Researching a Profitable Niche - My 5 Tips

Some of the lessons I've learnt along the way:

Tip #1

Never have only one product to sell. It is important to have backend products to sell to your customers once you get them into your funnel. You will be told by any knowledgeable internet marketer that it is much easier to sell to someone who has already purchased from you, than it is to get a new customer.

Tip#2

Do not make the same mistake I made and miss out on the most important part of creating an online business the research!
In the world of internet marketing you can pretty much take the guess work out of whether you are going to make money or not purely by doing your research.
Up until recently I was building my website based on keywords I thought would be easy to target, but using a keyword research tool I very quickly realised that I was targeting keywords that were already oversaturated and statistically did not have much chance of getting to page 340,000 on Google let alone Page 1.

Tip # 3

Basically there are two main keyword strategies organic traffic (traffic that you direct to your website without paying any money) and PPC traffic which is paid advertising using mediums like Google AdWords or Yahoo PPC etc. So basically your outcome depends on:

- Your budget; or
- How quickly you want to see results

The Organic method (SEO) can take some time to:

- Build a list
- Build a following; and
- Start building relationships with your customers.

Whereas PPC is much quicker method but can be very costly

- If you do not know what you are doing
- Have not tested your market or
- Have not tested every aspect of your landing page and sales copy for ultimate conversion

There is no use paying for, or driving lots of traffic to your website, if your website is not optimised to convert any of that traffic. In fact it is a guaranteed recipe for failure!

Organic list building

If you are going to try and work your way up the rankings in the search engines organically, I highly recommend targeting what in the industry is called Longtail Keywords. Basically these are the keywords that are typed in when people search for something on the internet that have more than 3 words eg.

• Internet Marketing would be considered a Market
• Internet Marketing Tools would be considered a Niche
• Internet Marketing Ebook Tools would be a Micro Niche (longtail - more than 3 words)

The more specific the niche the more chance you have of being

• Found on the internet
• Getting traffic into your funnel
• Converting that traffic and
• Selling to that customer over and over again.

Tip #4

If it is your first website and you do not have a big budget try and target Longtail Keywords or Micro Niches that fit into the category of no less than 80 searches per day and no more than 50,000 competing pages for that same keyword.

If you are more experienced with

• Driving traffic
• Using other peoples lists or
• Attracting power affiliates

Than you can obviously strive for higher more popular keywords, but I recommend starting small when you are new to internet marketing.You have more chance of getting to page one organically with less competing pages than an oversaturated market. or keyword.

I still recommend finding a keyword that is a micro niche to a topic that you are knowledgeable or passionate about. It is much easier to create an online business on a topic that you are interested in than one that might just be profitable.

Tip #5

PPC Ads

If you are a newbie and do not understand Google Adwords or PPC advertising it may be best to get someone to help you with your first campaign. There are many people who have been burnt trying to create their own campaign without understanding the system.

A couple of suggestions that has helped me:

• Try doing an AdWords campaign on one of your longtail keywords (they are less likely to be as expensive as some of the more popular search terms)
• Try and find keywords that are less that 0.15 cents per click that are still on page one 1-7 ranking (hard to find but they are still out there)
• If you have a bigger budget then you can obviously target more expensive keywords but, I recommend the smaller ones until you understand what you are doing.
• Always put a daily limit on how much you want to spend. That way if you have done something wrong you know that you will never spend more in any given day than you can afford to lose.
• Always put a time limit on how long your campaign will run. I usually run 3 days and then check my reports and statistics to see what is happening. If you are converting and you are making money that is great you can keep tweaking and adding more keywords. If you are losing money and not converting then you have to start tweaking one thing at a time to see what is not working and fix it until you start getting your desired results.

To Your Success.

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Pam Brossman is an Australian Online Business Coach helping women around the world create lifestyle choices by learning how to build their own online business.  If you wish to find out more visit http://www.pammieb.com