spill over into the look of your site if you want to strengthen your brand identity. As a result, your web design will be heavily influenced by your choice of subject matter – which is why football sites tend to be green and technology sites tend to be white/blue/silver.
The Tone
The niche you choose is also going to dictate the tone of your site and the ‘voice’ you use. A website on lifestyle for instance might have a colloquial and ‘fun’ tone of voice, as though you are speaking directly to your audience. On the other hand though, a website on finance or on medicine is going to sound a lot more professional with far more terminology.
Your Audience
This is one of the biggest ways your niche will influence your business model: once you choose your topic, you will also have decided on the type of person who is likely to read your content. In turn, this will influence the types of interactions you have on your site, the amount of loyalty your audience displays and even their disposable income.
Monetization Options
The way you monetize your website will depend on which products and adverts are available. If you’re in the ‘make money’ niche for instance, you’ll find there are tons of eBooks and courses being sold on the topic and that people are willing to spend a lot of money here, viewing it as an investment.
But on the other hand, if you’re writing about your favourite TV show, there won’t be many things you can sell without facing copyright issues – which means you’ll likely make most of your money through Amazon sales.
Originally posted 2018-02-26 08:02:00.
How to Use Pen Names to Penetrate Multiple Niches
Choosing a niche is one of the most important things you have to do when you first set out to create a blog. A niche doesn’t just impact on what you’ll be writing: it impacts your target demographic (your audience), your web design, your earning potential, the types of products and adverts you can earn from and much more.
If you get your niche right from the start, you’ll find you can quickly rise to prominence as one of the top bloggers and start earning a lot of stable income. Get it wrong and you might find that you struggle to get noticed, or that there’s no money to be made even when you start making progress.
So instead of stressing about it and letting this decision stall your progress… why not just enter multiple niches right from the start?
The Benefits of Entering More Than One Niche
There are plenty of very good reasons to try entering more than one niche and this is something that can help any blogger.
For starters, being in more than one niche is fun. It means you aren’t constantly writing content on the same topic and you won’t find you get bored of your ‘day job’ too quickly.
What’s more, being in multiple niches at once gives you resilience. In business terms, ‘resilience’ basically means that your business model is stable enough that a single thing going wrong won’t be devastating for your company. In other words, if you’re in more than one niche, it doesn’t matter if one of your websites – or even one of those industries – stops being profitable.
And on top of all this, with multiple niches you will have multiple different audiences and multiple different opportunities to start making money online.
Using a Pen Name
So how do you enter into these different niches?
One thing that can help is having more than one pen name to use on the web. Why? Because that way, your efforts in one area won’t negatively impact your efforts in another.
Having multiple blogs all on different subjects and using the same name could look as though you’re a ‘Jack of All Trades’ and expert at none. It could appear as though you’re just interested in making money rather than having a real passion for what you’re writing about. Finally, it prevents you from referencing or linking to your other blogs without it appearing biased.
So come up with a few names and enjoy writing on multiple subjects simultaneously!
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Originally posted 2018-02-26 04:43:00.
How to Target a Small Niche and Start Making Money FAST
Creating a blog that operates within a big popular niche is a great way to ensure you have a high potential to make money and that you can keep growing without running out of content or new visitors.
But this is only one way to approach blogging and it’s actually quite difficult. Instead then, you might want to consider making content aimed at a small niche – and as we will see, there are lots of ways that this can lead to rapid success and lots of money!
Examples of ‘Small Niches’
An example of a small niche is anything that is very specialist or that doesn’t have a broad appeal. This might mean creating a fan site for example that focusses on a ‘cult’ film. Alternatively it might mean looking at a fringe activity or a lesser-known hobby. Either way, you now have a small dedicated audience to create content for but you won’t have as much option to grow.
Benefits of Small Niches
The great thing about a small niche is that you can very quickly become an authority on your subject. Let’s say you create a website on cryptozoology (unproven animal sightings). This is a topic small enough that those who are very passionate will be actively seeking out more content. If you come along and promise to deliver X amount of content every week, then those people will be likely to subscribe as soon as they hear of you. This runs contrary to niches like fitness where people are more inclined to think ‘not another fitness site!’.
What’s more, smaller niches give you direct access to that audience, especially if there’s a strong community.
Growing Your Audience
To overcome the potential limitations of a small niche there are also more things you can do. One is to try and introduce your niche to more people. For instance, you might find that your articles on cryptozoology are sometimes interesting to those who are fans of regular zoology. Likewise, it might be interesting to people who like ghosts, forteana and the supernatural in general.
You can even try and grow the interest in your niche and spearhead a fad or trend. This way your site becomes not just a resource but also an ambassador for your passion and movement!
And if you’re really savvy, you can pick a small niche that is already on the way up. How about virtual reality for instance?
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Originally posted 2018-02-24 01:27:00.
How to Find Niches That Are On the Way ‘Up’
Many aspects of digital marketing can be compared with other money making strategies – and most specifically this includes investing in stocks and shares.
You see, in many ways, choosing a keyword or a niche is a little like investing in stocks and shares. While many people won’t approach it this way and will instead focus on making money from the big and ‘steady’ niches, the big money tends to come from taking risks on lesser known niches – just like the stock market.
Just as you can make a huge profit from betting on the right horse when trading, you can do the same with digital marketing by choosing a niche or subject matter that is currently quite small but also on the way ‘up’.
Examples of Niches That Exploded
What do we mean when we say a niche that’s going up? Basically we mean any topic that is currently not that competitive but that is heading towards world domination.
So an example of this might be CrossFit. Not so long ago, this was an unheard of activity that no one had much interest in. Now it’s the biggest trend in fitness by far and has a huge number of passionate fans. Websites that took a risk by focussing on CrossFit will right now being reaping the rewards big time. The same goes for writers who focussed on the Paleo diet. To a lesser extent you could say the same for those who took a bet on the Surface Pro line of hardware!
What niches might come to explode in future? It’s never possible to say for sure but things like Virtual Reality are likely to be big news going forward while the next fitness trend could well be ‘competitive fitness’.
How to Get it Right
Getting this right is part art, part science. Of course you can never be 100% sure that a niche will take off but you can certainly try keeping your ear to the ground to see where the buzz is being generated. And there’s nothing wrong with having multiple sites in different niches to ‘spread your bets’ (which is again is a little like creating a portfolio).
Want to get really advanced though? Then why not try to influence the next ‘big thing’ by making amazing content and generating buzz around it? Take something you truly love and then use your site to attract more people to a niche that used to be small!
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Originally posted 2018-02-23 23:38:00.
I am the BRAND on online search engines
For the last 10+ years, many companies approached me and promise a better ranking for Google search and to get my link in the first page. This is the goal of many companies, which may be good.
Over the last two weeks, I was building my website and I deployed my experience on website development and social media.
I was able to get my name in all links in the first 2 pages of google search and at least 8 out of 10 links in pages 3 – 12 of the search engine. I am now the brand who can appear 105 times out of 120 result link.
I was able to be dominating the top 27search result out About 130,000 results, It basically demonstrate and I am listed in 134 out of the top 160 and I should conclude that I am the BRAND.
Similar results are achieved on Yahoo and BING, and the following images. The following 17 images prove that my name dominates the top 16 pages search result and the following 2 images show the first pages of Ping and Yahoo search,
Can you do me a favour, search my name “Wael Badawy“ from your end on google.com, yahoo.com and bing.com and write in the comment if you find me that I am the Brand in your search
You are not running a business. You are copying grandma's hobby of making pies.
Like all grandmas, she had the hobby of making pies and we receive lots of them to make her happy. Like it or not, as grandkids, we are told to thank our grandma for the pie and tell her how wonderful is the pie, how we cannot resist finishing the last pie, which was the best. Then we ends up having more pies, although we did not like the pies till today.
Grandma is a very senior, (and I hate to say “old”) with very limited mobility and almost no eyesight. She will challenge her ability to make more pies and send them to her grandkids because she believes she makes them happier.
I was invited to the introduction of a new product with the business owner, and I was told that it is better product that best serve my health and my life.
I was given a bottle to try and I am just curious. I was told that it is a new product that is better than anything else for my health. I was intrigued and as I start to ask simple questions to find a reason to try the sample.
After asking few questions, I found a very strong resistance to answer these simple questions. Then, I was framed as a consultant who is looking for new clients. Then, I was told to not impose my service. The fact is I am not a consultant and I am not shopping for new clients. I wonder, if I should ask the business owner to simply search my name on google “Wael Badawy” to know who I am and what I do.
The product is introduced, as a combination of ingredients that I know, ingredients that I do not know, and ingredient that I may not heard about it.
This introduction triggered a flag, because I do not generally eat or drink what I do not know, in the absence of a strong motive, such as being ill.
THEN, the ingredients are very healthy and it has better fruits and vegetables that I do not know but I should consume for their valuable impact.
I am not sure what is missing here? But, my understanding is the consumers of organic products like to know everything about their food. They do not like the unknown chemicals that may impact their health. At this point, I saw the second flag, because I was judged again.
For me, rightly or wrongly, “organic” is good enough to justify its high price, but “organic” or natural ingredients that I do not know to be better for my health, is not true. Pure marijuana and marijuana’s leaves are organic and natural but they are dangerous and even though we need to know more details to understand its medicinal effect. If I consume it, I will be addicted and most likely, I will end up in Jail but I am consuming an organic natural plant!!!
THEN, the product’s presentation explained the principle of consuming the full fruit/vegetable in a juice, against extracts. In my mind, this principle is questionable with diverse arguments. As a matter of fact, having a full lime as a juice will change its flavor and texture with time because of oxidation, and it can turn to be poisoning or has a higher level of toxic. On the other hand, I cannot consume the whole orange or the whole banana. I have to peal it first!!!
– Anyway, I will pass on this argument because I am not the expert in food but I know what I eat.
At this point, I started to ask questions to better understand who is the business owner, what is the value of the product and what is the quality of the product in order to have a level of confidence to try the product.
I asked about the size of the business, to feel comfort that there are others who trust this product and buy it. I was looking for the customers’ WHY to compare it to mine, i.e. what are the reasons to buy this over-priced product. Oh, this product will cost 25x – 35x the price of a high quality 100% natural juice.
I asked about the plan to grow the business in the next three or five years. I asked about the vision of the owner to confirm the quality of the product, and there is someone stands behind the product. All what I received is “3 and 5 years are very long time”. In the absence of an answer, it demonstrates that there is no continuity and no guarantee to a quality control process. i.e. two samples of the product with the same ingredient, will have different taste.
I asked about the value of the product? The question aimed to help me to find my WHY, and I can try the sample. The articulated value is “You drink good natural stuff, so your body will perform better”. There is no confirmation or reference other than the business owner has issues and it was solved by personally drinking this combination. There was no testimonial and no confirmation of the business owner story. So, I attempted to clarify and I asked, does it help with a diet plan? or release weight? or having high energy? etc. The value was articulated as you eat better ingredients, you will be healthier and you feel good, with a proof.
I do not eat pizza and burger everyday and I eat apple and banana everyday. As it was said “One apple a day, keeps the doctor away!!!”
The articulated value is very general and I can have a blinder. I will use a mix of fruits and vegetables. AND, WOW, the juice will have the same value.
The answer continues to be “the ingredients used are planted by the owner in business owner’s garden and then picked and prepared to make the product!!!”
I asked about the science or the research behind this drink. The answer is that the business owner has researched each of the known and unknown ingredients. But, the business owner has two degrees (none of them are related to food, or health or technology or medicine). Yes, everyone may be impressed of these two degrees that have no relation to the business.
Moreover, the business owner has no passion to either degree and do not work with these degrees but the business owner offers this product to serve and help others.
The product looks professional with an expiry date to expire in two days!!! The product comes in a quantity of 1, 4 and 8 bottles. I do not know the reason that of the expiry date given that there is no research or science behind the product to determine the impact of the three days instead of two. I wonder If someone orders a pack of eight bottles, will he/her consome them all in two days. What about the logistics of producing, distributing and consuming a product that has to be kept cold (I assume) in two days?
It translates to a very limited number of customers with limited quantity orders, within a very small geographical area. So, the production, distribution and consumption in two days!!!.
I have to say that this is not a business, this is a grandma hobby to make pies, as:
1- The pies are initially FREE, till she asks for a favor in return, which will be fairly pricy.
2- The ingredients are from grandma apple tree in the backyard – Oh, by the way, the apple tree is very natural and very organic, because grandma is a senior and can not take care of the apple tree and no one fertilizes the tree.
3- Grandma believes that she makes her family happier by offering more pies. She consumes her effort, while her grandkids do not prefer to eat the pies, or do not eat them at all.
4- Grandma’s pies have to be eaten hot, and within one or two days.
5- No one knows the secret ingredient of the pies, even grandma herself does not.
6- Grandma pies taste differs from time to time. It is a function of the mood and the time in the oven, but grandma does not read the time.
7- Grandma serves only her family and close friends, which is a very limited consumer base.
The whole time, I was simply looking for a reason to try a sample of a new product. I may feel lucky to put my hand on a free sample of this product. I was trying to find a reason for myself. I know grandma, but I do not know the business owner. So please stop copying grandma hobby making pies and focus on building a business.
Note from the author:
This is a true story and I held the name of the product and business confidential because I have the care and passion to every small business and entrepreneur in our community. I strongly believe that the message within this post will help everyone in their business, So please let me know your thoughts below.
I declare that I owe the business owner the price of the sample because I did not feel comfort to drink it, which is my fault AND now the sample expired!!!
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