If you’re looking for a way to get into SEO or to start making money online, than you should consider niche marketing. There are several ways to do internet marketing, but starting a niche website is an easy way to learn the business and quickly see success. Flagship blogs, like this one, have great long term potential, but can be a challenge for a newbie. To do well in a hard niche requires a serious amount of marketing and SEO knowledge. Because of this, it may take months or years to grab a significant enough market share. Months will go by without results and many give up. This is why niche marketing is great for beginners.
With niche marketing you are creating a site that highly focuses on a particular niche or even a particular keyword. Court’s method of Keyword Sniping is basically a niche marketing method that is highly focused on dominating the rankings for a particular keyword. Although Court stopped supporting the method, it is an effective niche marketing strategy. It just was mixed with the idea of bad content and people might have used it for spam. Just because it was abused, does not mean it is not effective. If you use it in combination with solid keyword rich content and methods that appear clean, it can go a long way. (this site follows the keyword sniping model)
Niche marketing allows you to be a big fish in a small pond. It doesn’t take much content; usually a couple of solid posts is all a niche blog needs. The number of links you need are usually in the hundreds instead of thousands. And it allows you to easily be the “best” in the niche. You can dominate many niches in a few months from site launch, instead of a year.
When I started internet marketing, I launched a handful of niche sites. Instead of investing heavily into one site, I split it across a group of sites. In a matter of months I was making money from them. These sites now pay for all my bills and support me. I can now simply maintain them while I build this blog and other niche sites. In a few months my new sites will begin to produce income and my income will double. Also I can devote time to this site without stressing about the money it makes. This blog is around 6 months old now and has been a slow and steady project of mine. It made no money for the first 4 months. This would be enough to discourage most people. I didn’t stress it, because my niche sites provided me more than enough money. This site is now bringing in small amount of income, but is tiny compared to my niche sites. The time invested here is MUCH larger. I actually lose money on this site, but it has benefits outside of making money, but I can go into that later.
Finding a niche market is always a challenge for newbies and I don’t understand why. Honestly, I’ve never had a problem with it even when I was a newbie. I pulled out a sheet of paper and wrote down all my interests, all the stuff in my room that looked profitable, and wrote down all my girlfriend’s interests. These are all ideas for niche markets. I have ideas all the time. When I’m out and about, I’m hit with ideas constantly. Sometimes I’m caught without a notepad and come home with ideas scribbled on my hand to look up when I get back to my computer. Before I start niche research I start to think about how I can make money with it. If it is a service, Adsense is possible. If it can be purchased, I consider eBay. I jump on various affiliate networks and look at possible products. If I feel like it can make money, I’ll put it down to do niche research. I come up with some keyword ideas off the top of my head, then throw them into Keyword Elite.
Historically, I am best at niche affiliate marketing. I’ve done well with eBay and ClickBank. I’ve also dabbled in Adult affiliates to test that market (I wanted to test my skills in one of the most competitive markets, and I did really well). Over the next few months I plan on playing with a few Adsense niche sites.
If you’re feeling discouraged with your SEO luck and just cannot dominate SERPS, I recommend giving niche marketing a try. I’m going to make some posts talking about how to do niche sites soon. It will go right along with my case study. (the case study is a niche site) Find a medium to long tail keyword that has low competition. Build a small highly focused site and link build hard for it. Due to its small size, you should see results quickly. This is a great way to boost your confidence and test various methods. Once you make it work on a small site, you can simply repeat your skills on a larger scale to dominate larger markets.
Related Posts:
Affiliate Networks for Making Money
Done With Build A Niche Store
Adsense or phpBay For Niche Sites
Make Money Online
How to Find a Profitable Niche
{ 3 comments }
I was dissapointed to see Court had deleted his keyword sniping posts when I checked a few weeks back. In my opinion they were some of the best MMO posts ever. I think something that is important for people to keep in mind when targeting niches is volume. Griz advocates making a lot of sites that are really 1/2 done and seeing what seems to be working. Then investing more time in the niches that seem like they will actually go somewhere and cutting your losses elsewhere.
Justin, I have a hard time picking a niche. I am in this for 10 months, but because of the fact I can’t pick a keyword I consider myself a noob. Especially when I hear the results from others.
For me, it is hard to understand how can people pick a niche and have 50, 100 or even more uniques a day with just indexing the site. I just don’t get it and I go nuts. Especially when they say that there are 500,000 pages that Google pulls when you search for that keyword.
Honestly, I would be willing to pay for good keywords, if such market existed. Because I am doing this for far too long, and still don’t have success with the sites I made. I have blogs with hundreds of links from posts, comments, articles, BMD runs, directories… For me, picking the right keywords is what makes you stay in this business and pushes you forward.
Another way to find a niche is to see what people are wanting to buy via places like Craigslist. A great tool for that is http://www.CraigZoom.com , as it allows you to search ALL of Craigslist by keyword. So… you could put in a phrase like ‘wanted to buy’ and see what comes up.
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