by Malcolm Leyshon
http://www.malcolmleyshon.com
©
2009
A common mistake that new internet marketers make
is failing to find and market to a clearly defined micro-niche market. This is
the cause of a large proportion of small internet business failures. There are
many well established businesses in broad markets like "internet marketing"
or "self improvement." If you do not narrow down your market, you will
put yourself against very tough competition, which includes the most established,
most experienced and most successful marketers on the internet.
On
the other hand, if you have a viable product or service to offer to a narrow and
clearly defined segment of a particular niche market, you will have a much better
chance of finding success online even without any prior experience.
Having
a unique product of your own targeting a well-defined market provides you with
an advantage. It will be easier for you to gain top rankings in the search engines
simply by writing and posting articles about your product on your website and
on your blog. You will stand a good chance of success because the keywords you
need for your products will naturally occur in the process of writing about them.
You do not even have to have any knowledge of Search Engine Optimization techniques
or keyword research. Since there will not be much competition and you will be
one of few people writing on that particular topic, you are likely to hit page
one of Google without doing anything else.
If your product
has a hungry market, your articles and blog posts will start to attract highly
targeted traffic to your website. As long as you make it easy for people to purchase
your products, and the prices are within expectations, the odds of converting
a reasonable percentage of traffic into sales should be quite high.
This
is due to the fact that anyone using a search engine that finds your page will
most likely have entered a very specific search phrase. It is known that when
someone uses a more specific search phrase, the more commercial intent they have.
Of
course, your results will improve if you apply SEO techniques to your web pages
and actively seek out and cultivate your market on the internet, but you can get
a long way simply by writing about your niche product and benefiting from the
long-tail keyword phrases that occur as a natural result of what you write.
So
how can you seek out and cultivate your market?
Seek out
your market by going where it is. Think about where your likely customers might
hang out on the internet. What forums and social sites would they hang out in?
Join those forums and social sites and participate in the conversations.
Cultivate
your market by actively responding to both direct and indirect queries. By indirect
queries I mean those questions that people post on forums that are relevant to
your niche market. By responding to those questions on the forums, you are setting
yourself up as an expert in that particular field. Simply add a link to your website
in your forum signature file, and each time you respond to a question, you will
be quietly providing a way for the readers of that thread on the forum to check
out your website.
Another thing you can do is provide a
way for people to sign up to your newsletter when they visit your website. You
can use an autoresponder to set up this kind of service. This is a great way to
gather names and e-mail addresses of potential customers and connect with them
via e-mail.
Too many marketers fail simply because they
do not follow up on the messages that they receive from prospective customers.
Be diligent in responding to any queries you receive by e-mail. When people ask
you questions, they are actually inviting you to help and advise them, and if
they like what they hear, you stand a very good chance of converting that person
into a loyal customer.
One more thing you can do is strengthen
your position on the search engines by posting articles relating to your niche
market on article directories. You have already achieved good search engine rankings
for your niche product, and every time you post an article on one of the leading
article directories, you will reinforce your position at the top and dominate
your niche market.
The beauty of the techniques I have mentioned
is that they are either free or cost very little to implement. Your biggest expense
would be your autoresponder and micro-business with a mailing list of less than
500 names. We are talking about a budget of less than twenty dollars a month.
So
as you can see, if you can set up a micro-niche-business with a viable product,
you can achieve success on the internet much more easily than if you try to compete
with the big boys in broad and competitive niches.
