But the challenge is, as I work with many clients, it seems what many think a niche market is, is in fact not niche at all on the internet.

Firstly, a niche market is much smaller than many think.

• If the market is familiar to almost anyone, it is too large and most likely saturated.
• If it is a very strange and peculiar interest that is adopted by, say a few thousand people in your area then you could be on to something.
• It really needs to be small enough to fly under the radar screen of companies deeming it unprofitable to create products for that market.

Secondly, a niche market should be severe to be successful. One of the main things you need to ask yourself about the niche market is:

• Are those involved in this niche hobby extremely passionate and loyal to the niche?
• Are those involved in this niche desperate to have EVERYTHING related to it?
• Are those suffering from a niche condition willing to pay for something in the form of sound advice that will help them recover?

If your niche answers yes to the above then it will be very easy to rank for it and will get a great social media following if you come up with a great product or service to offer them.

If physical products are your choice to sell online, then a niche market for selling products is usually a small gap in between larger markets. Products that can make mainstream products easier to use. Some examples of very successful clients selling products in excellent niche markets are:

• Selling trampoline parts for trampolines. Believe it or not, trampoline parts are being searched for online more than the trampolines themselves.
• Selling unique doll clothes for popular dolls. Sure you can buy dolls online from hundreds of thousands of online retailers, but what about cool outfits for them. Tennis outfits, special occasion dresses, you name it they will buy it.

You see, whatever product becomes a huge hit, usually trails thousands of internet searches for accessories or instructions or products that help make better use of that product, and that is where you want to focus.

So really we should be calling this micro niche marketing. I usually tell people to come up with 5 things they think is niche, then try to identify two sub refined areas within each of the five and start your keyword research journey from there.

For those that prefer numbers to understand what a niche market is, here is my formula:

Search volume:

must have at least 10,000 accumulative searches per month for 3 or 4 word long tailed phrases and must have a ceiling no less than 100,000 searches for core phrases (2-3 word phrases)

Competition:

for phrases with roughly 1,000 to 10,000 searches per month, you do not want more than 500,000 competing sites in google when you type the following into Google:

Using the [intitle:] operator directly before your keyword phrase shows your real competition that you are up against. Pretty much if a site does not have the keyword phrase in its title tag, you can easily get ranked above them.

If you find this interesting and would like me to break it down into real easy to understand terms, why not get in touch. Together we can find the perfect niche market for you, that is in fact a viable and profitable niche!

Well, working with many clients and watching their sales trends and how we need to re-position their offerings sometimes, it seems some old standards are no longer appealing and it might be time for a change to your sales copy lingo also.

In a time where everyone starts their internet search for “free information” along with the introduction of many free how-to video sites and free ebooks, the emphasis for extreme value comes into play now more than ever!

Some of the best converting items we sell online today are digital products. these are also the best revenue model for automation and simplicity. Anything you can think of that people “normally pay for” offline is a great place to start.

Some items that people are accustom to traditionally pay for that make great online digital products are:

• blueprints
• plans
• diagrams
• stencils
• masks
• templates
• printables
• step by step instructions
• Interactive learning programs
• Print, cut-out and assemble crafts of all kinds

Ebooks these days must be EXTREMELY unique, intriguing, in-demand and must truly solve a problem your market is troubled with, using enough testimonials to back it up and must offer a 100% money back guarantee in order to reach a high enough conversion to make any real decent money from.

Therefore, add value to your ebook offering by adding more products to it. Add worksheets, study guides or journals and add actionable activities with your ebook so you can call it a package or a program instead, which has shown to increase conversions these days substantially.

With two of my very popular sites selling printable masks and pumpkin stencils, (which combined bring in over 1 million visitors a year), the market classifies these purchases as tangible products even though they are delivered via download which makes them a little more desirable, and worthy of paying for.

Just remember, you still need to have the BEST products available and they need to stand out from all the other sites on the first 2 pages of Google in order for yours to sell really well.

If you want to create your own killer website selling “unique digital products” of your own, let me help.  I can walk you through finding the right market and how to create the products and then how to sell them properly. Find out more about our Internet Business Program

In order to provide better quality or more relevant results for searchers, Google is getting smart enough to find sites that only create content for ranking purposes instead of to provide information of use on a given topic.

One of the ways Google is identifying these sites is by unnatural inbound link patterns. Which means that if most of your inbound links to your site have the keyword phrase in them linking to the highly optimized for the keyword phrase page content, that would be unnatural and therefore raise red flags.

How to stay ahead of this and continue to rank well would be to “be aware” of your keyword phrases and use them as a starting basis for writing new content.  But do not write simple useless content that is not going to be of interest to anyone just for the purposes of getting ranked.

Some other suggestions for avoiding this penalty would be to:

• Avoid duplicate content and keep your title tags and meta descriptions unique to the page content.
• Make sure that inbound links are not all focused on anchor text that is just the keyword phrase.
• use stats, opinions and research from your own resources in your content.

well first of all…

No it is not true that your affiliates conversion rates will be the same as yours. The probability of a sale being made from an affiliate (depending on the loyalty of their traffic and the credibility of their site,) will quite often be higher than your own sales conversions.

remember, an affiliate properly selling your product, is actually endorsing it and recommending it.

As for how to increase conversions on your site, there are many things you can do.

1. Increase the value of your product.  At the end of the day, you need to feel 100% that what you are offering is better than anything else available and then this value needs to be communicated in your sales copy.
2. Add videos of testimonials. Testimonials of your product not of you personally.
3. Price test different prices every couple thousand visitors. 1000 sales at $17.95 is better than 150 sales at $27.
4. Change up your product. Sometimes the term ebook can sound a little tired and lack lustre. Perhaps switching it to a “learning kit” or a “health program” can add a twist that could stimulate new sales.
5. Get your product reviewed or used by an official organization.  The majority of your web visitors have probably never heard of you before visiting your site.  That requires a huge leap of faith to buy a product from you then.  If it is has been reviewed by or used by an official organization, that might add the credibility you need to win over their confidence in you.
6. Focus on ALL of your conversion goals. There are usually two types of sales conversions you need to focus on, not just visitors to sales.  The first is the conversion of the click from your content pages to your checkout page. That is the one that should be in the 5% or more range.  Then comes the checkout page to transaction completion conversion.  In theory, that should be around 30-40% as statistically most clients get a 60-70% shopping cart abandon rate. If your content pages are not getting the 5% clickthrough to the checkout phase, then you need to sell them better on those pages.  If the shopping cart abandon rate is higher than 70%, you need to close the deal with more value on the checkout page or reduce the number of clicks required to actually complete a transaction with you.

I hope these help you in your quest for higher conversions. This is an area in the program we spend much time on, as a simple increase from 1% – 2% means thousands of extra dollars per month in revenue.

Excellent question. A Youtube featured or more commonly a spotlight video can really launch views to a new level and if your video is designed right send your traffic through the roof also.

First off you need to create your video properly:

• Content focused on a good keyword phrase (not selling)
• 8 minutes or less is best
• Your website URL watermarked throughout
• Create the video file name with the keyword phrase in it
• upload to Youtube and make sure to use descriptions and tags with the keyword phrase in it. (very important)
• Once it has been uploaded, solicit top ratings and positive comments from other youtube members, friends, family, virtually everyone you can.

Once your video has good ratings and comments, Send an email to editor@youtube.com, and attach a link to the YouTube video you would like to have featured. Do not attach the video. It must first be uploaded to the YouTube site!

Explain to them why you think your video is worth being featured. Even if the video hasn’t yet received a high rating or a lot of views, the editor may deem it worthy.

Make a heart warming compelling case as to how many people need this information etc. Featured videos are mostly from yourtube partners, but they do throw in a spotlight video now and again.

My opinion is you should have your autoresponders sending out relatively short 5-10 paragraph messages with 60/40 content to sales copy split messages every week or so. Each with their own unique call to action for driving sales.

As there are so many things to do running a small web business, you don’t want to get trapped in having to write monthly newsletters.

The only time I feel you should send out other messages to your list are for time sensitive specials, seasonal specials, current news updates etc. Most other things can be added to auto responders.

As for how many… some people have 52 autoresponder messages that go out (once a week for a year). If the recipient doesn’t buy after that they most likely won’t. You do want to end your auto responder series with a final email to them. Telling them this is their last chance to take advantage of a special email members vip discount or something. Kind of a “pee or get off the pot”

I personally feel 8-10 messages over a period of up to 3 months could be the limit. Written to be engaging, funny, useful, informative and then hard hitting to drive the click to the landing page.

Lastly, Once someone buys from your auto responders you should take them off the optin list and add them to a customer email database. This new list can start sending out different auto responders to the person as a customer such as:

• would love to hear your success story
• info on a new product that can compliment their purchase etc.

There is so much more on this covered in the program as we build together an amazing list of prospects and send them out a pre-created auto responder series.

Well it is understood that Google determines an acceleration or deceleration trend in your sites “fresheness” level by how often pages are updated since the last time the Google bots came by your site.  This is why you want to create interactive pages these days and definetly encourage comments on posts and pages because they will trigger new content added to the page.

But to be safe, you should be adding at least a response to a comment yourself to posts for adding a new paragraph or so of copy to keep them fresh at the rate you specified in your Google XML sitemap.  You can determine how often you told Google you were going to update your pages and posts by clicking on Google Sitemaps under your main settings tab in your wordpress dashboard.

This is not to say you will get penailzed for not updating old pages frequently however.  You can not become a slave to page changes. You have to be realistic. Just add new topic (keyword focused) pages and posts at a reasonable rate when you can.  Always encourage viewers to comment on your posts and pages so all you need to do is moderate comments.

At least once a month you should be doing more keyword phrase research and be adding new unique, interesting content based on those new phrases. Your content should be at least 10 paragraphs in length and providing useful links with anchor text to other posts on your site also.

With the launch of Google’s indexing system “Google Caffeine”,  you will get ranked almost immediately for new phrases as it will be a live index instead of a 5 layer cached index as it is now. So you want to be one of the first to have a new keyword phrase trend added to your site content.

Well to preface, Google provides a quality score or an “importance level” for each page of a website that it indexes. These quality scores can be found buy either downloading the Google Toolbar for Microsoft IE or by installing a plugin like SEO Quake for firefox.  Google Chrome also has some great SEO plugins you can install that will also display a webpage PR once visited.

Google PR or PageRank is primarily based on how many quality relevant links you have from other sites to yours. Each website linking to yours is classified as a “vote” for popularity that directly impacts your PageRank once Google does its PR updates (usually 3 or 4 times a year).

The algorithm these days for PR however is not simply calculated by the number of backlinks. reciprocal links (exchanging links), affiliate links, low PR links all score relatively low as “not important” links.  Links from relevant sites with High Pagerank (these days PR4 or greater) will benefit immensely as “important links”.

A simplified explaination of pagerank and it’s original creation is:

Imagine there are 4 websites in google (A,B,C and D.  Each one would start with a PR1 once indexed by Google.

If website A,B and C each link to D and D is not linking back to them then D would score a PR value of 4 and would show up on top of the search results for the phrases it was optimized for. If A,B,C and D are all cross linking to each other, their PR would most likely still be the same and only the well optimized site for certain keyword phrases would show up in the search results top spot. (this is explained in much simpler terms in my program).

But what specifically should be used as a guideline to follow to validate a market? first of all you should read: what is a niche market then come back and read this page.

Demand (Search Volume)

Making sure you can get at least 10,000 searches per month by accumulating the search volume in the google keyword tool for all of your 2,3 and 4 word long tailed keyword phrases should be the first step. Then secondly you want to make sure there is no less than 100,000 searches for more “core phrases” or general phrases that are of course going to be more competitive but something we work to get ranked for over longer time period. (I explain this in easy to understand terms in the program).

When searching Google for competing sites, be sure to use the syntax: intitle: before your keyword phrase. This will search for all of the sites with your keyword phrase in the title tag of all competing sites and therefore show the true number of sites you are up against.

Supply (Competing Sites)

Next, when you search in Google for some of your top search volume (long tailed) keyword phrases, do these ratios apply?

2-3 digit demand (search volume) – no more than 5 digit supply (10-99,000 competing sites)
4-5 digit demand – no more than 6 digit supply (100-999,000 sites)
6+ digit demand – There will usually always be more than a million sites competing for this size of traffic. If you find niche phrases with more than 6 digit demand and only a few hundred thousand competing sites, you might have found a gold mine!

In all cases above

we will need to evaluate from an SEO stand point how good the top 2-3 pages of Google’s organic results are and what they are offering. In many true niche markets with many competing sites, we find most are only garbage sites, and Google is waiting for a good optimized specialized site to come along. This is why I would never work on the market of “Internet Marketing” with anyone. There are millions of sites competing and most of them are all quite SEO savvy.

All of this is broken down into very easy to understand instruction in the early part of our niche market discovery and validation phase of the program.