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Niche Marketing the Right Way!
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Author: Case Stevens Article source: http://www.advertisingknowhow.com/. Used with author's permission.
Niche marketing is hot these days.
Membership sites pop up everywhere inviting you to make
tons of money. All you have to do is find or buy the
highest paying Adsense ads and add them to your pages
filled with automatically generated content.
That's NOT niche marketing, that's Adsense marketing.
It's a numbers game and it's dangerous. I'll explain that
below.
How did this so called Niche Marketing develop?
Solid niche marketing advice already existed for some time.
Very often you were advised to follow your passion or
expertise and set up a site for that.
Then, RSS feed techniques lead to software programs that
scrape content from directories. You have to do absolutely
nothing but entering a bunch of keywords and presto ...
thousands of new content rich pages are automatically added
to your niche site.
And when Joel Comm presented his Adsense Secrets showing
how he went from $30 a day to $500 a day - mind you, a
good book with solid advice, no doubt about that- suddenly
we had three variables that are responsible for the hype:
1. niche marketing,
2. content generating software and
3. high paying Adsense keywords.
Let's have a look at each of these variables in reverse
order.
High paying Adsense keywords.
Suddenly someone discovered that there are certain keywords
that are of great value. Advertisers paid a lot of money to
have their products displayed on pages using these specific
keywords.
It was said that a keyword like 'mesothelioma' or derivates
would pay 50 to 70 dollars a click.
I just entered this in Google Adwords, bidding 90$ per
click and it returned with an estimated number of clicks
per day of 6.2. Now, these figures are just estimates, but
if this is true, with a 1% click-thru it means you would
have to wait about 16 days to earn my 90 dollars!
Again, just assumptions, I only want to make a point.
Adsense is a numbers game. You'll need thousands of
visitors AND good click-thru's to make decent money.
To get thousands of visitors you either have to buy traffic
(Adwords or other PPC's) or create search engine friendly
pages. Now, type in 'mesothelioma' in Google and observe
the PageRanks of the resulting pages. PR 5 or higher! Hard
job to beat them! That means ... work!
To get great click-thru's you'll have to test where you
place your Adsense code. Dang, even more work!
But there's something else, something more important. Read
this carefully ...
Do you really believe ...
that advertisers are going to pay that much money only ...
to have their expensive ads displayed on ...
automatically generated content pages?
Huh ... do you ... huh?
OF COURSE THEY WON'T!
There's a fine line you have to follow playing the Adsense
game. And generating content automatically, no matter where
it comes from, is like walking an elephant over a paper
bridge. It kills the system!
Now, let's have a look at ...
Content generating software
I'm sure in the past you have used the search engines to
find information about a specific topic only to find that
if you click the resulting pages ...
you'll see another 'search-engine'-like page.
That was the work of a niche marketer (specific info)
scraping search engine result pages (SERP's) with 'page
generating software' to quickly generate thousands of pages
about the topic.
Search engines don't like that.
You see, they are looking for great, valuable and original
content. That's what they want to provide to their users so
they keep coming back.
And here's another biggie ...
they want SATISFIED ADVERTISERS!
The last thing they'll need is another copy of their own
pages.
And that's exactly what this software will generate.
Mind you, the software IS good, it does exactly what it
promises. I've used one of these packages long time ago and
that one certainly DID work.
But this kind of software also leaves fingerprints for the
search engines who are getting smarter all the time.
Eventually they will discover automatically generated
content, ignore these pages of even penalize them. That's
why I stopped using such software long, long time ago.
The only way to use this kind of software in a responsible
way is to change the templates that come with the package.
And to do that right means ...
(a lot of) work.
And that's something that wasn't included in the deal!
These days this strategy has changed into scraping articles
from directories. All you have to do is enter a keyword and
presto ...
an article containing that keyword is placed in your page.
That won't work either and for the same two reasons:
fingerprints and copies.
Search engines don't like duplicate content and that's
exactly what this software generates.
The latest trick is software that uses a thesaurus to
change article content on the fly. Apart from copyright
issues, I've seen results of that and they were just
hilarious.
If you want to use reprint articles for keyword rich
content, you have to at least add some unique content to
the page. You could write a review or your own opinion
telling what you think is good and bad about the article
that you posted below.
Dang, work again!
Publishing a reprint article every now and then won't hurt
you, but it does when you do nothing else.
And the article content better fit well into your pages and
even into your site. If it's way of topic, you won't get
far.
Here's a great tip: find unique Public Domain Software! Go here: http://www.anownsite.com/products/public-domain/
Now, let's go down to the core of the business ...
Niche Marketing
Let's define a niche first:
A niche is just a tiny, (highly) specialized marketplace.
A marketplace means that there's demand and supply.
Basically there are two ways to enter a niche:
1. follow your passion (supply) or
2. follow the money (demand).
If you follow your passion it will be easy to develop
content: you're the expert and you do what you love.
But you still have to find out if the passion you're
following is profitable!
And if you follow the money, you're already on the right
track, but you will have a difficult time to develop
content.
Recently I found one on Ebay. But I didn't do a thing with
it. Know why? Cause I don't know squat about millinery!
(THERE you have it! a niche market!)
In order to follow the money, you have to develop some ... passion for the niche otherwise you can't fill your site
properly.
So, either way you have to do something extra.
Now, let's redefine a niche. Let's define a ... profitable niche!
A profitable niche is a highly specialized marketplace with few competitors, high demand and money to pay for that demand.
That's what you have to find out.
"Gheesssss Case, you really make it sound like ... eh ... work!"
Not necessarily.
If you have no idea how to do that, read my article about niche markets.
http://www.anownsite.com/articles/niche-markets.shtml
It's just to give you an idea. Right now I'm working on a
special guide on how to find profitable niches, so stay
tuned.
If you don't want to do all the work to find profitable niches, just have a look at the 50 hot niches that were selected by niche expert James. B. Allen.
http://www.anownsite.com/products/niches/index.html
Or, if you act quickly, you can join what looks like a very, very promising and brand new niche site where everything already is done for you called Niche Site Special.
http://www.anownsite.com/cgi-bin/u.cgi?nss
Now, if you really have found your niche and you've found
profitable affiliate programs that you can gently pre-sell,
then and only then you can consider adding Adsense to your
pages.
Provided that you deliver unique, high value content!
You CAN add some reprint articles, but most of your content
should be yours.
And you'd better use a search engine optimized website for
that! (Right now I'm developing such a system, so again,
stay tuned.)
Bottom line: you still have to do some work or buy the
results of such work!
THAT is the right way to perform niche marketing!
Have fun!
Case Stevens Case Stevens, owner of AnOwnSite Internet Marketing, is experimenting with different marketing techniques, websites, traffic and lead generation. He publishes his experiences in a newsletter featuring understandable, successful low cost Internet marketing techniques, ideas and strategies, articles, news, tips & tricks and interesting (free) downloads.
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