Category: Niche Marketing

There’s been a mad rush to the Internet these days for marketing purposes, and for good reason. With so many people riding the Information Superhighway these days to find information on everything from TV channels to bread machines, smart business owners know that they need to be on that highway as well. After all, if you don’t jump on the next big thing your competition will, and nobody wants to get left behind in the race for the Internet.

However, even though it’s of the utmost importance for companies of all shapes and sizes to have an Internet presence – even those who still do most of their business out of a brick and mortar building – it’s also important to remember the offline world when it comes to online business. That’s right – even if your company is entirely an Internet creation, there are many things you can do offline in order to create interest and profit online.

First off, try printing some brochures. These are a great way to get the attention of customers who aren’t on the Internet at that particular moment – like if you are a car parts wholesaler, see if you can put your brochures on the desk of the local oil change facility. You can also contact your local Chamber of Commerce to see if they have any ideas.

Speaking of the Chamber of Commerce, be sure to switch off your computer long enough to join. Also, get involved with business clubs both online and offline to maximize your business’ impact and start networking with other businesses in the area. You might find a great partner in crime to team up with. If nothing else, you’ll make friends.

Business cards are an effective tool, if they’re used wisely. With the ease of information transfer, the business card isn’t as important as it used to be, but it can become of interest if it doubles as a coupon for services or products. Be sure to hand them out whenever business comes up in conversation, and be explicit about the coupon’s value. This will encourage the recipient to hang on to the card longer than they might otherwise.

Flyers are another cheap way to get the word out. You can either post them around your community in approved places, or hand them out on the street. The reality of the situation is that most people probably won’t take too much notice of a flyer and it might end up as littler, but there’s always the chance that you’ll really catch somebody’s attention. At the end of the day, flyers are still effective – if they weren’t, you wouldn’t see them around so much!

And, of course, there’s always the option of radio and television ads. These can be expensive, but if you’ve got the budget and the inclination they’re a great way for a captive audience to hear your message.

Video: Brad talks about what forum marketing is and why it’s important to get involved in forums.

We’ve spoken about the dangers of getting too specific. Now, let’s talk about the advantages of being too specific, at least some of the time.

You want to have your business appeal to as many people as possible. This means that if you’re a car repair shop, being able to show knowledge of everything from tires to chassis is a great way to rope in people who are interested in all levels of car repair. You’ll be able to establish relationships with these people who will hopefully become repeat customers of yours, and maybe even offer references to others.

What you want to avoid in general is getting too pigeonholed, as this can cause you to miss out on a lot of business.

However, the fact of the matter is that staying broad and appealing is a good thing, but people do tend to have specific interests. Maybe you know a lot about overall car repair, but you prefer to tinker with the engine. Maybe you like all car brands, but you prefer Jaguars. Humans do tend to gravitate toward increasingly specific levels of mastery depending on their inclinations. Just because you happen to know more about Jaguars than any other brand of car doesn’t mean that you should hide your knowledge out of fear of seeming too specific.

The “too specific” parts of your business can be used to your advantage. These are called “sub-niches,” and are basically where you can get super specific without losing huge chunks of your audiences.

In fact, being able to use your sub-niche is a great way to really get your business to flow. Maybe there aren’t that many people in the world who are as psyched about Jaguars as you are, but if you can tap into this sub-niche, you might be floored about how much business they’ll give you. People love to tap into others who have similar specific interests, and if you can manage to find the people who are as obsessed about the Jaguar engines as you are, you’ve probably made about fifteen new best friends. Best friends are excellent for advertising – and they’ll likely mention you to others who just have general interest in car repair, just because you’ve connected over Jaguar engines.

The trick is not to let the sub-niche take over the niche. Again, more balance. Maybe you like talking about Jaguars more, but you shouldn’t let it keep you from the general “help me with my oil change” threads on forums. In this way you can stay broad enough to help even the most out of touch layperson as well as the experts in your sub-niche. Behold the power of the sub-niche if used properly – just don’t let it take over everything else!

If you’re a savvy business owner who is looking to get into the world of pay per click advertising, then you’re already aware of the salience that low competition keywords hold. For those who aren’t aware, here’s the long and short of it: low competition keywords are less obvious words that still relate to the product being sold by the merchant. For example, “auto” is a lower competition keyword as compared to “car.” Low competition keywords aren’t just limited to individual words, though – a “keyword” could conceivably consist of a pair of words or even a phrase. “Motorized vehicle” would also be a keyword that has a lower competition rate than does “car.”

The question being, though, is that in the case that a business owner is searching for those low competition keywords, where might they be found? The first place to check is, of course, your own head. Or a thesaurus. Look up all the synonyms for your main high competition keywords that you can and see which ones seem to make the most sense insofar as your products or services are concerned.

Of course, the usefulness of the word game stops at some point. Low competition is important, but you also want the keywords to be relevant and current. For example, “horseless carriage” might well be a synonym for “car,” but it’s not exactly highly relevant in the current market. It’s likely a keyword that has low competition, but it’s not very likely that a car dealership selling Ferraris is going to find it particularly helpful to their cause.

The real secret to using low competition keywords correctly is to find the keywords that are both low competition but yet highly searched for. Yes, these do exist! But where to find them?

The long and short of it? Software.

The bad news is that most of these software programs are paid deals. The good news is that once you have the software under your belt, it will end up saving you tons of money in the long run, so its definitely a worthwhile investment if you’re looking to use low competition keywords to the best of what they can offer.

There are several software programs on the market that are entirely dedicated to finding what keywords are low competition but yet deliver a major impact on the Google charts. Another good thing about having the software that searches out these keywords be for-profit is that it means that not as many people are taking advantage of the software as could be doing so, so those low competition high click keywords stay ripe for your picking.

Simply do a Google search on “keyword software” and you’ll get several options from which to choose. Do some research and pick the program that seems most intuitive to you – and then buy. You won’t be disappointed, and you’ll make up the cost of the purchase in the long run.

One of the best ways to advertise these days is through pay per click advertising. Done the right way, it can literally boost your site hits and even your revenue by millions. For those who understand how applications like Google Adsense works, pay per click advertising can be cost effective and just plain old effective in an overall sense.

However, if mismanaged, pay per click advertising could be extremely costly and just as ineffective. Many people who use pay per click advertising spend hundreds or even thousands of dollars each year for clicks that don’t go through . What’s the difference between those who use pay per click advertising effectively and those who do not?

One of the major things you can do to up your success rate (and lower your costs) when it comes to pay per click advertising is to go for low competition keywords. For example, a very high competition keyword might be “car.” This is the most common word that comes to mind when people think of motorized vehicles, so the cost of “buying” this keyword for pay per click purchases is very high. Any time somebody clicks on that ad that’s targeting the word “car,” the cost to the company putting out the ad is quite high.

For bigger businesses, this might be fine. However, if you’re a smaller car dealership, you might have better luck going for “auto,” which is a synonym for “car” yet a keyword with a lower competition level. These words will still show up when potential customers are doing searches (most people who are searching for “car” will likely search for “automobile”), and even if the event that the customer doesn’t search for “auto,” the keyword is related to “car.” Google and other search engines understand the magic of synonyms, and you could get included in a search for “car” even if you didn’t buy the keyword!

Using low competition keywords is a great way to get a lot of attention for much less money. When you sign up for pay per click advertising, be sure to do some research first and come up with commonly searched for terms that are lower competition. Don’t just go for the most obvious words – while it might seem that this would get you more advertising bang for your buck, remember that you’ll be paying out considerably more bucks for what might not even be a worthwhile bang.

In following articles, we talk about the best routes of finding these low competition keywords that will help you keep costs down while boosting site viewership. It might sound too good to be true, but effective pay per click advertising is a great way to get the attention of niche markets – and it doesn’t have to be expensive!

It might come as no shock to you to learn that the most commonly engaged in activity on the Internet is email. People are connected to their email like no other function on the Internet, and we all know how popular Facebook and Twitter are. If you really want to get somebody’s attention but can’t or don’t want to call, we reach for our emails. Email is one of the most professional and reliable ways to get in contact with somebody in the modern era, and even people who are “less connected” tend to have email addresses.

This means that if you can tap into an email connection with potential and current customers and clients, you’ll be getting their attention in the most reliable way possible. Most people check their email every day, and even those who don’t spare a glance at it every week. That means there’s a high chance that those people will be looking at your email in their box, and even if they don’t read it, they’ll be reminded of the existence of your company and its products and services.

Best of all, email advertising is cheap. In fact, it can be free. Sound too good to be true?

The flip side of all this is what’s known as spam. Spam is unsolicited emails – that is, the digital equal to “junk mail.” People loathe spam with a passion, and virtually all email accounts these days come with “spam filters” where if you try to reach out to a potential client uninvited, your email gets diverted to a netherworld of Viagra offers that most people don’t even look at.

So how to get into the email boxes of your potential and current clients without falling prey to spam? Simple. Don’t send unsolicited emails.

Most companies who are looking to take advantage of email advertising do so by utilizing “opt in” email lists. This is done by the customer actively choosing to sign up for your mailing lists. Most wise companies who take advantage of this offer a customer the chance to sign up for their email lists after making a purchase. Some even advertise it on the front page of their website (or right next to the checkout counter if it’s a brick and mortar operation).

The trick to opt in email lists is to make it worth your customer’s while to be part of the list. Don’t send them ten emails a day. One a week is probably the maximum. When you do send out the emails, make sure that they have something relevant to say, and preferably at least one coupon. Rewarding your opt-in email subscribers is a great way for your business to be passed around by word of mouth. It’ll work even better if they’re extremely happy customers!

You’re probably well aware of how helpful social networking tools can be when it comes to getting attention for your business. In fact, social networking has become such a salient topic in recent years that it’s developed its own marketing acronym– just as Search Engine Optimization has SEO, social networking has Social Media Optimization, or SMO.

Yes, it’s true – there are people who make their living by controlling the Twitter accounts and Facebook profiles of people and businesses. The good news is that if you’re a small operation, there’s absolutely no reason why you can’t manage your own social media optimization. There’s very little about the process that’s acutely difficult – the most annoying thing about it is that it can be time consuming, which is why some companies choose to outsource the work. Once your social media optimization reaches a certain point, you might deem it necessary to outsource it as well, but for people who are just starting on the path to social medial optimization, it’s recommended that you take control of it yourself.

The reason why social networking is so pivotal when it comes to niche marketing is that the entire point of social networking in the first place is to find a niche. Think of it this way – when you create a personal profile on these sites, you’re seeking to find people who you can network and connect with. On personal profiles, these are likely friends that you know in real life, so you can build up your communication methods with them. In essence, you’re creating your own little niche where you can find others easily through social networking, and others can find you.

Working through social networking with a business is the exact same thing. You’re putting your business out on the waves, looking for people who might be interested in your goods and services, or what you have to say. The art behind using Twitter and LinkedIn is the same as it would be with email advertising or working on forums. Post regularly enough so that your account is obviously an active account and people stay aware of your existence, but don’t spam the accounts of your friends and colleagues multiple times a day. To do so is to becoming annoying, and even though you’re looking to keep a steady stream of conversation going, if you become irritating, people will “defriend” your social network account.

Good things to make your “friends” on social networking sites aware of are promotions, blog updates, sales, discrepancies in business (like if you will be away from the computer for a while or the business will be closing for a period of time), or tips and tricks. Keep your updates fun, interesting, and relevant. A good rule of thumb is that if you don’t have anything to say, don’t say it. However, you should have something to say about your business at least two times a month – should this not be the case, you need to work on making your business more dynamic!

Video: Brad discusses article and press release marketing and shows the most effective ways to distribute your article and press releases.

Search engine optimization is one of the most important methods of marketing that a business can invest time and money into. In fact, for those who would like to trim the fat as well as possible and get to the most effective means of marketing, here they are: blogging, search engine optimization, and email advertising.

Search engine optimization goes hand in hand with a niche. This is because the very act of sharpening your SEO is essentially you carving a niche out for yourself and your business in the world of the Internet. SEO determines where your site pops up when keywords pertaining to your business are keyed into a search engine. Recent research shows that over 85% of all traffic to sites is generated by search engines, so having your website show up on that first page (or even the coveted first spot on the first page) is key to your site getting a lot of traffic and a lot of conversions.

You can make this happen with SEO. The issue is knowing how to relates to niche marketing and how to use SEO to bolster both your niche and the amount of hits your site gets.

There are many ways to improve your SEO – there are quite literally libraries of books out there with information on the subject. For those of you who would like the quick and dirty on SEO, however, we’ve compiled a bullet list of points that will help you understand what SEO actually means and how to improve it.

– The first way to improve SEO is through code. This means using something called a meta tag – and if you don’t know what this is, look it up. If it still seems like Greek to you, find a business that specializes in SEO and get them to up the code on your site. This is one of the most important things you can do insofar as SEO is concerned and is certainly worth the money you’ll pay to have it done if you’re not interested in/can’t do it yourself.

– Page content. This refers to the stuff on the webpages that mostly doesn’t change – product and company descriptions are great examples. What helps SEO here is keyword frequency and placement – there’s a specific style of writing that helps improve a site’s SEO by balancing the amount and placement of keywords with informative content. There’s plenty of free information on the Internet about this, and if it seems like too much trouble to have SEO-attuned page content, find a copy company and outsource it. It’s worth the cost.

The reality of the situation is that calibrating your business’ SEO is a complicated science that’s rather hard to sum up in two bullet points. This is just a starting point. But if you want to advertise to the niche, the niche has to be able to find you. Better your SEO and you better your chance of landing customers!

Video: Brad discusses why it’s important to have an email list and the best ways to build your list.