Take it away, Susanne!

Niche Marketing: Mission Impossible Style

by Susanne Myers

Let’s have a little fun with niche marketing and approach it “Mission Impossible” style. I don’t know what causes me to come up with these quirky topics and analogies when I’m writing for Nicole’s blog, but I sure hope you’re enjoying it. With that said let’s dive right in …

Your mission, should you accept it, is to connect your readers with the best solutions to help solve their problems. Let me introduce you to your team:

• WordPress Site With Awesome Content
• Redirected Affiliate Links
• Autoresponder Messages
• Niche Research Packs

Let’s start with some good news.

Building a profitable niche website is not an impossible mission. In fact, if you assemble your team and put it to good use following the steps I’m outlining below, it won’t take you long at all.

Let’s say you want to set up a new site over the summer to help pay for that new car you want to buy (I know you’re car shopping Nicole). I like doing that anytime we have a new purchase coming up or even to save up for a nice vacation or a new laptop.

Every good mission needs some sort of mission plan. Here’s yours:

Start With The End Goal In Mind

I find it helps to set some sort of goal for the site. This could be making an extra $200 a month to pay for an upcoming vacation, $50 to cover the phone bill or $2000 to make your mortgage payment each month. Without a goal, you don’t know what you’re working toward. Having the goal helps you figure out how hard you need to work, how fast you need to build your site, how much traffic you need and how big of a list you want.

Once you have your dollar amount, it’s time to find a suitable niche to work with.

Find A Problem And Solution

As I mentioned before, your job on this mission is to help people solve their problems and since we are in the US,  that often involves our wallets and credit cards. Of course some of the problems are going to be solved by sharing a quick tip or explaining and idea. But since we’re in it to make a living from niche marketing, you also want to find good products to promote.

Build Your Site

Let’s bring some of our team members into play.

Team member #1 is a site (or blog) built with the free WordPress software. It’s quick and easy to install, very customizable and most importantly it’s fast and simple to add content to it. Use this team member to its fullest advantage by learning more about using wordpress and the various plugins available. For example there are quite a few good ones out there to help your readers share your posts via social media. (see those Facebook and Twitter buttons on this page for example).

Team member #2 is Redirection. Redirection is a simple plugin that helps you to redirect your affiliate links from within the WordPress dashboard. Of course any other way to redirect your links will do – just make sure you get it done.

Built Your List

Team member #3 is your autoresponder. 

My favorite autoresponder to use is Aweber. (Both Nicole and I use it.)

Set it up right away and start creating autoresponder messages that send subscribers back to your niche website, share additional tips and of course make offers. Your list will be one of your biggest assets so get started here as early as possible.

Your Secret Weapon – Niche Research Packs
Last but not least, I would like to introduce you to a secret weapon – or an ace up your sleeve – Niche Research Packs. They help you set up niche websites on the fly with all the time-consuming research already done for you.

Nik says:  If you use Susanne's Niche Research Packs, it's a heck of a lot faster than doing it yourself and a heck of a lot cheaper than hiring someone!

In each niche pack, you get…

• Detailed niche description
• Who your target market for this niche is
• List of affiliate products available
• 100 domain name ideas (plus list of modifiers for hundreds more)
• Detailed keyword report for over 1000 keywords
• 100 article and blog post ideas
• 15 different author resource boxes
• 2 different detailed marketing plans (beginner and advanced) with action steps to get you up and running right away.
• List of available PLR products for this niche
• Recommended tools and resources

Here’s the link to check those out: Niche Research Packs

(NOTE: Use coupon  61414 – to save $20 off any niche pack)

Please show Susanne some love and comment below.

Warmly,
Nicole Dean

Want to see more posts from Susanne? Check these out…

• Online Success Interview: Susanne Myers
• How to Create Niche Products
• Reinvent Yourself
• What is Link Building and How Does it Impact SEO?
• Before Building One Way Links – 3 Things You Need To Have In Place First
• Link Building Frequently Asked Questions
• How to Declutter Your Online Business
• How to Create Passive Income and Summer Fun
• Affiliate Marketing Lessons That I Learned at The Bowling Alley
• Skip The Latest And Greatest Marketing Techniques and Stick With Stuff That Really Works

ok. Turning this over to Susanne. Enjoy her brilliance!

Creating Passive Income

By Susanne Myers from AffiliateTreasureChest.com

Today is the first day of summer break in our neck of the woods, which means we headed down to our beach house right after our daughter got out of school yesterday. We’ll be spending quite a bit of time here this summer, swimming in the ocean, napping in the hammock in the backyard and checking out the local seafood restaurants. It’s something I never thought we’d be able to do, and to be honest, it wouldn’t have been possible just a few short years ago.

The reason we can take off for weeks at a time and spend most of the day playing on the beach is that my husband and I have both spend the past few years creating passive income. We have quite a few different websites, some lists, autoresponder series, reports and ebooks out there that create income for us even when we’re not working.

How’d you like to get started this summer and set up your own little stream of income?

Getting Started

What’s worked well for me is to start small and then keep building and keep working at it, increasing my passive income along the way.

Since you’re a reader of Nicole’s blog, I’m sure you know all about her awesome PLR articles from www.EasyPLR.com.  You may even own quite a bit of it already, so let’s start with that.

Pick one of the PLR article packs and use it as the basis of a new niche site.

I’ll tell you a little “secret”. Nicole does a lot of research before she ever puts out a PLR pack on a topic. She makes sure there’s plenty of traffic, affiliate offers to promote and most importantly that it’s a profitable niche. That’s part of what makes these packs perfect for affiliate niche websites that will make you money month after month.

The basic steps to getting started with your own affiliate website are to choose a niche, set up a website (via a wordpress blog), add content to it (both the PLR from Nicole and some you write yourself), promote it and then monetize it.

Instead of covering each of those steps here (and turning this into a super-long 2000 plus word post), I’ve put together a short 7 day ecourse for you that walks you through each step.

-> Sign up here: Free Affiliate Marketing Fast Start Lessons

Go ahead … go sign up right now – it’s free and I’ll wait till you’re done

All signed up? Perfect!

Work through each of the daily lessons using the PLR article pack you picked as the basis for your niche website. By the end of the 7 days you have your first little stream of passive income set up.

Don’t stop there …

Keep Working At It

Take a minute to give yourself a pat on the shoulder for a job well done … and then get back to work. Add some more content to your new site, build another or set up a list for the first one. Keep working at this and other little streams of passive income. The key is to keep working at it and building more and more income streams, even if it just brings in a few extra dollars per month. Those little dollars all add up.

We weren’t able to hang out at the beach all summer last year and the years before that, but we keep at it. At first the passive income paid for a pizza a week, a few months later we were able to cover our car payments and now we’re able to rent a house at the beach all summer.

How about you? What would you like to be able to do that’s just a bit out of reach financially? Use it as motivation to set up a new niche site this week and keep working on your passive income streams all summer.

Want More from Susanne?

Here are some places you can learn more..

• Free Affiliate Marketing Fast Start Lessons
• EasyLinkLove.com
• Susanne has also shared great information all over my blog. Click here to learn more from her

There's a picture of us together from earlier this year. ->

I'm the closer one and she's the one further away. We're both thinking hard, getting smarter.

Well, I'll step down and let Susanne take the stage and shine.  Here she is…

A Step-By-Step Approach To Creating A Niche Website

by Susanne Myers

I spent the past weekend with Nicole at NAMS (Niche Affiliate Marketing Workshop) in Atlanta where I spent a good bit of my time helping out in the beginner room.

The first stumbling block for many beginning Internet Marketers seems to be choosing a niche that they will then build a website or blog in.

Over the years I've done quite a bit of niche research. Here's my process I go through every time I am considering going into a new niche.

First of All, What IS A Niche?

Let's start by talking about what exactly a niche is.

According to Wikipedia, a niche is

“the subset of the market on which a specific product is focusing; therefore the market niche defines the specific product features aimed at satisfying specific market needs, as well as the price range, production quality and the demographics that is intended to impact”.

For Internet marketing in particular they have the following to say:

By appealing to smaller segments of larger markets, referred to as niches, a website can be developed and promoted quickly to uniquely serve a targeted and usually loyal customer base, giving the affiliate a small but regular income stream.

Let's look at an example. Health and Wellness is a large market, weightloss is a subset of that market. We can then “niche” it even further down by choosing “weightloss for new moms” as our niche.

Is It a Profitable Niche?

Next I like to take a look at the profit potential of a niche. Some things to consider are:

• Is it popular?
• Does it solve a problem or entertain?
• Is there a magazine (or even better several magazines) out there that target your niche market?
• For ecommerce sites, if you can't find the product at large stores like Wall-Mart, you have a pretty good chance of being able to sell it online.
• Do others buy google adwords ads for products in this niche?

If you can answer several of these questions with a definite yes, your niche has quite a bit of profit potential and it is usually worth spending a little time putting together a website to test the niche further.

Who's My Target Market for this Niche?

My next step is to put myself into my customer's shoes. Get as much information about your target market as you can. Who are they? What kinds of problems do they have that you can help with. What questions do they have that you can answer. Great places to research your target market are niche forums and sites like yahoo answers.

Are There Products I Can Sell?

Before you start building your new site, I want you to check on one more thing…  Are there any products (eletronic or physical) that you can sell to this market? I like to start by looking at affiliate products. Later on I might consider developing my own products, but for now let's focus on affiliate products. If you have several options, move on to the next step.

If there are no good products out there, it may be time to move to another niche. Please do not skip this step. I have spent hours and hours developing a site in the past only to notice a week or two into the project that there was really no good way to monetize the site.

Time For Keyword Research

I mostly get free traffic via search engines to my niche sites and the way to do this is to do some keyword research and then optimize content for these terms.

Pick your favorite keyword research tool. I personally use the paid version of wordtracker, but even the free wordtracker keyword tool or the google adwords keyword tool will do.

Spend a little time figuring out what terms are searched for in your market. Put them in a spreadsheet so you can refer to them easily when you start to create your content plan.

I like to sort my keywords into 3 different segments. The first is my main term. This will be the keyword with the highest search volume, but it will also be very hard to rank for. That keyword becomes my main focus for the home page of my website.  Next I like to choose 5 to 10 keywords that are very general, but a little easier to rank for than the main one. Those become my category pages. All other keywords will be used in individual articles blog posts. This sorting is the first step toward creating a content plan. Let's talk about that a little more.

But first, if you want to learn a bit more about keyword research, listen to this panel discussion I was involved in along with SEO experts Karon Thackston, Lynn Terry and Dan Morris. It's $17, but I think you'll find it well worth the small investment.

Creating A Content Plan

I like to take those “sorted” keywords and come up with a content plan for my new website or blog. It helps me get things up quickly when I'm ready. A great way to organize the keywords is to use a mindmap. You can see a very simple example in the image below:

Of course you would add quite a few more long-tail keywords for the individual article pages (shown here in green). As your site grows you can expand by adding more and more keyword targeted articles.

Of course you can also do the same on paper if you are not comfortable with mindmapping.

Building Your Site

With your plan in hand, it's time to build your niche site. You will need a domain name, website hosting and some sort of content management program. While there are quite a few good ones out there and you could even build a static html page, I prefer using the free wordpress blogging software (www.wordpress.org) to build my niche sites. (If you've never installed a blog, ReliableWebs.com will set one up for you.)

Use your mindmap or content plan to lay out your categories, then start writing your content using the long-tail keywords. I like to get about 10 or so posts in to begin with and then work on adding a few more each week.

Content Promotion Strategies

The last step is to go out and actively promote your new site and the individual articles on it. It's a little outside of the scope of this blog post to cover content promotion in detail, but here are a few ideas to get your started:

• Tweet about your new site and new articles as you add them.
• Do some article marketing.
• Participate on popular niche forums and include a link to your site in your forum signature.
• Comment on other popular blogs in the niche.
• Write some guest blog posts on other blogs.
• Build some backlinks to each page of your site to get it ranking well in the search engines.

I hope you found this step-by-step approach to niche research helpful. Yes, there is quite a bit of work involved, but it's also a fun process to go through once you get a hang of it.

Of if you prefer, I'll do all of the research for you. I create niche research packs that include all sorts of other important niche info at your finger tips to help you enter a new niche or dominate one that you're already in.

Check them out at NicheResearchPacks.com

Susanne Myers

I hope this was helpful!

Please let us know if you have questions by commenting below. We’re happy to keep answering questions as long as you keep asking.

Have a great day!

Warmly,
Nicole Dean

You know how it is when you go to a movie that you're really excited about? Then, you eat popcorn and drink a big ole soda to wash it down and start to think “Oh no! I have to PEE!”

You try to hold it for the rest of the movie so that you don't miss anything important, but…  as you start to sweat and do the potty dance, you realize there's no chance that'll happen.

What's a movie buff to do?

Well, a new niche website has been launched to save the day.

Just go to http://runpee.com before you go to the movie and find out exactly the best times to … run and pee during the movie you'll be watching. Coolness – they're working on an Iphone App in case you forget and need to check as you're buying that big soda at the theater. (Correction: iPhone app is under development right now and than other mobile versions will be out in the Fall which is as fast as the owner can get it done.)

I was fortunate to get the owner of RunPee.com to do a quick text interview with me. Here is some insight into the business side of things…

————  Begin Interview ————

1. Tell me about RunPee and how you came up with the idea.

Here are two pages that answer a lot of the questions about the site:
http://blog.runpee.com/about
http://blog.runpee.com/about-polygeek

2. How are you monetizing the site?

Right now I don't! So far I think I've made about $50 off the site and spent $500 on hosting – for the year. I'm a developer and not very knowledgeable about advertising but I'm working on it. I think if the site stays popular and people use it on a regular basis then I'll eventually find an effective means of monetizing it. I really need to get the iPhone app out there. It will sell for .99 so that should be a nice infusion of cash.

Nicole says: Yes, the Iphone app should be a good burst of income for the site, definitely.

3. I see you're getting a lot of interviews. What have you learned so far about scheduling and getting results from interviews.

Just say yes to everyone that wants an interview! The funny thing is that I've only contacted one person for an interview on their show and they never got back to me. Fortunately lots of requests have come to me.

4. Any questions you may like to ask me for help marketing/monetizing your business.

I think the model I'll follow is going to be similar to RottenTomatoes.com. Since the site is Flash based I can work in some really nifty themes for movies. Plus I'd like to have a section at the bottom where users can browse for previews and such. Eventually the site will grow into much more than it is now but it will always stay focused on the core asset which is to be able to quickly get in and get the RunPeeTimes for the movie you want to watch.

Nicole says: I can envision a whole line of cool tee's similar to Threadless.com Also, as the site grows in popularity and page rank, you should be able to sell text-links and banner ads, as well, for a decent price. Plus, the Iphone App will certainly take off, if you market it well. Your branding is good and memorable, for sure.  Readers, do you have suggestions?

5. Anything my readers can do for you?

Firstly I would say use it and tell all your friends about it. I hope that lots of people just make it a regular part of their movie going experience.

Second, if anyone has any suggestions please throw them out there. The site will evolve largely based on user input. And it would be nice if people bought T-shirts. I need the $$$.

6. Anything you'd do differently if you were to begin again?

I might have set up monitization better. The site has been out since last August. Since it didn't get any traffic I didn't bother working on finding ways to make money from it. And I should have added features to moderate the publicly submitted RunPeeTimes. Some of them have been of the “Go pee and don't return” variety which doesn't help anyone. I'm working on moderation today. And letting users vote on which RunPeeTimes they like the best. I have received lots of great suggestions from users which will make the site better and better.

————  End Interview ————

Great innovative thinking, RunPee. I like the way you think.

Problem –> Solution –> Opportunity for Profit.

Go get 'em guys. Find problems that YOU can solve for profit!

Warmly,
Nicole