What You Need to Operate a Niche Marketing Site

What You Need to Operate a Niche Marketing Site

Before you can sit back and reap the rewards from operating your own niche marketing site, there are a few vital components necessary to create a successful and profitable website:

1) A Product or Service to Sell.

Not just any old product, you need to do a little research and find a hungry market. The secret to making money is to find out what problems people are facing and offer them unique solutions.

Don’t try to sell what every body else is, be unique. You need to stand out from the crowd by offering a better solution. Offering a cheaper solution doesn’t always work. Any product or service will have a perceived value to it; try to sell cheaper than that and people will wonder what’s wrong with it.

2) A Domain Name

Despite what people may think, a well worded catchy .com domain name will enhance your sales. It adds to the perceived value of your product or service.

There are many places to buy domain names and a simple search on any search engine will lead you to many of them. Many hosting packages will include a domain name for no extra cost.

3) Hosting

Before setting up the website on your domain you will need to join a hosting service. There are thousands of hosting services to choose from, and not all of them are reliable. Don’t be misled by price, there are many cheap reliable hosting services.

There are two basic types of hosting:

i) Shared Hosting - This is the cheapest hosting but your domain will be hosted with many others on the same server. When your website traffic is low, it makes sense to share the server resources and cost with other people.

ii) Dedicated Hosting - This is more expensive, but your domain is the only one hosted. When your website traffic increases beyond a certain point you will have to consider dedicated hosting.

When choosing a host, take note of their “uptime” which is often shown as a percentage. This is the proportion of time the host’s servers are working properly (i.e. your website will be online). Any host who claims to have a 99.99% uptime is lying to you.

4) Website

The type of website you decide to use will greatly affect your sales. The most important point is don’t confuse your visitors. If you want to sell a product, don’t offer them anything else, just the product.

A website with a single sales page will nearly always outsell a content website with many pages. The reason… a single sales page offers your visitor two choices, buy or leave. A multi-page website offers your visitor many options and confuses them; they will click to a few different pages and then leave without buying.

5) Good Sales Copy

This is the make or break of your niche marketing site. A sales page with poor copy will not sell very well.

Sales copy, what’s that?

Sales copy is the wording you use on your sales page. It encompasses:

- What types of words you use.

- The way you use the words.

- The layout of your page.

- How you present your product.

- Above all else, it explains how you customer will benefit from owning your product.

Writing good sales copy is a skill which most people do not possess. It is the area of a niche marketing site which will take up most of your time, and if you’re not prepared to study copy writing, is best contracted out to a professional.

6) Sales Processor

The one thing you don’t want to do with your niche marketing site is process sales manually. The internet doesn’t shut up shop for the night; it keeps going 24/7. If you process sales manually, you’ll be doing it at all sorts of odd hours.

To get around this you need to use an automated sales processor. This is simply a system that will automatically process credit cards on your behalf. Your customer simply enters their credit card details into a form and after these are successfully verified, they are sent to a webpage explaining how their order will be delivered.

7) Autoresponder

This is the only optional part of a niche marketing site. You don’t have to use autoresponders, but once a customer has purchased something from you they will be inclined to buy more from you. If you capture their contact details you will be able to tell them about future product launches, or fantastic special offers you have put together.

There are many autoresponder services available and even scripts you can purchase to install on your website. Before committing yourself to any particular provider, do a little research. Forums are a great place to learn who are the best or cheapest.

 

Article written by Ivan Wong from Internet-Marketing-Today.com
Visit today to get hot marketing tips, free marketing software and comprehensive reviews of marketing resources.

Sincerely,
Ivan

Top Research Ideas for Your Niche Product

Top Research Ideas for Your Niche Product

The fundamental mistake made by many niche marketers is they create products based on what they think people want to buy. The correct way of deciding what niche product to create, is to find out what people are actually buying at the moment.

Here are five ways of discovering ideas for niche products which you can sell to make money:

1) Use Forums

With the rapid expansion of the internet, forums (or discussion groups or bulletin boards as they are also called) have proliferated. There are forums hosted all over the internet based on practically every theme imaginable.

Forums are websites where like minded people gather to discuss all sorts of issues pertaining to the theme of the forum. Some of the well moderated forums are extremely active and a good place to conduct research.

When it comes to finding ideas for niche products, you need to use the search engines to locate a number of forums on the theme you are interested in. For example, if you’re interested in needlepoint, you could enter needlepoint+bulletin board into the search engine.

Visit each forum and find out what questions people are asking. In addition, find out how many times similar questions are asked. The more frequently a question is asked across a number of forums, the more likely you have found a topic for your next niche product or website.

2) Visit Your Local Book Store

If you are completely stumped for ideas, a visit to your local book or magazine store is in order. People who are keen on a hobby almost always subscribe to related magazines, and if they buy magazines there’s a good chance they will buy niche products.

Your task is to discover what magazines are being sold and how quickly they move. It is best to visit a number of stores and compare the common magazines sold in all of them. Try to find out from the sales assistants how many copies they sell of the popular magazines you have identified.

A magazine sold in great number by each store, month after month, is a sure sign of a profitable niche.

3) Investigate eBay

eBay is one of the biggest, if not the biggest single market place on the planet. Millions of people buy a gigantic range of products month after month.

Go to eBay.com and scroll down the left hand menu, click on “All Categories” and scroll down to the bottom of the page that opens in your browser until you get to the section titled “Other Ways to Browse”. Included in that section are four sub-sections, each being ways to conduct your research:

i) eBay Keywords (popular terms being searched for)

ii) Common Searches

iii) eBay Pulse (a daily snapshot of current trends)

iv) Popular Products

From these four you will be able to spot a multitude of popular ideas for your next niche product.

4) Survey Your Website Visitors

If you have an existing website which receives a fair bit of traffic, you can survey that traffic using a popup. In order to entice people into taking the survey you will have to offer some kind of reward. You could even offer extra rewards for people who refer others to your survey.

Normally any web survey you conduct would have to be of a similar theme to your website, but it is possible to conduct a survey to find out your visitor’s interests and whether they would be prepared to spend any money on their interest.

They key is to ask simple questions in a manner that won’t lead your respondents to any particular answer. When designing your survey, keep in mind you will have to analyze the data and draw conclusions from it. This means keeping your questions “on topic”.

The simplest surveys to analyze are those constructed with multiple choice questions. The disadvantage of this is you don’t know for sure that the answers are absolute or close (i.e. “second best”).

5) Survey Your eMail List

If you have your own email list, you could survey them to find out what problems they are currently facing, or what interests they have. People on your email list will tend to answer more truthfully because there is a degree of trust between you and them.

This degree of trust not withstanding, you will still have to offer an incentive for your subscribers to take the survey. Design your survey the same as you would for a popup on your website.

 

Article written by Ivan Wong from Internet-Marketing-Today.com
Visit today to get hot marketing tips, free marketing software and comprehensive reviews of marketing resources.

Tips for Finding Wholesale Sources of Niche Products

Tips for Finding Wholesale Sources of Niche Products

If you want to sell niche products from your own website, physical store or even on eBay, you need to be able to compete with your local retailers. This means finding a wholesaler willing to trade with you at prices which give you enough leeway to make a profit.

The first place to look is locally, why pay shipping charges for goods sent from a supplier across country when you could take a drive in your own car to a local supplier for small goods or hire a van for bigger stuff? Some local wholesalers might even provide a cheap or even free delivery service.

Wholesalers as a rule don’t advertise in the mass media such as TV or newspapers and so they are often difficult to find. To get you started, here are a few ideas for locating wholesale sources of niche products for you to sell:

1) One of the first places to look is in your local trade directory, many wholesalers place advertisements in local trade directories and even in the Yellow Pages for the products they carry.

2) Another place to conduct your research is on the internet, and there are search engines which are wholesale specific such as www.wholesalecentral.com and www.wholesalequest.com. These wholesale specific search engines allow you to search for wholesale sources by browsing categories or by entering keywords (related to the products you want to sell) into a search bar.

You can find other wholesale specific search engines or directories by typing “wholesale search engine” or “wholesale directory” or “wholesale directories” or even “wholesalers” into the search engine of your choice.

3) Nearly all wholesalers will belong to a trade association and these trade associations will often host trade shows all over the world. It stands to reason that an excellent place to discover new wholesale sources is to visit as many trade shows as you can. Here are two ways of finding suitable tradeshows:

i) Join a trade association related to the goods you wish to sell and subscribe to their periodicals or newsletters as these always carry details of local, regional and international trade shows.

ii) Conduct research on the internet by visiting websites such as Trade Show News Network (www.tsnn.com). You could also search for others by entering “trade show directory” or add a keyword related to your products to the search phrase - for example, “jewelry trade shows”.

4) Look for the items you wish to sell in a local store, when you find the item look carefully at the packaging as many suppliers provide their contact details and often include their website URL. You can either contact them directly or visit their website to discover how to either purchase from them directly (which is often cheaper than buying from a wholesaler), or if that is not possible ask them who your local wholesaler is and if they can give you the wholesaler’s contact details.

Once you have a list of possible wholesale sources for your niche products you need to do some due diligence on each wholesaler. You need to find out if they are legitimate businesses and are approved by the manufacturers. They last thing you want to get involved in is a copyright lawsuit because you are inadvertently selling illegal copies of the original product.

From a purely business point of view you need to find out their payment terms, return policies, shipping charges and methods. If you can, you need to get references from other customers; are they happy with the wholesalers service or not?

Once you have decided on a wholesale source, there’s one thing you need to be aware of… When you purchase from a wholesaler you have to buy in bulk, you cannot buy individual items. If you’re just starting out you’re probably going to find this quite expensive, but there is a way to reduce this cost. If you can, find another established customer who buys the same products as you, you can approach them with a joint venture whereby they sell you products for a set profit, say 20% on each item you buy. Your end of the joint venture will be that you agree to buy a set number of items each month and that don’t compete with them directly.

 

Article written by Ivan Wong from Internet-Marketing-Today.com
Visit today to get hot marketing tips, free marketing software and comprehensive reviews of marketing resources.

Simple Methods For Boosting Traffic And Increasing Profits

4 Simple Methods For Boosting Traffic And Increasing Profits

The life blood of any website is traffic, not traffic in the real world sense, but a large flow of internet visitors to your website. The more visitors to your website, the more money you will make. But getting a large flow of visitors is not as easy as it sounds, it doesn’t just happen, you have to make it happen, and here are 4 very effective ways of doing this:

1) Conduct joint ventures with other webmasters or list owners. Creating an effective joint venture is one of the quickest and most profitable ways of boosting your website traffic and massively increasing your sales.

A joint venture is simply an agreement made between two parties in which they both benefit. In your case, you have a product to sell and what you need to find is somebody who has a large list of subscribers and who is looking for good quality products to offer their list. You would offer the list owner a percentage of each sale in exchange for them recommending your product to their subscribers.

The key with joint ventures is to find list owners who are not direct competitors. For example, if you have a product related to puppy care you joint venture with somebody who has an ezine dedicated to dog breeding, or you could joint venture with your local vet.

2) Write articles related to the topic of your niche product and submit them to as many article directories and ezine editors you possibly can. Writing articles serves three purposes:

i) It sets you up as an expert in your niche. If your articles appear in many newsletters and hundreds of websites, people will perceive you as an expert.

ii) At the bottom of each article there is a brief bio in which you can place a link back to your website. If people are impressed with the content of your article, they will click on the link to your website to read more.

iii) Each of your articles that are published on the internet is one more link back to your website. The more links that point back to your website the more relevant your website will appear to the search engines and the higher your page will rank.

The key with articles is to submit them everywhere, to as many different places as possible. Submitting articles manually will take days, so use a paid submission service.

3) Promote your website using pay per click search engines. Your first task is to find as many keywords and keywords phrases related to your product (that people are typing into the search engines) as possible. We’re not talking about ten or twenty, but hundreds, over a thousand if you can. Next you need to create a brief classified type advertisement which has a catchy benefit laden headline.

When you have these, enter them into your pay per click search engine and decide on a maximum bid for each keyword (the amount you are prepared to pay when a person clicks on the headline for your advertisement). When a surfer enters the same keyword phrase as one of yours associated with your advertisement, your advertisement will be displayed as a “Sponsored Listing” and if the surfer clicks your ad, you get charged the bid amount and the surfer is taken to your website.

4) Get as many links as possible pointing to your website. As mentioned earlier, the more links pointing to your website, the higher it will rank in the search engines for the keywords you have optimized the page for.

There is another side to having hundreds or thousands of links pointing to your website… You also get a considerable amount of traffic from people clicking on those links. This type of traffic tends to be very targeted as people won’t click on a text link unless it is of interest to them.

Other than article writing, there are two major ways of getting links back to your website:

i) You can purchase text links back to your website from other high ranking web pages. The key is to buy links on pages with a similar theme to your website.

ii) You can create a reciprocal linking directory on your website. For each link you receive from another website, you will place a return, or reciprocal link back to that website. The ultimate link directories are categorized to help surfers find interesting links and also because links of a similar theme give the page they appear on the same theme, which is important for link relevancy and search engine optimization.

 

Article written by Ivan Wong from Internet-Marketing-Today.com
Visit today to get hot marketing tips, free marketing software and comprehensive reviews of marketing resources.

Secrets to Getting Affiliates to Sell Your Niche Products and Services

Secrets to Getting Affiliates to Sell Your Niche Products and Services

One of the quickest methods of increasing the sales of your niche product or service is to start an affiliate program. An affiliate program is simply a system you can implement which allows other people to sell your product or service and earn a commission on each sale. The higher the commission you pay, the more affiliates you will attract to sell your product.

Your best affiliates are unlikely to want any help from you when it comes to selling your product or service; they will most likely be experienced marketers themselves and could probably teach you a thing or two about selling online.

You can’t rely only on experienced affiliates, there will be a considerable number of people who will join your affiliate program who are inexperienced in some aspects of internet marketing and the onus is on you to help them in any way you can.

First things first however, you need to set up your affiliate program so even the most seasoned internet marketer will feel comfortable joining your affiliate program. Important issues you must address are:

1) Pay a reasonable commission on each sale. Most information product authors pay commissions in the 40% to 60% range. The point is not to be greedy, make it worth the experienced marketer’s time to promote your product.

2) Pay the commissions due your affiliates regularly. Once per month is the average for most affiliate programs so you never want to exceed that. When sales are good, you might want to consider twice monthly payments to your affiliates.

3) Don’t use an overly high minimum payment threshold. In the old days when check payments were expensive to generate, many affiliate programs introduced a minimum earning threshold. They did this because it was pointless raising a check for a small amount when the bank charges and postage costs were more than the value of the check. Another reason the minimum was introduced was because it was so expensive for foreign affiliates to deposit the checks into their bank accounts.

Now days international banking has become common place and therefore considerably cheaper, and there are also other payment mediums such as PayPal which make it feasible to pay smaller amounts to your affiliates.

4) Always pay your affiliates on time. Never miss a payment date unless you have very good reason to do so - not having any money is NOT a good reason, you must plan for all your payments. Nothing will scare experienced marketers away quicker than somebody who misses payment dates and then has no reasonable excuse. They might forgive you once, but not twice.

5) Use an accurate system for recording sales, commissions due and commissions paid. People need to know how they are doing with your affiliate program. They need to know how much traffic they have sent to their affiliate link. They also want to know how many sales they have made and when they can expect payment. If you have paid them they need to know when you sent the check or made the transfer.

Pay attention to these five issues and your affiliates, particularly the experienced ones will be happy, but you also need to offer a helping hand to your inexperienced affiliates by creating:

1) A number of text advertisements that can be used in the affiliate’s email advertising, be it in their own ezine or for solo ads in other people’s ezines.

You must test these text advertisements and make sure they are effective at generating sales before placing them in your affiliate resource center.

2) A number of classified ads for affiliates to use either as classified advertisements or as top sponsor ads in those ezines that accept advertising.

As with the text ads, you must test all your classified ads before placing them in your affiliate center.

3) A few different banner ads - there are still a few places where banner ads can attract sales, but for the most part banner advertising is not that effective.

One type of banner advertisement that is worth spending some time getting professionally made because it attracts sales is the 120 x 240 pixel, or the slightly longer 120 x 600 pixel banner which people can place under the Google Adsense code on their web pages.

4) Links to training materials which will help your affiliates become better internet marketers. You have a vested interest in their success because the more successful they become, the more money you both make.

 

Article written by Ivan Wong from Internet-Marketing-Today.com
Visit today to get hot marketing tips, free marketing software and comprehensive reviews of marketing resources.

Secrets of Profiting From Resale Master Resale Rights to Niche Products

Secrets of Profiting From Resale & Master Resale Rights to Niche Products

Here are three ways to profit from resale & master resale rights to niche products:

1) Profiting by selling the rights to your own products

Creating and selling niche products can be a challenging but very profitable business. There is considerable work involved and many hard hours before your product will be ready for sale.

Imagine then your bitter disappointment when you don’t make a single sale. After days and days of relentless promotion all you have to show for the effort is a string of bills…

That’s one end of the spectrum, here’s the other:

After considerable effective promotion you have made numerous sales, but sales are dropping off. The market that you have managed to penetrate is becoming saturated; you simply can’t find enough people to sell your product to.

In both cases you need to find a different market niche or approach your existing niche from a different “angle” to find more customers. One very effective way to do this is to use the efforts of established marketers who are already selling in your market niche or in a similar one. It is to these marketers you can offer the rights to your product.

Essentially you are selling the rights which allow them to sell your products and keep all the proceeds (resale rights), or you could allow them to sell the rights to your products (master resale right).

You should only sell a certain number of products with rights and base your product pricing on the rights, for example:

- Unlimited copies with no rights @ $20 each.

- 200 copies with resale rights @ $150 each.

- 100 copies with master resale rights @ $300 each.

2) Profiting by selling products you have purchased the rights to

You might not be in the slightest bit interested in creating your own niche products, so buying the rights to sell somebody else’s products gets you started quickly.

Don’t “jump the gun” - it’s important you have a market to sell to. Getting carried away and buying resale products just because the price is good is a sure way to loose money. The correct sequence is:

1) Find a niche market that is ready and willing to buy.

2) Purchase a niche product to sell the market.

One point worth remembering is niche product creators who sell resale rights often include the sales website as a bonus. This means a number of people will be selling the same niche product from identical websites.

The success of your sales is going to depend on how much you can differentiate your package from everybody else’s, don’t follow the crowd. A few examples of how you could do this are:

i) Redesign the sales website, for example you could:

- Use different sales copy

- Use different graphics

ii) Purchase similar products that have resale rights and offer them as bonuses. Check the rights before you buy the product… Very often product creators will not allow their products to be given away or used as bonuses.

iii) Write your own brief 10 to 15 page report related to the niche product and offer it as an exclusive bonus.

3) Profiting by creating and selling resale rights packages

To do this you must own niche products with master resale rights. You want to sell the resale rights to other people.

Far too many people try this avenue for earning an income on the internet and the end result is a number of resale rights packages which are practically identical, because they all bought their master resale rights niche products from the same sources.

If you have decided to pursue this avenue, your success will depend on how unique your package is. You need to source as many niche products with master resale rights (preferably that nobody else is selling) as you can. The products don’t have to be from the same niche, but must be related.

For example, if you decide to put together a package of products related to dieting; your package could include e-books in these niches:

- diet recipes

- exercises

- dieting

- fat reduction

Bear in mind your exclusivity won’t last long. As soon as your package is revealed, others will try to include the same products as you.

In all three cases, you can profit from resale and master resale rights to niche products, but there is one common denominator… Make sure you have a market to sell to. Do your research first and make sure your niche is full of people who are ready and willing to buy.

 

Article written by Ivan Wong from Internet-Marketing-Today.com
Visit today to get hot marketing tips, free marketing software and comprehensive reviews of marketing resources.

Killer Copywriting Tips to Increase Niche Sales

Killer Copywriting Tips to Increase Niche Sales

The success of your niche website is going to depend on the quality of the copywriting on your sales page (there is no such thing as a product that sells itself). People will only purchase a product or service if they consider it a viable solution to one of their problems. Your task is to convince visitors to your sales page that your product or service is the best solution available.

It is vital you get their attention; nobody is going to read your sales page just because it is there. They need to be stopped dead in their tracks and compelled into reading your sales page.

You do this with a big bold headline. A headline that in one sentence highlights a problem your potential customer is grappling with and hints that a solution is available from reading your sales page. For example, your customer might be flat broke and desperately seeking a way of making extra money… This Headline will get their attention: “How To Start With Nothing And Create A Money Making Empire”.

No matter how bold you make your headline, it’s lost if the next sentence doesn’t capture your reader and lead them into your sales page. This next sentence is often called a sub-headline and is often formatted to be bolder than the rest of the text on the sales page.

The sub-headline must provide a compelling reason for your prospective customer to continue reading. Saying your product or service is the best is not a compelling reason. Implying your customer will benefit in some way is compelling. For example a sub-headline like: “This New Business In A Box Can Earn You Hundreds Of Thousands Of Dollars While It Runs On Full Auto-Pilot” implies that money can be made in this business which runs on its own without much personal involvement. Basically your big benefit is time saving; while the business runs on its own, you can go do whatever you like.

Having got your readers full attention, its time to elaborate on the problem and how your product or service can offer a solution. You must speak on a one to one basis; imagine your friend is sitting opposite you and you are explaining why your product or service is the solution they have been looking for.

You need to get involved in the conversation that is going on in their mind. In essence you need to create a FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) which asks and then answers as many questions as possible. Put yourself in your friend’s position and ask:

- What are they feeling?

- What are they scared of?

- What do they disbelieve?

- What are their expectations?

- What is their dream solution?

Each of your answers must introduce how your product or service is the solution. In your final copy, you may choose to list these points or you may choose to re-write them so they flow from one point to the next. There is no “best method” and only testing will show which method works best in your unique circumstance.

By explaining the many ways your prospective customer will benefit, you begin to create a desire for your product or service. Don’t fall into the trap of implying you have improved on what is available from your competitors. Running down your competitors won’t get you anywhere. The only way to heighten your prospective customer’s desire for your product is to show them more and more ways they will benefit from owning your product or service.

The only time you list the features of your product or service is when they add to the benefits your prospective customer will receive. For example, a key feature of a new computer could be that it has a Pentium 4 processor, but owning a computer with a Pentium 4 processor is irrelevant to somebody who only uses it to download email; it is relevant to somebody who needs the extra processing power of a Pentium 4 processor if they use their computer as a full multi media center.

Having established a desire for your product or service, you need to call your prospective customer to action. Put simply, you need to ask them for the sale and state it in an obvious manner. For example, if your want them to order, use a very obvious graphic order button which states “Click here to order now”.

Copywriting is a skill that takes a lot of learning and practice to perfect. You are not going to be a copywriting expert on your first time out, but experiment using these simple tried and tested copywriting tips and are bound to increase your niche website sales.

 

Article written by Ivan Wong from Internet-Marketing-Today.com
Visit today to get hot marketing tips, free marketing software and comprehensive reviews of marketing resources.

How to Tell if a Niche is Too Crowded

How to Tell if a Niche is Too Crowded

Many people make the mistake of choosing a highly competitive niche and developing a business idea around it, only to find that the market segment is so inundated and crowded with competitors that it’s virtually impossible for a new comer to make any money at all. Many new comers start off by choosing a niche that is far too broad and as a result far too crowded. If you’re thinking of building a niche marketing website, a quick check using any online keyword research tool will tell you if this is the case.

Even if you get there first and discover a unique tight niche and create products and services to offer your customers, the existing internet marketers will notice you have discovered a profitable market segment, and you will soon find yourself having to compete with them. In no time at all when someone searches for a keyword similar to yours, they’ll be amazed to find that there are so many other websites serving the same customers.

Before you start building a niche website, doing a little keyword research using an online keyword utility will return the number of web pages with a similar theme and which contain roughly the same content, this number being an indication of the competition you are facing. Bear in mind that even if the niche is narrow and tightly focused, it will start to become crowded even if only two or three new businesses start working on the same niche.

Unfortunately the plain truth is if you dominate a profitable niche market you will not be able to keep it a secret for long. No niche can be kept in absolute secrecy forever: there are too many smart people out there on the internet who all want to get their hands on a slice of the pie.

To keep your niche market profitable you need a constant stream of ready to buy customers, and one way to do this is to capitalize on search engine traffic. Use a good quality keyword research utility to uncover all the different words and phrases people use when searching for information on the internet. Next you create web pages which are optimized for these terms (known as keywords).

A point to bear in mind is some keyword research tools use the data from pay per click search engines to calculate the number of searches conducted for a given keyword, and this figure is not that realistic. Keyword research utilities such as WordTracker use data from the major metacrawlers like Dogpile to calculate very realistic keyword search statistics, and will give you the number of times any given keyword or phrase was searched for during the previous three months and a predicted count for the next 24 hours.

Each of these keyword research utilities maintains a very powerful database of raw data for your subsequent research. If the niche is starting to get too big, then the number of searches on your keywords will be in the thousands. Careful analysis will also reveal the number of websites in the niche, which will be a large number if your niche is crowded.

You can also use pay per click search engines to drive traffic to your website, but it’s worth remembering that popular keywords are expensive. If the niche is profitable, your competitors will be prepared to pay hefty sums to buy those keywords. The only way you are going to get cheap pay per click traffic is by finding keywords which your competitors aren’t using. Unfortunately these little known keywords won’t be popular so you’ll need to find a lot of them to get a reasonable amount of traffic to your niche site.

As your niche gets more and more crowded with new competitors these pay per click keywords will become progressively more expensive. There will be those new competitors who understand the value of keyword research and will discover the same keywords you are using. This will reduce the traffic to your website and so reduce the amount of money you can make.

A point will be reached when the niche becomes so competitive it is no longer profitable, and you will either have to abandon the niche or discover new methods of getting customers to your website.

 

Article written by Ivan Wong from Internet-Marketing-Today.com
Visit today to get hot marketing tips, free marketing software and comprehensive reviews of marketing resources.

How to Select a Web Host for Your Niche Site

How to Select a Web Host for Your Niche Site

The success of your niche website is going to depend to a large degree on the quality of web hosting your choose for your website. In much the same way a store owners success is dependant on the stores location, so your choice of a web host will affect the success of your niche site.

Don’t be fooled into thinking decisions should be cost related… you can get very expensive hosting from John Doe in Timbucktwo but his servers are old, can only handle limited traffic and the link between him and the outside world is shaky at best.

You can set up your web hosting in any country in the world, there are no international boundaries on the internet. This gives you the opportunity to shop around and find the best web hosting to suit your circumstances. When conducting your research, these are the points to investigate:

~Does the web host operate with at least a 99% uptime?

A quality web host will use generator backup in case of power outages and they will also have redundant back-up systems so that in the event any of the Internet connections get interrupted, an alternate Internet connection will take over?

~How many domains can you host on the one hosting account?

Many web hosts will only allow one, others allow unlimited domains. If the web host only allows one domain, do they allow separate I.P. addresses for each domain hosted?

Many spam related filters will block anything from an I.P. address that has been reported for spam violations. Most small websites are hosted on a shared server (one computer can host many different websites) and these are all hosted under one I.P. address. If anybody on your server gets into trouble for spamming, you could pay the penalty because of the I.P. block that will be imposed. If your website has its own I.P. address, you will be unaffected.

~How much bandwidth are you allowed?

Bandwidth is the amount of internet traffic going through your website. If you have e-books, audio files or video files that your customers download, you are going to need a fairly large bandwidth allowance.

The question to ask is what happens if you exceed your bandwidth allowance? Does the host automatically increase your fee and put you into the next hosting category or do they just stop showing your website until the next financial month?

~How much disk space are you allowed?

It is pointless purchasing web hosting only to discover after adding a few new pages to your website that you have run out of disk space on the server to host your website.

Remember that pictures, e-books, audio files and video files take up considerable space on a hard drive.

~What sort of customer support does the web host supply?

Do they respond within 24 hours? The whole point about hosting is you want your website online 24/7 so if something goes wrong and you report it, how quickly do they respond and correct the problem?

A good web host will have phone and email support, the better ones also use live chat.

~Is MySQL available?

If your web site is going to store a lot of data, for example in a reciprocal link directory or you are going to use a forum you will need MySQL which is an extremely powerful and very popular database program.

How many MySQL databases are you allowed? Some hosts only allow one database per domain, while others allow unlimited databases.

~Is a control panel available?

Most web hosts allow their clients to manage their website hosting through a control panel known as cPanel. This allows you to control all aspects of your hosting including:

- email accounts

- MySQL databases

- Passwords

- Sub-domains

- Backups

~Does the web host support FrontPage?

FrontPage is a popular software program used for designing and building web pages. Does the web host support FrontPage, and if you’re currently using FrontPage, do they support the same version you’re using.

Don’t just sign up with the first hosting service you come across, do a little research first. One very good way of discovering the best web host is to ask the question on a few of the more popular forums. You’ll soon get the good and bad about any web host you’re interested in.

Finally, price is not a good selection method. The old premise that expensive means good quality doesn’t apply here. There are plenty of good reliable web hosts that charge a surprisingly low monthly fee.

 

Article written by Ivan Wong from Internet-Marketing-Today.com
Visit today to get hot marketing tips, free marketing software and comprehensive reviews of marketing resources.

How to Profit From Drop Shipping

How to Profit From Drop Shipping

Smart Internet marketing involves smarter business strategies - and one such strategy is drop shipping. With drop shipping, you can save your time and put it to better use making you more money.

Drop shipping is an entrepreneur’s dream, offering a host of benefits. To put it simply, drop shipping allows you to sell goods online at a price of your choice without keeping any inventory. When the customer purchases the goods and makes payment for them, you will place an order for the product though your supplier, a drop shipper. Your drop shipper then charges you a wholesale price for the product and ships the product directly to the customer. You get to keep the difference between wholesale and retail price.

Drop shipping offers many unique advantages to you:

1. You don’t need to keep stock or inventory.

2. You don’t need to bother with packing and shipping.

3. You can make money easily by just taking orders.

4. Your profit margin could increase.

Even though drop shipping can have many advantages, however, there are some things you need to consider:

1. Any product or service you intend to sell online must be in demand.

2. The product you choose must sell in high volumes: the fact that you could sell the profit cheaply and make a good margin doesn’t mean anyone is buying. Research the market for any product line you’re considering. Try to determine demand for the product, how much competition there is, and what they’re charging.

3. Signing up with a well-known supplier offers you many benefits. For instance, you will probably find it easier to return unsatisfactory products. Some drop suppliers will even pay the return costs in these cases. As a promotion, some suppliers will even offer you products for free if you meet their targets.

4. Target one or two products at a time — don’t be in a rush to sell lots of different ones. Maintaining a large drop shipping business is often difficult and can become unmanageable.

How do you set your drop shipping business? To get started, find a directory of legitimate drop shippers with excellent reputations. Make a list of drop shippers who are established in the business and have a proven track record. Next, take the top five from the list and look through their website for products and services. In most cases you will find that their catalogue is massive, with all sorts of things available. Above all else, you need to be sure that you can sell what you choose.

Once you’ve done your homework, make contact with the drop shipper, either by phone or by mail. Don’t start prematurely telling them all about your project, though — you should start by asking for additional information on the terms and conditions. You will have read every clause and sub-clause thoroughly, taking care to understand the business model you’re signing up to. Terms and conditions and service policies often vary with different drop shippers — look out for any hidden clauses that could cause you trouble in the future.

The next step is to select the best offers from the drop shippers and start negotiating for better commission rates. If you have a thriving web business with a lot of traffic, it’s possible to make a case for a better commission rate. Once the terms and conditions are acceptable to both of you, you can add the products to your online store.

When you work with a drop shipper, you become a “merchant” or “trader”. This usually means that you will need to register with the relevant authorities. To become a merchant you may have to register to file tax returns and get a valid license to sell your products. Such regulations vary from region to region, so you should check it out with your local authorities.

The biggest headache associated with drop shipping is product returns. Don’t expect it to be anything like smooth sailing. You’ll run into back orders, product returns or even refund demands, if products are defective. As the shipping isn’t under your control, it’s difficult to explain your customers what’s going on when products are unavailable or delivered late. Your own terms and conditions, user policy and other such notices must be precise and explain everything in detail to the customers. Always aim to avoid legal hassles, but do be prepared to contest customers’ claims.

 

Article written by Ivan Wong from Internet-Marketing-Today.com
Visit today to get hot marketing tips, free marketing software and comprehensive reviews of marketing resources.