Erich Stauffer

Tag: Micro-niches

  • 6 Steps to Making Money Online

    Using proven, repeatable techniques there is little risk and great rewards involved in marketing products for profit.

    When you use keywords that people are searching for, you naturally drive traffic to your site, which in turn makes you money online. But how do you find the right keywords and how do you know what people are searching for?

    There are six key steps to this process which will answer all of these questions:

    1. Find Micro-Niche Keywords – Identify a micro-niche inside a penetrable market that has profitable products that people are already selling. A micro-niche is a subset of a market niche.
    2. Verify Keyword Volume – Using WordTracker and/or the Google External Keyword Tool, make sure searches are over 80 per day and that there are under 30,000 search results overall.
    3. Verify Keyword Competition – Determine whether or not you will be able to penetrate the top 10 results in Google based on the number of top-level domains listed, their age, and number of backlinks.
    4. Produce Keyword-Rich Content – Write content for your primary landing page that also contains your primary keywords and links to sub-pages that contain longer keyword phrases.
    5. Promote Using Keywords – Write articles, blog posts, and lenses for posting on other web sites that link back to your sub-pages with your longer keyword phrases. Post at least two Youtube videos.
    6. Sell Products or the Web Site Itself – At this point, if you followed all of the steps, you should be making money online by selling products.  If not, then consider selling the domain for a profit online at Flippa or Sedo.

    The rate of success with this method is roughly 1 out of 8 and marketing and testing can take anywhere from 1 to 30 days.  Success is defined as more money coming in than is going out each month and that includes all opportunity costs (time that could have been spent making money in other activities).  Tracking is critical not only with the data of the results, but with the finances and time spent.

  • Blogtrepreneurs Blogging for Profit

    The Internet is a great unsettled land not unlike the discovery of a new world – and entrepreneurs everywhere are taking notice

    Entrepreneurs who blog for profit are sometimes called Blogtrepreneurs. Whether they come from a business background, an Internet marketing background, web design background, or are still in high school, anyone who can identity a niche (read: need) can turn content creation into revenue creation. In fact, that is exactly what I do everyday whether I’m actively working on a blog (or mini-site) or not. That is because blogging for profit is like a fly wheel. It takes a lot of energy to get it going (finding a niche, an appropriate domain, adding content, and promoting), but once the fly wheel is going it takes little effort to keep it going and you are free to start a new fly wheel, or blog.

    Niches

    Niches are segments of a market and are generally well covered. Micro-niches are segments of a niche and are generally covered less. This is where blogtrepreneurs can add value to the market by helping people find answers to what they are seeking in a nook of a market segment. For example, digital cameras are a market. SLR cameras are a niche of digital cameras and NIKON SLR cameras are a micro-niche of SLR cameras. A site about NIKON SLR cameras could sell it promote or educate about the cameras themselves and about all of their accessories. I have a blog about family photography that talks about different digital cameras and techniques for taking family pictures, for example. Identifying a micro-niche is not easy, but there are many sites out there that can help you identity how to find a niche.

    Domains

    Once you have a niche picked out, its time to secure a domain. There are still good domains to be had, but everyday there are less and less as more people gobble up the remaining ones. In the same way there is only so much land, there are only so many words and combinations of words, which is what adds to domains value over time. When choosing a domain you should include your primary keywords if at all possible. If you don’t know what your primary keywords are for your niche, stop and find out. There are plenty of sites with advice on how to choose the right keywords, which you should use  in your domain. Domains can be registered at registers like GoDaddy.com, but also at hosts like HostGator, 1and1, and BlueHost. I can recommend any of these.

    Content

    Once you have your domain registered with hosting, you’ll want to start adding content. One of the easiest ways to do this is to setup WordPress on your server. BlueHost makes it easy with SimpleScripts, but you can install it manually almost as easy at 1and1 and others. Once WordPress is installed, you can start adding posts, but where will you get the content? Think of writing content like writing a research paper. You can’t copy works, but you can quote and reference. Ultimately you wafted to add commentary and value to the material without plagiarising. You won’t get an F, but Google may not rank your site if it contains duplicate content so write your own. For my nook covers site I pieced together facts around the web to create something whole and new and its paid off.

    Promotion

    Now that you’ve created your content its time to promote your site. Promotion starts from within and that means finding a WordPress theme that is SEO ready it making it so. I’m not going to go into SEO here, but there are lots of sites that explain all about search engine optimization. The next step is creating backlinks, which are links back to your site from other, preferably relevant, sites. Think of backlinks as votes that Google uses to decide who it should rank first for a given set of keywords. Find relevant sites to create backlinks on by commenting or by adding to a forum discussion for example.  I was able to greatly increase my ereader accessories traffic by adding a link to it in a forum about ereaders.

    So do you think you have what it takes to be a blogtrepreneur? Don’t wait. The longer you do the more you delay getting paid and risk losing out on the perfect domain. Want more? Check out my other blog on how to make money online.

  • Blogging for Profit

    How to Find a Profitable Micro-Niche to Market Online

    This is an article based on a similar article I wrote about traffic conversion in 2009. Using proven, repeatable techniques there is little risk and great rewards involved in blogging for profit. Peter Drucker in Innovation and Entrepreneurship: Practice and Principles writes, “Entrepreneurship, it is commonly believed, is enourmously risky…[but]…entrepreneurship should be the least risky rather than the most risky course,” because of how entrepreneurship, “by definition, shifts resources from areas of low productivity and yield to areas of higher productivity and yield.” Much work has already been done for us in the form of innovating processes and software tools, which eliminates risk. There are two key phases to the process:

    1. Research and Analysis – Identify a micro-niche inside a penetrable market that has profitable products that people are already selling.
    2. Marketing and Testing – Promote the products and test the results. If the traffic and/or conversions do not meet thresholds in a given time, start over.

    The rate of success with this method is anywhere between 1 in 6 to 1 in 10 and marketing and testing can take anywhere from 1 to 30 days. Success is defined as more money coming in than is going out each month and that includes all opportunity costs (time that could have been spent making money in other activities). Tracking is critical not only with the data of the results, but with the finances and time spent.

    Rules and Metrics of Phase 1 – Research and Analysis

    According to The Thirty Day Challenge (now called simply, “The Challenge“) micro-niches are identified as the #1 keyword receiving at least 80 clicks per day and websites containing that keyword being less than 30,000 globally. At least 3 keywords other keywords within the micro-niche with similar criteria must also be identified, if not, start over.

    The top 10 search results for the top 4 keywords has to be penetrable within the time allowed. Metrics to consider are:

    Test 1: If the competition has a young domain age, a low number of back-links, and does not exist in any of these directories, then the market is penetrable. If the opposite is true, stop and start over.

    Test 2: Check to see that related products are both available to be sold and are being sold by others. If either is not true, stop and start over.

    If both of those tests pass, then make sure the products are giving a referral amount that you deem acceptable. If not, stop and start over. You now have products in a penetrable micro-niche that are profitable to sell. Move on to Phase II – Marketing and Testing.

    Phase II – Marketing and Testing

    Begin by setting up a place to place your products. This is where your marketing efforts will point back to. It can be a Squidoo page, a Blogspot Blog, or WordPress running on your own domain.  If you are using Blogspot or WordPress, install Google Analytics to track traffic. If using Squidoo, there are tracking mechanisms built into the site. Once you have a place to put your products, begin writing copy (content) for the site. You will need to write the following:

    • ‘About’ and ‘Privacy’ pages – use keywords and talk about the product. A privacy policy is required by many advertisers and affiliate programs including Google Adsense.
    • Ad copy for the products – if using Market Samurai, there are built-in features for helping with this, but you can do it manually too.
    • Create posts (or pages) about the keyword subject matter within the micro-niche.
    • Next, begin to create backlinks to your site by placing links to the domain, the blog posts, and the the product pages on social bookmarking, social media, and in blog comments in your related market. Be sure to add links from .edu and .gov domains. You can search Google specifically for blogs on those domains manually, but you can do this semi-automatically with Market Samurai too.

    Track the incoming page hits on Google Analytics. Testing for viability can begin only after your product’s page is receiving at least 200 hits per day. If you are not getting 200 hits per day, then try these things first:

    • Increase the number of blog posts on and off the site using other services like hubpages and squidoo – then promote all of the new posts again.
    • Make sure you are promoting on at least 30 different sites for each post – you can use services like ping.fm or trafficbug to assist with this task.
    • Pay to have your site listed in the Yahoo! Directory.
    • Pay for Google Adwords or Bing (Microsoft) AdCenter.
    • Add pictures with descriptive text to get hits from search engine’s image searches like Google Image search.
    • Add video to Youtube with links and comment on other videos in your micro-niche.
    • Make sure you are posting to Twitter and Facebook regularly and engaging in conversation, not just promoting.

    If after 30 days or at your own set threshold, you are still not receiving 200 hits or more per day, your product is not viable. Quit and start over. You have just found one of your 6 to 10 failures. If you do have over 200 hits per day, but are not getting conversions, first try changing out your ad copy, images of the products, and/or placement of the two on the page. Refer to Dan Kennedy’s sales letter technique. If after changing all three of these variables and still your revenue is below your expenses, then start over. If not, you have a profitable business. Consider selling it for ten times it’s worth and starting over using Flippa.

  • How to Build a Mini-Site Around a Micro-Niche in 10 Steps

    Mini-sites are web sites setup to cover very specific things (micro-niches) and are not usually updated, or at least not updated that often. A mini-site that is updated often stops being a mini-site and becomes a blog. Mini-sites usually answer a question, act as a guide, or help filter information to help searchers find answers about a particular micro-niche. A micro-niche is simply defined as a smaller, sub-section of a niche that together with other niches make up a market, which together with other markets make up an economy.

    Mini-sites provide value for both the visitor and the vendor. Sometimes it is hard to find what you need online because the niche is so small that no one has thought to gather the information together before into a micro-niche. When you do that in the form of a mini-site you add value to the visitor and in return get value in the form of ad clicks or affiliate purchases. Think of it as organizing the web into specialty areas that provide the content that search engines need and you see how building mini-sites can be a very noble endeavor.

    Below is a Checklist for How to Get Started Making Money Online in 10 Steps:

    1. Decide which Affiliate program you want to use (Clickbank, CommissionJunction, Paydotcom, Amazon, or LinkShare, for example) and register.  You may need to have a website first (chicken and egg, I know), but you can get a blog for free at Blogspot.com or Tumblr.com to get started.  If you already have a web site, make sure it has some content.
    2. Browse around their respective marketplace and look for 5-10 products which look interesting to you, but that are hard to find. For example, if you joined Amazon Associates, browse Amazon to find 5-10 products that interest you, but but that you could add more information to, group, or sort differently to help people find them easier.
    3. Use the Google Keyword Tool to find keywords (key phrases) that advertisers are purchasing which receive between 1,500 and 20,000 exact searches per month.  The difference between ‘exact’ and ‘broad’ is that exact has to occur in order as if in quotes, but broad can have the keyword out of order.  Run competition tests on each of the keywords you find. If there is a page or web site in Google ranking in the top 5 results with less than 100 backlinks, then it’s generally a good keyphrase to go for.  Otherwise, keep looking until you find some.
    4. Go to Bing and search for link:www.site.com –site www.site.com to view backlinks from other sites to that site (replace ‘site’ with the actual web address).  Google hides their backlinks, but you can find out more detailed information on your site by using Google’s Webmaster Tools.  However this doesn’t help while researching other people’s web sites. If your competition has more than 5 homepage results or more backlinks than you are willing to spend the time and money to compete with, then start over at the top of this checklist.
    5. Decide on a final keyword (just one) that you want to go with. If a lot of them are similar in statistics, just pick the one you know the most about and make this the title of your web site and home page.
    6. Purchase a domain that is very relevant to your keyword and/or includes your keyword(s).  A keyword-relevant domain with good content and backlinks will toast the competition based on Google’s current algorithm setup.
    7. Make sure your site has at least 4-5 pages of relevant, unique content with at least 400 words per page.  Add at least one picture to each page to help with promotion later and to get traffic from Google Image Search.
    8. Install Google Analytics so that you can track how many visitors your site is receiving and see where they are coming from.  This will help you measure success and help you decide when and if to change things up.
    9. Design or purchase a theme for your web site and install it.  This should be done after writing content because content is more important than design.  Let me repeat that.  Content is more important than design.  Yes, design can affect the helpfulness and value of your site, but it is far too easy to get caught up tweaking a web site for weeks before a single post has been written.  Don’t fall into this trap.  Save the design work for after the content and before the promotion period.
    10. Its time to promote your web site.  Submit to search engines, find relevant forums that contain signatures and get involved, find relevant blogs to comment on, and consider writing articles for submission to other web sites.  It’s all about creating backlinks to your site from areas relevant to your keywords.  Keep working on building backlinks until you rank in the top 5 results on Google and you are receiving at least 200 visitors per day.  Only then should you tweak your design to help increase revenue.

    Now go make some money online!