If you have heard of the Internet marketing business for quite some time, then you already know that niche marketing is one of the most popular methods of making money online. Best of all, this market is nowhere near saturation because of the ever-increasing demand for quality information.

So let us quickly look at how you can select a niche that pays.

Choosing THE right product from a hot list of products is probably the most difficult thing for a marketer. Coming up with an idea that sells is something that gives jitters even to the experts. Here are a few things you can do to improve your chances.

Keep your eyes open: The first thing to do is to spend some time surfing the net. Look at ads on websites. What products are they selling? Visit blogs and look at the “paid sponsors” section. Watch the news and read papers. See what products are being offered on the market right now. Search for a keyword and see what comes up in the search engines. Visit websites like google.com/trends or wordtracker.com and look up the demand for keywords you like. Watch TV and find what products are selling hot. Market research is vital to finding the right niche.

Look inwards: What ideas do you have in your head? Are your ideas already on sale? Explore new ideas and new angles of old ideas. Can you come up with a better idea and beat your competition?

Turn to ClickBank: Just as their tag suggests, ClickBank is the world’s biggest marketplace. So, they have a finger on the pulse of the market. If it is selling hot, it will be on ClickBank. Visit their website and click on “Buy products”. This will open up a large category of products. Clicking on any of these categories will take you to the sub-categories of that category. Click on any of the sub-categories and see what kinds of products are selling in that niche. Read through the sales pages of these products and discover their USP. This will give you a good idea of what you should select.

Once you have identified your niche, half of your business structure is in place. But you need to build the other half too.

The power of niche marketing comes from the fact that the market consists of consumers looking for a particular product. Even if you develop a product, you can’t succeed till you shine a torch on the fact that you are the best in your field. You need to reach out to people.

For this, it is essential that you know your target audience. Knowing who you are marketing to, makes it easy for you to channel your energy and marketing $$ only on that section of people.

For example, take a car dealership. The first thing you have to decide is where the dealership is located. If it is in New York, chances of consumers coming from Seattle to buy from you are less. So, narrow your focus to people within a 50-mile radius. This increases your chances of clinching a sale.

Defining your target audience helps you to:

• Maximize your profit by targeting a defined market. Your efforts will no longer be like a shot in the dark.
• You can optimize your search engine accordingly, so your customers can easily find you.
• You can offer solutions specific to your niche.
• This makes it easy for you to develop new ideas for supporting products.
• It is easier for you to dominate the market if you know the dynamics of your niche.

This should give you a good idea of how to develop a niche and become the expert of your field.

Now that you have the product, it is time to market it. Niche marketing can be done in two ways: Membership websites and websites with no up front charges.

Membership websites obviously ask for a fee upfront, before they give members access to their site. This is a recurring income business model where members keep renewing their subscriptions if they are happy with the product you offer.

Websites without an up front charge are a little different. They offer the cake free of cost and tell members to pay up for the icing. If you like the cake well enough, you will pay for the icing.

Popularity: 38% [?]

In my last article, “Discover The #1 Secret To Leverage Forums For Traffic“, I talked about forums and how you can leverage them for traffic through the content you post. Blogs can also be monetized through content. Blog marketing is a hot topic with internet marketers, so lets see how you too can get the best out of them.

Blogs are easy to start. Blogs are cheap Internet advertising strategies. You can start one for free on blogger.com, wordpress.com, etc. They are often a great alternative to building and maintaining a website. In fact, most Newbies in online business get started with a blog to get a feel of the whole thing and then plan bigger projects.

The success of blogs is mainly due to that thirst for information, which leads visitors to browse the Internet. Happily, the search engines also demand good quality content and since you need to rank high with the search engines so that they bring you focussed traffic, you can use blogs to achieve this.

Blogs are must-haves for Internet business success. Bloggers wield a lot of powerful influence because when someone is considering buying something, they prefer to turn to their favorite blogs for more information and product reviews and to express their concerns. People trust blogs and visit them regularly, especially when it is refreshed on a daily basis. See what we mean? Now lets move on to ways in which you can pull traffic using your blog.

• Your blog title and description must be keyword specific. When you sign up to start a blog, say at blogger.com, you are asked to give a title and a brief description. Here’s where you think hard. Based on who is your target audience and what topic you are passionate about writing on, you can do some quick keyword research with the help of a keyword research tool and name your blog.
• Generate keyword rich content for your blog. You want to be found by your niche market don’t you? Update your blog on a daily basis so that your visitors bookmark you and keep visiting to see what is new. While original posts are best, you can also use an automatically updating feed getting content from other blog posts and articles. With each post treated as its own page, to the search engines your blog will appear like a multi page website with regular fresh content that is rich in keywords and links.
• Your blog profile must be complete with information about yourself as a person. Visitors love to see that you are for real, what you like and dislike, your favorite things etc. Sprinkle in a few relevant keywords, too.
• While at it, you can also post on other blogs and link back to your blog. Make contact and start the process of relationship building. The more links you have to your blog, naturally the more traffic you will see.
• Allow people to subscribe to your blog through RSS feeds. The advantage is, your content will be delivered to your readers by their consent. Each time you post new content they are notified about it.
• Submit your blogs to RSS directories as a one time activity.
• Each time you update your blog, ping it to let the directories know.
• Preferably create an RSS reader of your own - it’s a good branding exercise for increased visibility.
• Consider pod casting. Technology changes by the day and you might like to keep up with it. There are pod casting services that can upload, store, host and set up the RSS and submit to directories as well as ping.
• Try video-blogging.

Blogs are probably the easiest way to be indexed by the search engines for your specific keywords, and are a great platform to launch your products, pre sell your products and keep in touch with your niche market.

Popularity: 27% [?]

You have probably heard and read a lot about the concept of search engine optimization. This is important for all Internet marketers in order to be found by prospective customers online. This is possible through keywords, which are identified through keyword research. Keywords must be relevant to your business since they bring visitors to your website.

For your website to rank high with the search engines that are responsible for bringing focussed traffic, some serious keyword research is essential so that you can find out exactly which ones are used by your visitors. Finding these keywords will also enable you place them in the right locations.

You can shortlist your keywords via brainstorming with peers and friends, competition analysis, and use a keyword research tool for evaluation. What we now want to share with you are crucial criteria to bear in mind when you select keywords to receive targeted website traffic:

• Select key phrases rather than keywords, as you are likely to get better- focussed traffic and appear in more specific results
• Keywords must be related to your website and be relevant to your product or service on offer
• The more specific the keywords, the better the chances of prospective customers visiting your website and the lesser the chances of facing competition
• Pay attention to the variation of keywords used in different locations across the world. Accordingly web pages must be optimized for the audience. The English say ‘lift’ while the Americans call it an elevator - so take care to use the right ones at the appropriate domains.
• You primary keyword can be used for website optimization. The secondary keywords can be used to draw traffic.
• Remember that keyword research tools are effective, but your own knowledge also counts just as much.
• The final keyword list must be tested. This may seem like a tedious process, but it is necessary in order to enable you finalize a list that is effective and ranks well with the search engines
• A variety of relevant keywords is more effective than the same keyword being used over and over.
• Keywords must be located in the title tags, header tags, ALT tags, anchor text, URLs, meta tags and comments. There are efficient tools that help by suggesting the best ways to do this.
• Also add keywords that are spelt slightly differently by users to your list since they are equally responsible for traffic
• By including a site search function on your website you will be able to monitor the keywords being used by your visitors, as well as making it easy for them to navigate your site.
• There are keywords that have a high search rate even though they are low in terms of competition. These keywords are just as important.

To be successful, keywords must have a high conversion rate. This means you must be able to turn your visitors into customers.

Popularity: 23% [?]

One of the main reasons why so many membership sites fall flat on their faces is due to lack of expertise in their selected niche.

For people to visit your website AND pay for information, you have to be the expert. Why would anyone pay you otherwise?

The moment someone mentions your area of expertise, your name must pop up in people’s heads. Easier said than done, you say? Listen up, it is not that difficult.

Before you select your niche, there are certain things you can do to make it easier for you to become the expert.

• Evaluate your expertise. Why should people pay to listen to you?
• Who is your target audience? Students, businesspersons, executives, investors or work-at-home moms? Determine their gender, backgrounds, income level, interests, professional and educational backgrounds. This will tell you what unique angle you should explore in your website.
• How good is the competition? What areas are they exploring? Do they know more or less?

By the time you have answered these questions, you already know where you stand. Listed below are some things you can do to become THE expert in your field.

Read: Read all kinds of material - books, forums, blogs or magazines. Forums are a great place to find enthusiastic questions, diverse answers and innovative ideas. Sometimes, you can even pick up hot information on new products from various forums.

Narrow your focus: Suppose you picked self-improvement as your area of expertise. You know that this niche is simply too vast for one person to do full justice to it. So you narrow your scope and take up one aspect, say ’stop smoking’. Good. You are now targeting a specific group of people. But, how about narrowing it down to ’stop smoking using herbal supplements’? Haven’t you just chopped off more than half the competition and targeted an even more specific group of people? Can you begin to see how narrowing a field down to its sub-topic will make the subject manageable and not overly competitive? It is much easier to dominate a narrow field of interest.

Speak whenever you get the chance: More than 95% of the population develops nervous ticks when they stand up to speak. So, the moment you walk up to that microphone, you are already ahead of 95% of your competition! Speaking about your topic establishes you as the indisputable expert in your niche. The next best thing to do is to give interviews. This neat technique wins you the label of an expert, free advertisement and increased traffic.

Write: There’s a public perception that only an expert can write well. This is more so if you are writing a book. So, get busy and write a book on your niche. If you can’t do it yourself, go for second best: hire a ghostwriter. Write good, read-worthy, thought provoking articles and send it out to ezines and other websites. This is the easiest way to get free publicity. Submit press releases that pique people’s interest. In short, generate EXTRA-ordinary content. Only this can establish your expertise.

Network like your life depends on it: Create a bulletin board, start a blog and visit related forums. Attend networking events where your clients hang out. Remember, it’s not who you know that is important, it is who knows *you* that counts!

So, there you have it!

Formula for expertise = Consistent great content + continuous online presence.

Popularity: 25% [?]