Why Niche Marketing Is So Effective

Why Niche Marketing Is So Effective

Why is niche marketing such a great choice for someone who’s just starting out? Here are some of the main reasons.

=> Low Competition Means Faster Profits

Who wants to wait months to begin to make money? Getting cash flow fast is crucial for any business, but especially so for someone just getting started online.

A lot of people don’t really and truly believe they can make money online until they start to see the cash flow in. Having that cash flow in for the first time breaks that belief. That first check is often invigorating and very inspirational. It causes people to want to work harder, now that they know it’s real.

Going into a small niche will allow you to start making money right away. You’re not competing against million-dollar marketers who’ve spent years establishing their site, their brand and their rankings.

Instead, you’re going in with guns blazing into a market where the top sites probably don’t often face serious competition. In other words, you’re going for the low-hanging fruit.

=> A Higher Work-to-Profit Ratio

In a niche market, your work will be translated to profits faster. But it’ll also probably be translated into more profits. Because you have fewer people to compete with, your efforts will quickly get you through barriers that would take a lot longer to break through in a bigger market.

In a bigger market, you could literally spend hundreds of hours building backlinks and working on your SEO without breaking into the first page.

In a niche market, you could put in that same effort and quickly get into the first, second or third place positions for your main keyword. You’ll instantly be getting traffic and making money, which you can put back into your business to make even more money.

=> Simple Techniques Work

With niche marketing, you don’t need complex techniques. You don’t have to understand the ins and outs of AdWords if you don’t want to. You don’t need complex tracking mechanisms or custom-built shopping carts.

Niche marketing allows you to learn very basic marketing tactics, put them into action and see immediate results.

In larger markets, you often do need to learn very advanced tactics to compete. After all, if you’re competing against very sophisticated marketers, you’d need very sophisticated tactics yourself.

Don’t try to take on established or well-funded sites until you’ve built at least one or two successful sites yourself. Niche marketing allows you to test out both simple and advanced marketing tactics in easier fields before you try out more difficult markets.

In short, niche marketing is easier, faster and often more profitable. It’s one of the simplest ways to make a good income online, quickly.

Why Branding Is Crucial in Niche Marketing

Why Branding Is Crucial in Niche Marketing

When it comes to branding, most people tend to think of big brand advertising: Coca-Cola, McDonalds and Microsoft spend money on branding. But it doesn’t really apply to smaller businesses – or does it?

Believe it or not, branding is actually crucial to success in a small industry. In this article, you’ll learn why that is, plus several of the big benefits of having strong branding in a niche.

=> Your Reputation Precedes You

Once your site has been around for a while, your reputation will precede you. That means that before someone even lands on your website, they will have heard about you.

They’ll probably already have an opinion about you and your products. What that opinion is depends on your brand. If you did a good job, they should ideally think your products are high quality and that you can really solve their problems.

In other words, your brand can have a huge impact on your conversions.

=> Type-In Traffic

Many beginning marketers have a hard time believing that type-in traffic can be a big traffic source. In reality however, a business that’s been around for a while and has a strong brand often gets more traffic from type-ins than from paid marketing.

For example, Amazon.com gets a lot more traffic from people typing in their domain than people who end up there from ads. In much smaller markets, the same applies: people know your brand, know that you can help them and type in your domain.

This is a huge traffic source in the long run. The only way you’ll do well with this traffic source is to manage your brand well.

=> Networking Benefits

Who would you rather meet in person or do a favor: Someone in your market who you’ve never heard of, or someone who you’ve heard of who has a great reputation?

Having a reputation that precedes you will open many doors. It’ll open doors to guest blogging on other people’s sites, to affiliates, to JV partners, to speaking opportunities, to free backlinks and a lot more. You’ll even have people approach you to do brand new business deals.

=> You Are Your Brand

It’s important to realize that building your business’s brand means also building your own brand.

Not only will this open doors for your business, it’ll also open doors for you professionally. Need a book deal? If you have an existing reputation, it’s much easier. Need investors for your next venture? Want to steal a top-notch programmer from Google to work on your start-up?

Whatever it is you need in your life, by building a strong brand in your business, you’ll automatically be seen as more credible in just about anything you do in the future.

The effects of a powerful reputation can’t be emphasized enough. It’s definitely less measurable numerically than ROI or traffic, but its power is there. Don’t overlook it just because you’re in a small market.

Get to Know Your Niche: How to Research and Connect with Them

Get to Know Your Niche: How to Research and Connect with Them

In order to talk to your niche, you first need to get to know the people in your market. The more you can know their hearts and souls, their problems and desires, the more you’ll be able to connect with them.

How do you connect with a new market quickly? These are three effective methods that’ll get you up to speed on just about any market, fast.

=> Search Yahoo! Answers

Search Yahoo! Answers for questions related to your market. For example, if you’re teaching online marketing, you might search for phrases like:

“Make money online”
“Internet income”
“Online money”
“Make money from home”

And so on and so forth.

Read through dozens of questions to figure out what people commonly ask. What are questions the crop up again and again?

What kind of answers are people getting? Are there questions that are consistently going unanswered? What are some of the frustrations of people asking questions?

=> Look for the Most Replied Posts in Forums

Go to the internet forums that are most popular in your niche. Scroll to the bottom of the forums and set the forum to search by “Most Replied” threads. Set the date range to as far back as it can go.

This will give you a list of topics that people have found most interesting to discuss. These threads will often give you incredible insights into how people view current topics, what was hot in the past and what’s hot now, what kind of creative solutions others have come up with and so on.

Rinse and repeat for each category in the forum, as well as for different forums to really get a feel for where your market’s at.

=> Subscribe to Popular RSS Feeds

Find some of the most popular blogs in your industry and subscribe to their RSS feeds.

Being subscribed to these RSS feeds will allow you to stay on top of new discoveries, new techniques, new questions and other relevant news.

It’ll also give you a wide range of different perspectives, assuming you’ve subscribed to a range of different RSS feeds.

How do you find these RSS feeds?

First start by looking on the forums for blogs that are often mentioned. On those blogs, look at their blogrolls to see what other blogs they’re recommending.

You can also do a search on Technorati, the most popular blog directory online, for your market’s topic. You’ll be able to sort by popularity to find the influential blogs.

If you combine these three techniques, you’ll gain a deep understanding of your market very quickly. You’ll know what drives the people and what problems they face overall, as well as what the important topics are in the market right now.