How to Research and Find Your Niche Online
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Deciding on what product or service you will promote in a niche market should be based on a simple principle. There should be a demand for your product or service.
You want to offer something that people actually need, something that will make their lives better, make them feel better physically, make them look better, or help them solve a problem.
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Once you have chosen a product or service to market, researching to find the right niche for your product or service is the next most important part of beginning a niche marketing program.
The things that you need to know are where they spend their time online, and what makes them tick from a personal and business point of view. There is niche marketing software out there that can help you learn these things about your potential niche market.
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The next thing you need to learn as you research your online niche market is what you can reasonable charge for your product or service. The best and most effective was to do this is to visit sites that advertise products or services similar to what you have chosen to sell.
It should be easy to see if they are giving away a service or selling the product at a price far lower than you would have to charge.
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If you can determine that there are people out there who are willing to spend money to buy what you are selling and you can identify those people then you have a niche marketing product or service that can make money on the Internet.
Sometimes it takes reframing your product or service to make it more attractive, better or just different than what others are selling it for. Research is the key to successful niche marketing.
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Does Your Passion & Hobby Really Matter?
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Does your passion or your hobby matter? Well, it most certainly matters to you and unless you have a passion or hobby that nobody else in the world has ever heard of, there are probably plenty of other people who share your passion or hobby and may even more into it than you are.
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Being deeply involved in a hobby or passion is the stuff that successful niche marketing is made of. Most really successful niche marketers have turned what the care about the most into successful businesses. The reason for their success is their passion about the theme of their websites.
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Creating a successful niche marketing site takes a lot of time and a lot more dedication. Unless you are passionate about the subject, it is hard to stay focused on it long enough to make it a success.
So passion and dedication are your two biggest assets. You must be willing to put in long hours and be willing to accept the fact that it will be quite some time before you start realizing a profit…even a modest one.
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Keeping on keeping on is the only way you will ever be successful at niche marketing.
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You can establish a money-making niche marketing website with the theme about the very things that you love the most.
If you can correctly define your niche, make certain that people are willing to pay for the product or service that you are selling, and locate that specific audience; there is no reason why you can’t build a niche marketing site that is all about your greatest passion or the hobby that you most enjoy.
Imagine that! Being able to make money and do what you love doing at the same time. It doesn’t get any better than that!
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How to Improve an Existing Product
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You may have a niche marketing website that just isn’t producing sales for you at the rate at which you had hoped it would…..or maybe it isn’t producing any income for you at all or it could be that you haven’t actually figured out that what you are selling is, in fact, a niche market product.
You might need to do a little ‘tweaking’ and modify your strategies somewhat to get the site performing better. There really are some things that you can do to improve your existing product.
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Step #1: Bill Cosby, the famous entertainer, once said, "I don’t know what the secret of success is, but I know the secret of failure and that was trying to please everybody." He was right. You can’t please everybody and you can’t sell to everybody either. It’s possible that you may simply need to narrow you market, identify you product as a niche marketing product and advertise it accordingly.
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Step #2: To improve your existing product you have likely overlooked the most obvious solution of all. You could simply ask your customers what they think. They are, after all, the end users of the product or service that you are selling. There is nobody that knows how a product can be improved better than the people who are using the product.
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Step #3: Analyze the competition. Take the time and put forth the effort to look at the product or service that your competitors are offering. Identify their strengths and weaknesses. Find out what your competition can’t, won’t or doesn’t really like to do and set about doing those very things yourself.
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Step #4: Are you selling your product at the right price? Pricing a product too low makes people think it won’t be any good, pricing too high will discourage them from buying it.
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Going to Bookshops to Identify a Hot Market
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The day may come when people do all of their researching and reading online but it isn’t here yet. Fiction, of course, will always be in print… it would be hard to curl up with a good novel in front of the fireplace on a cold winter day with a computer.
Research, however, may eventually all be done online. People buy ‘how-to’ books and books that are devoted to solving their problems and/or making their lives better every day. By identifying the hot market books that are being sold in bookshops (online and off line) you can identify a hot niche marketing topic.
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Go to the bookshops in your area and take note of the kinds of non-fiction books that are stocked. You should particularly note the ones that are self-help or how-to books. If you can create the opportunity, ask the stock boy which ones are selling the best. He’s the one who knows what is being restocked most often.
That failing, ask a floor salesperson the same question. Asking the bookstore owner or manager is the last option. They are more likely to be pushing the books that aren’t selling well in order to make a sale.
Learn by whatever means you can which self-help or how-to books are the hottest sellers.
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Another option is the online bookstores. You can’t, of course, ask for information from a person but you can research the site and determine which of the non-fiction self-help or how-to books are highest in sales.
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Finding out what books people are most often buying can give you some insight into what the hot market subjects are. Armed with this information, you can go about creating a niche marketing website that will have a better chance of becoming successful.
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Why Niche Marketing is the Way to Go in Succeeding Online
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Niche Marketing is the last great frontier for the small business entrepreneur. Out there in the ‘real’ world, small businesses don’t have a half fair chance of competing against the giant international corporations of the world.
The Internet has evened the odds for small business. The Internet has created a real equal opportunity for those who are willing to use it. There are several different ways to make use of niche marketing and succeed.
All of the ways require getting a domain and a webhost, building web pages and adding content. Those are just the basic basics of Internet Marketing in any form. Then there are the choices of how to go about building a successful niche marketing site that will provide you with a profit….hopefully a very large profit.
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1. You can create an informational product. An informational product can be articles, reports, columns, audio or video, or other things. These can be sold as stand alone products or used for advertisement or promotional causes.
2. You can build a content rich web site that will be so interesting it will draw potential customers again and again.
3. You can publish newsletters and ezines that are so full of pertinent information that people will happily pay for subscriptions to them.
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All of the above listed ways can be used to create a niche marketing website that has the capacity to make money. There are two things that all of these methods have in common.
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1. The topic must be one that helps people solve a problem, makes them healthier or happier, or provides them with information that they want or need in some way.
2. The content of the website, no matter the topic, must be relevant, timely and interesting to the people who are reading it and the website must be easily navigated.
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Making Money From Publishing Newsletters
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The object, of course, of any niche marketing business adventure is to make a profit. When people subscribe to your online newsletter or ezine, their object is to get the information that you are able to provide to them.
When people subscribe to your online newsletter or ezine, your object is to make money by supplying that information. This is a simple concept that is easier said than done. Making a website profitable…any website….isn’t easy or quick.
Try to remember that anything worth doing is worth doing well even if it takes more time than you thought it would.
If you have chosen a topic that addresses the needs or wants of a specific segment of the population and if you have set up your opt-in software correctly, you have a list of potential customers.
If they have subscribed to your newsletter, then they obviously believe that your have information about a subject that is near and dear to their hearts. They must consider you to be an expert maybe a guru. If you have worked hard at building your customer’s belief in your own credibility, then you should be able to make a nice profit from your newsletter.
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You can advertise products and services related to your topic on your website. This can be done with logos and banners that contain links to the products and services. When visitors to your site click on an advertisement, you get credit for a lead and if they buy the product or service you get a commission on the sale.
You can use your newsletter to recommend products and services to the members of your list. Some companies will happily pay you for simply recommending their product or service to your list and give you a commission on any sales that your recommendation generates for them.
Making Money From Content Rich Sites
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Making money from a content rich niche marketing website can be very easy, very difficult or impossible. First let’s define and describe what a content rich niche market website is and how it works.
You won’t find a list for “Niche Markets” anywhere. There isn’t one.
A person will find niche marketers when he types words into his favorite search engine and hits search. Let’s say he types in “Improving my golf score”.
He will get many hits that will provide links that take him to niche marketing sites. On these sites, he will be asked to enter his email address and opt-in to receiving a newsletter.
Since he is in need of learning how to improve his golf score, he willingly does that. On the content rich site he will find articles and other information about improving his golf score and advertisements for products and services designed to help him improve his golf score.
In the future he will receive a newsletter, about every two weeks usually, and he will have become a niche market customer.
If you are the niche marketer, the opt-in email address supplied is pure gold because you will have a customer or a potential customer. When he buys the products and/or services that you are advertising on your site, you will make money. Having a content rich site enhances the possibility of sales.
The trick to making money from a content rich niche marketing website is to have a topic that helps people solve their problems, makes them feel better or look better, or supplies them with information that they need.
You will need to have related products and services advertised on your site since that is where the income actually comes from. The website content is what makes people visit your site again and again.
The more content rich it is will determine how often they visit and how long they stay. The longer they stay the more opportunities you have to sell to them.
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