niche marketing – Micro Business Specialist

How To Decide Which Clickbank Product to Promote.

As affiliate marketers we often rely on Clickbank for inventory to sell. It offers products to sell in a lot of different niches. Quite a few in many of the more lucrative fields. Some pay to promote, others may not perform.

Deciding is a complex mix of knowing your competition, the quality of the site, its products, gravity, and trend lines, etc. Some pay more, some have residuals. We can analyze all the above or rely on pure guess work.

Now in the past, I looked and ultimately kind of grabbed a product and ran with it, if only to get the experience.

But as you get more systematic and start following a plan of consistent action for massive results, you want to focus on the best products, which when coupled with your best efforts yields maximum profit.

But you can’t be wasting your time researching the sales page of junky Clickbank products that won’t sell. Your time is too valuable. Instead spend your time focused on the best options and use the ones that best fit your particular niche and approach. Your results will be better, for the same amount of effort.

There is an easy way to discover the best performers.

Brad Callen introduced a free plug in for Firefox, that highlights the best performers from among all the products listed on Clickbank.

It’s easy to install. I have, and it works great.

The plug in color codes each product offering on Clickbank, and reports critical information on its marketability. Those colored green, met a set of standards for marketability that is proprietary to the product. The red ones didn’t and are to be avoided.

You will succeed faster by focusing on those products with stronger prospects.

The one rub is that it’s kind of a black box. We don’t really know the full contents of the equation they use to decide who gets green and red and why. But we can get a pretty good idea by listening to their introductory video. Enough to make a decision on.

http://askearlabout.com/CBSurge.php

Do you think it makes sense to try it for a while? Would it help you find better products to promote?

The basic version is free so you can test drive it for years if you want.

Once it’s working for you, upgrade to the paid version, but no need to do that now. Unless you want to.., of course.

Whether you are working facebook, twitter, blogs, email marketing, moble or more, Clickbank is a huge resource – no matter what your niches.

Your objective is to promote the cream of the crop, not the poor performers.

This free tool will eliminate 80% of the clutter, so you can focus on the 20% of solid offers that will pay you for your efforts.

http://askearlabout.com/CBSurge.php

[tags]clickbank, CBSurge, firefox, plugins, firefox plugins, affiliate marketing, niche marketing, twitter, blogs, email marketing, [/tags]

Marlon Sanders Discusses – Your Value…

Marlon Sanders discusses the value you have to offer others.

I found this useful. I also gained a lot of insight from the new rules of selling from Marlon. You can still get your free access by checking out my last blog post in the blue box on the top left below.

[tag]Marlon Sanders, Value, niche marketing, motivation, [/tag]

Who’s Afraid of Competition?

We have run into a number of competitors during our niche market research process. Hopefully made some notes about them along the way.

While the initial inclination is to be discouraged by the competitors, the truth is that for the most part, they are a good sign. One you should be grateful for, because their presence in the market indicates that people are willing to spend money in your niche. Thus when you get your product(s) out there you should have a good shot at making money.

If there are a lot of competitors, that means a lot of people are making money.

What you want to do is subscribe to their mailing lists, and analyze their follow-up emails. You want to go to their web sites and make a copy of their sales pages and analyze them as well.

Make note of the commissions they pay, the % of payout etc. Figure out how long they have been around. Do they frequently update their web pages? Do they offer bonuses. What types of free offers do they use? And what type of up-sells do they present? What are their price points?

You want to make a study of the major competitors and then you want to explore what they don’t offer. What could they do better?

You want to do a SWOT analysis. Swot stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats.

For each of your top competitors, identify what their strength is, Where are they weak, how can you turn it into an advantage for you, and what will be most difficult to overcome.

Odds are you won’t become the dominant force in your niche overnight. But you can find a toe hold and build from there. Find an angle of attack keeping in mind everything you have learned during your market research. And then don’t over analyze.

While it’s vitally important to research your niche don’t get stuck in the process. Get it done, and create a plan and take action.

You have picked a niche, you have researched it and determined that it is vital. You have identified the types of problems people in the niche are looking for solutions on, and have a good idea of who those people are.

Now it’s time to create a product or find one of more products you can represent as an affiliate.

Understanding Niche Demographics

The final free tool we are going to discuss on this series on niche marketing is Quantcast.com. The more you know about your niche’s demographics the better and this is where we are going to find the best information quickly and easily.

Go to www.Quantcast.com and once there register for free.

Then pick one of the top web sites you have found in your niche. Quantcast will provide you with information on their site and their demographics. You may want to check out three or four or more sites to see how the results are the same of different. If they are different you will want to reason out why.

By examining the demographics of people going to the top competitors in you niche you should be able to pick up some solid insights into the audience you will want to target with your site or product.

Quantcast is a tool that you can use to find the demographics of your audience. This tool allows you to gather traffic statistics and demographics data for any existing sites on the Internet.

For this demonstration, we will continue to discuss the Sleep Apnea niche we have covered in past posts. One of the top sites in the forums was www.apneasupport.org

When we search on it we discover one of the limitations of Quantcast. Small and moderate sized sites are not as well documented as are major authority sites. That said in this case they do return data which we will review. We just need to keep in mind that it may not be as accurate as we would prefer, but it’s much better than nothing.

Like Google Trends it provides a graph showing their estimate of the traffic to the site.

The Quantcast statistics suggest average traffic of about 14.8K per month.

The above 6 month chart shows a drop off in traffic in the months of November and December of 2009. In this case the data is from just the US.

On larger sites, you can get world wide distribution as well.

Below the traffic chart is the nitty gritty and why we want to use Quantcast, the Demographics.

With this data we see that the searchers for information on the topic are somewhat more likely to be women, typically 35 or older with the largest group 50+. Most are Caucasian with no children at home. They tend to have had a college education with more than an average amount having graduate education, but their incomes tend to be slightly below than average which may indicate a significant portion of retired people.

With this background information, you now have a better idea of who your prospect may be. To do this right you should as I mentioned check on several other related sights to see what variations in the data you can find.

This will allow you to brainstorm ideas to make your site more user friendly, which in turn should help the success of your venture. It may also give you ideas on the type of additional products you could offer your prospect.

This finishes my tour of free research tools you can use to identify and develop profitable niche markets. In my next post in this series we will discuss competition.

Selecting a Niche: Some Starting Points

Before we start searching for your new niche, lets review how the niche marketing process works.

•   Step 1 – You need to pick a viable niche.
•   Step 2 – You need to study and understand the niche.
•   Step 3 – You need to create and/or find a product to promote to this niche. (This is where you provide a solution to them)
•   Step 4 – You design your campaign, copywriting, and drive traffic to your niche website.
•   Step 5 – You generate nice niche profits.

In my next couple of posts we will discover a number of free tools you can use to assist in this process of selecting a niche. But before we go into depth on using these tools lets start deciding what niche we want to research and develop.

There are 3 main themes that are highly lucrative for niche marketing, that you should be aware of. They are: –

1.   Health
2.   Wealth
3.   Relationships

You can never really go wrong with these as starting points when selecting a niche. There are always people having problems and desperately looking solutions in all three.

However, these 3 categories mentioned here are very broad. So what you need to do is to use the tools, that will be demonstrated later, to dig deeper into these broad categories before selecting a niche to exploit.

That way you can become the “expert” to provide specific solutions to your new niche easier, faster and better.

In addition to these broad categories you may want to think in terms of broad motivations that people may have within a category.

For example, think of ‘people in transition’. If someone has just lost their job, they are more likely to be searching for solutions and willing to take action when an appropriate solution presents itself.

Another example would be a wife filing for a divorce. This is also a transitional period where the couple may be looking for a specific solution for the family or solutions on how to move forward with their relationship.

Sometimes one side of the couple may even be seeking out advice to get back together with the spouse or partner.

So people in transitions are normally ‘hungry’ because they are desperately in need to get out of their current chaos.

Another lucrative type of market is the ‘in the news trends’. While these may or may not be long lived niches, they can be highly profitable while they are prominent in the public’s mind.

In the news trends are often just a quick dash or sometimes a prolonged situation. Often it’s a wave that needs to be caught. An example of ‘In the news trend’ would be the recent retrenchment and unemployment news.

News stories about the current recession and high unemployment rates are all over the news. These people are currently in chaos. They’ve lost their jobs and need to find a solution as soon as possible to sustain their lifestyle and their monthly commitments.

While this may always be the case to some extent, when you are in a major trend it’s wise to use effective marketing to capitalize on the situation.

Another example might be ‘celebrity diets’.

News about the latest celebrity diets are evident in gossip magazines, TV channels, and on various trend indicators as we will discuss. When you see a trend capturing the media’s attention, it is ‘hot.’ People will very often craze about it during that period of time.

Again it takes some nimbleness, but niche marketers who are prepared to catch and ride on these waves can generate extraordinary niche profits.

So when thinking about effective marketing for a new niche consider not just what niche, but whether you can identify some “moving force” that might motivate people within your new niche to take action.

What Are The Advantages in Niche Marketing?

There are several advantages to our simple marketing plan of focusing on niches online.

The first is that by narrowing our topic to something very specific, we allow ourselves the opportunity to become an expert on that narrow niche. To be effective as a marketer, you want to be seen as an authority, someone you customers can trust. Because trust is a key element of the buyers decision making process.

It’s much easier to learn everything important there is to know about Ice Fishing lures and gear than it is to learn everything there is to know about fishing in general.

By selecting a niche and learning about it through research, you will be viewed as an expert who provides solutions for your audience.

Additionally, by focusing on a smaller niche market you will have more targeted customers and less competition. This means you will be in a position to be the dominant force within your niche market.

In other words, you will be the big fish in the little pond, as opposed to being a little fish in a big one.

In niche marketing, the concept is first to identify an audience or customer base. Then to study and understand them so that you have a good handle on what they are looking for, what they are hungry for. And then you feed it to them, by promoting a relevant product to meet that demand. That product may be someone else’s or your own, but the key is that before you go to the trouble of promoting it, you have already identified the people who want it, and understand how and why it will meet their needs. It then is a simple matter to sell it.

The primary advantage of niche marketing is that it reduces resistance to the sales process. You are no longer trying to get people to buy something they don’t want. Instead you are helping them solve their specific problem. As such you become their hero, which is a far more satisfying outcome.

Niche Blogs and Web Sites are Ideal for Home Gamers

Much of what I write about here is oriented to the “Bricks and Mortar” business person, but the Micro Business Specialist is a “Big Tent.” concept and particularly includes one person shops staking out a claim via the internet.

For a few home run hitters, the internet is a place to dominate a field. To be the top guru in pay per click, or Adsense or Article writing etc. And then to make millions selling how to books to all of us wanna bees.

A better strategy for most, is to strive to become good a just getting hits. Singles will do nicely if you can string enough of them together. And one of the best ways to get hits consistently is with niche marketing.

I have two suggestions today. One for those of you already aware of the power of niches, and a second for those who may still be getting their feet on the ground here in the less than solid cyber fields.

First the immediate and urgent. It’s one thing to identify a niche, its another to fill that niche with useful material.

One of the best shortcuts is to find and use quality private label material. Private label material is like the store brand of green beans at your local grocery store. It may have the stores label on it, but it was grown and packaged by someone else.

This is done everyday in many fields including article research and writing. You have all heard of ghost writers. Private Label Rights is the term used to describe articles and even books that have been ghost written, and are available for you to use.

Some are PLR material is better than others and some niches are better than others. I will return to this topic again. But I want to share with you my most recent niche and the source of material I will be using. Because if you hurry, you too can grab on of the few remaining rights packages.

The niche is aroma therapy. Aroma therapy is a sweet smelling niche. It’s been around for thousands of years and will likely be around for the foreseeable future. It’s also a niche that isn’t over saturated. That’s why the recent release of a quality PLR package on the subject is worth more than passing attention.

There are a lot of ways to build a successful online enterprise. But one of the surest is to focus on niche markets, and create internet properties that serve those niches. When you can find a quality PLR product that fills a niche you have a tremendous head start.

Doug Champigny, who is a PLR master if ever there was one, has just released an Aroma Therapy package. It includes a 50 page ebook that you can sell as your own, a set of ten articles and ten podcasts of those articles. It also includes a set of graphics you can use and a blank set that you can edit to rename the eBook to your own title.

You could have these added to a web site or blog in short order and add adsense ads, click bank products and a wide number of related products from elsewhere.

Now word to the wise, you will have much more success with this if you rework the content to make it your own. I spent a chunk of my yesterday doing just that. I reworked each of the articles into my own words. It wasn’t difficult as the material was well written. In the process I learned a lot about the topic, which is a plus.

I bought a new domain name, www.aromatherapyscents.com which I will launch as a wordpress blog site in the very near future. I will offer the eBook for sale and provide useful information in the form of the 10 articles on Aroma Therapy that were included in the package.

I will probably add Adsense ads on the site and offer a set of additional products from a select few of the hundreds of aroma therapy and related companies that offer affiliate programs. I will also set up a Google Alert for the term Aroma Therapy and monitor what comes my way. That should allow me to add relevant material to the blog format as time goes on.

I’m slow, and I have many diverse tasks on my daily schedule, so this may take me a few days to get set up to the point I like. But once done, I will have an internet property that will attract visitors and sales for years to come. That is what I call a single. Now if it gets really hot, and I discover that I am getting a lot of traffic I may try to stretch it into a double, but I will take a look at that once I round first.

Now heads up, Doug Champigny the author of the PLR Package on Aroma Thearpy is no fool, and he restricts his PLR material to just 100 copies. That way the internet doesn’t get over saturated with the stuff. This works to my advantage, and yours if you decide to jump on this bandwagon.

But you need to grab your copy today. This one is already largely gone. There’s a growing group of folk who grab Doug’s stuff as soon as it’s issued and run with it. I’m one of them and I think you should be too.

Go to http://askearlabout.com/champignyAromaTherapy.php

Now if this is all new to you, let me suggest that their are dozens of people who teach bits and pieces of this approach. I’ve spent tons of money over the years on eBooks and courses that covered various parts of the whole. Sometimes the parts meshed together with one another, and other times they didn’t. They almost always had a hole, sometimes a big hole when it came to implementation of the theory being taught.

That’s one of the reasons I’ve become such a fan of the Niche Profits Classroom. If you are still struggling to find your way online, they have an extremely comprehensive training program and some cutting edge tactics that will get you up and running in the right direction fast.

I don’t know if it’s the best such training resource out there or not. It may be. It is certainly the best I have encountered, and rather than charging $1,000’s you can access it for a small monthly fee, take what you need and leave. They have a huge array of videos that walk you through the steps to almost everything you need to know. And they share some top end secrets that will make your head spin.

So in this relatively long post I have shared an immediate opportunity to grab great material for a lucrative niche, and my best recommendation on how to move forward online if you aren’t fully up to speed yet.

I hope you will take action on both.