3 Common Niche Research Myths
If you’re looking to start an online business, or perhaps you already have, then you’ve likely come across the term, “Niche.” You’ve also likely heard several myths about them. Most of these myths center on the research aspect of Niche marketing. Let’s take a look at the myths and the truth and explore what’s important to know about niche research.
Niche Research Myth #1 Niche Research Takes a Long Time.
False.
Like many things in life, it takes as long or as short as it takes. Generally, with a focused mind and a plan, it shouldn’t take more than a few days. However how long it takes also depends on how much depth you want to do your research. Generally niche research can take as little as an hour or as much as just a couple days.
And isn’t it worth whatever time it takes? Particularly, when skipping this step or rushing through it means spending days, weeks, perhaps even months with website traffic or revenue. Niche research is a small investment in time. To find your perfect niche, determine your profitability and traffic potential and to pick out keywords you want to target. That’s it.
Niche Research Myth #2 Niche Research is Hard to Do.
False.
The truth is that there are very strategic steps you can take to work your way through the niche research you need to do to be profitable. It’s not rocket science and it doesn’t require any special skills. Niche research is seriously nothing more than following steps, like a recipe. You’re simply looking at a series of pre-determined factors to see how the market you’re considering stacks up.
If you don’t know how to do your niche research, it’s possible for it to feel like you’re stumbling along lost, making uneducated guesses. It’s important to learn how to do niche research before you jump right in. However, once you know how to conduct your research, it becomes just an easy step by step process.
Niche Research Myth #3 Niche Research Doesn’t Make That Much of a Difference.
Again, false.
Niche research makes all the difference in the world. If you look at successful internet marketers, you’ll find that most of them stress the value and importance of good research. This is a step that makes a huge difference.
Consider for a moment how you search for information online. You visit your search engine of choice enter your keywords, keyword phrase or question and wait for the results. The results show up and what do you do? You scan the first few, click on the ones that look helpful and relevant and you’re off to the various websites.
Those sites that showed up on the first page of the results and whose site you visited – they did their niche research. You want to be those sites. They’re the ones getting the traffic, the opt-ins and the customers.
Niche research isn’t something you have to do. However, if you want to achieve online success and profits as quickly as possible, then it’s worth the time and effort.
Bruno
Mobile Websites and Internet Drawbacks
With new technological modes of communication, there are bound to be glitches, problems and drawbacks. The mobile web is no exception.
For starters, its operating systems are not the same as those on PC’s, and they vary with each model and device. Oh, there are a standard handful – but if you want to conduct business on the web, you need to research each type of mobile device very carefully, to see what it’s internet-ready capacity is.
One good thing, however: Mobile phones and even palm-type devices have been around for over a decade. This does help cut down on buggy behavior, since some things, developers don’t have to worry about (unlike the virgin days of personal computing, when everything about them was new.)
And being able to stay connected is far more unstable than on a PC – coverage remains an issue, even if it’s not (properly speaking) an internet issue. (This holds especially true for rural areas in North America – but then again, many rural areas also can only connect to the net via PC by dial-up.)
There are far more weighty problems to consider, however, when switching over to conducting business on your mobile. And the foremost of these is:
Personal Safety – yours, and other people’s! I recently read a study which scientifically rated people talking on mobile phones while driving as legally impaired. Their reaction time was slowed, and their attention distracted. Road safety was not their priority – their conversation was. Bluetooth technology (hands-free) has helped somewhat – but surprisingly, the distraction and slowed reaction time was still a factor, when tested.
Issues of liability have been brought up already: If you cause or get into an accident while conducting company business on your mobile, is the company liable at all? Common sense might tell us "no" – but the law often looks at things differently; and there are very few existing precedents (in spite of a staggering number of accidents).
Legal issues and site security issues are still being ironed out – not so much how to keep sites secure, but who is liable for what. It’s up to you, if you’re planning to access the web via mobile for business purposes, to practice due diligence, and make sure you thoroughly understand liabilities and legalities before you engage with a site.
In spite of these drawbacks, however, one must look at things from the viewpoint of the end user: As in "your potential customer". Mobile phones have become like a third arm to many people – and that number is growing every day!
The best thing you can do is make sure your websites are mobile ready (and secure!) Then "go with the flow" – after all, we’re living in adventurous times!
Bruno
10 Mobile Seo Secrets
It was inevitable. Along with mobile websites, comes mobile website SEO. But is it really so different from "regular" SEO?
Here are 10 tips to help your mobile website soar in the Search Engines…
1. Top of the list – make sure you create a mobile Site Map. This piece of XML code is directly from Google Webmaster Central, and Google recommends that, for once, you avoid Sitemap Creation tools.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"
xmlns:mobile="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-mobile/1.0">
<url>
<loc>http://mobile.example.com/article100.html</loc>
<mobile:mobile/>
</url>
</urlset>
(Whatever you do, don’t omit the <mobile:mobile/> tag, or your mobile site won’t be crawled.
2. Each mobile Site Map must have a name that is unique – but "URLs serving multiple markup languages can be listed in a single Site Map".
3. If you use the Google Sitemap Generator to create your Site Map with, Google cautions that you will "need to create a separate config file for each Mobile Sitemap.
4. Don’t use huge titles. "21 Tips for Turning your Hamster into a Money-Making Machine While Helping Him Lose Weight" is just not gonna cut it, for a mobile site. Think "short blog post headline, instead. Keep it really, really simple.
5. Don’t forget to submit it to Google webmasters, just as you would with a regular Site Map.
6. When it comes to mobile blogs, if you’ve set them up properly with the right plug-ins, SEO isn’t such a problem. But do remember that if you don’t submit your blogs and websites to mobile directories – you’ll be invisible. All the SEO in the world won’t be able to help you, if you don’t seem to exist!
7. Keep an eye on SEO Principle.com, which reports all the latest SEO news from Google (specifically, from Matt Cutts, head of Google’s Webspam team. (Also check out the YouTube Google Webmaster Central channel for the latest SEO news.) Cutts is the guy with all the facts and figures: He reports more than 4 billion mobiles world-wide to only 1 billion PC’s. Says Cuts about the planned expansion of Google’s Search features: "…mobile is going to be a big part of it." (Again – get in on the leading edge!)
8. Drive traffic to your mobile website with a YouTube video – with your mobile site URL and a call to action prominently displayed. If you’ve ever used Google’s mobile web index, it should strike you that most of the results are YouTube pages. This may not be a sure-fire SEO strategy for ever – but it sure seems to be working, right now!
9. Check out the W3C Mobile Web Best Practices 1.0 page, at http://www.w3.org/TR/mobile-bp/#d0e1099. You’ll find out all sorts of helpful data, including "keep your pages under 21k" and tips for SEO
10. Meet Googlebot-Mobile, a very special bot that looks for "mobile-friendly" sites, and includes them in Google’s mobile web index. So far he hasn’t been doing a very good job – but then again, maybe countless people aren’t bothering with those all important Site Maps.
Googlebot-Squarepants, er, I mean "Mobile", is a lot slower than other search bots, according to SEOprinciple.com, taking about 2 weeks to complete a "rotation".
When all is said and done, mobile SEO is still in its infancy. By all means follow the tips I’ve included here – but first and foremost, you need to concentrate on make your blog useful, interesting – and worth coming back to.
How To Redirect Visitors to your Mobile Website
Facebook and Twitter are two of the most user-friendly sites on the mobile web – and that’s great news for those who are going mobile with their websites, because it means people can right-click on bit.ly links in Twitter – and be automatically taken to a mobile version of your site, if they’re accessing it from Twitter.
The best way to accomplish this is to set up redirects, so that whenever a user is detected on a mobile, it goes straight to the mobile version of your site. There are several ways to do this, all based on detecting browser screen size.
The easiest method I’ve seen comes from justtechnika.com, and involves inserting a small piece of JavaScript code on your main website, "anywhere between <head> and </head>". (I’d recommend right at the bottom of your page, so as not to interfere with search engine bots and site SEO.) I tried the piece of code provided – and it worked! I don’t have permission to reproduce the code – I only found it today, and there’s been no time to contact the blog owner, but you can find the article with the code snippet at the following link: http://justtechnika.com/articles/find-mobile-visitors-to-your-website-and-redirect-them-to-your-mobile-site/
Treat Your Mobile Website like A Tweet
So you’ve successfully redirected them to the mobile version of your website – now what?
If you’re re-writing a shortened, condensed version of your main website, treat it like a Twitter tweet: Just hit the high points, and strip out all the filler. (One thing Twitter has done for us since its inception: Turned us into effective self-editors!) Think of your mobile site visitors like Twitter users, and you’ll increase your targeting automatically: You have about 2 seconds to get to the point, and half that again to show them where they want to go.
Don’t use bottom of the page or sidebar navigation – simple tabs at the top will do the best job (and people are becoming used to looking there for them.) Make sure your type fonts are large enough, and easy to read (Verdana and Arial are two of the most popular), and avoid "high tech" color combinations with dark backgrounds (unless your demographic is between 18 and 26): Most people find them hard on the eyes.
Make your site easy to bookmark – and remind people to do it (your "call to action".)
Above all, be consistent with every element. After all, you’d find even Twitter confusing, if the colors and layout changed every time you visited.
Don’t worry – you’ll soon get into the habit of "thinking mobile". But until then, remember this maxim:
Keep it short… and sweet.
Bruno
How To Attract more Viewers for your Videos
One of the simplest ways to attract more viewers lies in not ignoring a small but larger-than-you-likely-realize segment of your potential market: Namely, those who are still on dial-up. While admittedly a small segment of the global population, their business can boost your sales more than you might think possible.
One of the strongest reasons? You’ll be providing a service 98% of all other video marketers ignore – making your videos much easier to load and view for those to whom a 5-minute video load can often equal over an hour of waiting time.
“Get over it. Get high speed”, is something you hear on forums, if those on dial-up dare to complain about load in times. But the simple truth is, there are those in rural areas all across North America for whom dial-up is still the only available service. Perhaps a tower has not yet been built, or geographic conditions just don’t facilitate signal.
It’s not always about these viewers being “stubborn” or “cheap” – most of them would kill for high speed!
How can you make your videos accessible to those on dial-up?
1. You’ll speed up dial-up viewers’ load in times considerably, if you provide a simple “low fidelity” option. And your high speed viewers can still access your high fidelity version
2. Keep your video segments short. It’s much easier to load in a 3-minute video than an 8.27 minute one. In fact, 3.46 minutes seems to be the cut-off time at which video views drop by half (as you’ll quickly discover, if you spend a day browsing view rates and marketing video lengths on YouTube)
3. Allow purchasers to download video series you are selling in individual zip files, rather than one huge one. It can easily take 6 hours to download a 78 mb zipped video file containing 12 “lessons” for someone on dial-up… and chances are, they’ll sit through that (on the rare occasions they’re dedicated – or foolish – enough to try, only to find that their rural phone line couldn’t sustain the download… leaving them with a corrupt, inaccessible file to show for all that effort. (Nothing is more frustrating!)
4. Let them know your video files are “dial-up friendly”. Mention it in your sales pitch; on your web page; in your blog… or even in your signature! (What’s the use of creating short, low fidelity videos – if nobody knows you have them?)
Believe me, the sort of gratitude you’ll get may not propel you towards a six-figure income, but these dial-up viewers will get high speed eventually – and you’ll have earned their loyalty and dedication for life!
Archaeologists Uncover the Best Passive Income Program
Oh come now: You didn’t really expect an example of the best passive income program unearthed from the depths of an ancient Egyptian sarcophagus in Sakkara, surely? Although we can take lots of wonderful lessons from ancient history, online passive income generation is not yet one of them.
But what are forensic digital archaeologists going to say about the subject in the far distant future. (Say, about 5 years from now…) Will they look back, and say “Information product creation turned out to be the most versatile passive income strategy!” – or will they take its other great rival, affiliate marketing, and create holographic brain chip shows about “The Fall of the Super Affiliates”?
Flippancy aside, it’s amazing what razor-sharp vision hindsight can bestow. But for now, all you can do is pick the passive income plan that works the best – and the most naturally – for you.
If one plan isn’t right, don’t be afraid to switch chariots, mid-race. For example, you may start out determined to be a niche blogger, with a small fortune invested in several domains and hosting packages (before somebody finally tells you about reseller sites). But several months and several hundred dollars into your experiment, you suddenly realize… you hate niche blogging. That free Special Report you created as a sign-up bribe to your “1,001 Liverwurst Recipes” blog did so well, you’re thinking of switching your passive income generation to original info products.
That’s perfectly alright. Most top entrepreneurs will tell you they had several “failed” experiments, before they finally hit on the perfect business model.
And don’t worry – all that work you put into learning niche blogging will come back to reward you, when you unearth and re-purpose all that content you wrote, a year or so from now.
How To Make Your Information Products Stay Evergreen
One way to keep your passive information products producing like little money machines… Keep them evergreen - that is, always relevant and timely. But it’s easier said than done, when you’re not quite sure which subjects fall into that category.
The easiest place to start is by focusing on the subjects you already know. Then narrow it down to your favorites – and sit down with a notepad.
Make two vertical columns by drawing a line down the page.
Now make your headings. One should be "Things That Can Change" and the other should be something like "Constants".
Now think of your subject and jot a point form listing of these facets into the appropriate columns.
This way, when you’re ready to write your information product, you can be sure to focus on the "Constants" column – and cut out as many of the "Change" column (unless a point is crucial, of course.)
`Evergreen’ Doesn’t Mean `Bland’
But there’s one danger to watch out for, when you take this approach – especially if you’re new, and overzealous about doing things “right”: In your zeal to cut out anything that’s limited by time, don’t cut out so much detail that you leave your product bland.
But you’re not caught between a rock and that proverbial hard place: There’s a powerful alternative to putting in time-relevant detail.
Instead, look for the juicy extra `twist’ – the fact about your subject no one knows yet, or talks about. (TIP: Your local library may be a particularly rich offline source.)
What I’ve described here is such a simple technique – but you’d be surprised how well it works, when it’s time to create reports or eBooks that will remain as fresh as the day you wrote them!
Are You Missing Passive Income Opportunities Right Under Your Nose?
When it comes to passive income opportunities, you’ve already got your plan in place. You’re a new marketer, so you’re go with the most inexpensive option for your product – a digital eBook. You plan to pay Clickbank’s $50 one-time publisher’s fee, and place your product there. Clickbank provides your affiliate program management, as well as your payment processor, so you don’t have to manage either. And you’ve covered the last base by learning how to legally, effectively cloak your hoplink.
Let’s run over your checklist…
Domain name
Minisite
Sales Page
Affiliate banner ads and code
You’ve even paid for a professionally designed header and some graphics. And you’ve already started to publicize your new eBook on social networks and forums.
In fact, you’re all set, and ready to go!
Or Are You?
There is one more question you need to ask yourself:
Have I made the most of every opportunity to squeeze more passive income out of my subject?
Until you’ve considered every option, you’re leaving money behind that could be pouring into your bank account! You could easily upsell at check-out point by offering your eBook as a physical product. Companies like Kunaki can produce your CD or DVD on an “as-ordered” basis, shipped directly to the customer. Your base cost, at time of writing, is $1.75 per CD!
If your actual cost (including shipping) is $1.75, and you offer the CD version at checkout for $10.00 (including shipping), you could maximize your passive income from that one sale point by a profit of $8.25 per CD! (Kunaki can create videos and DVD’s too.)
There’s no good reason to leave unmined sources of income behind at every sale. Find out all the details at Kunaki – and decide if creating a physical upsell product is a viable idea for you.
Hiatus from Posting
Well its been just little over a month since I last posted on my blog. It seems like forever since I last looked at my blog. I don’t normally wait so long in posting but I have been concentrating on my ffiliate marketing efforts.
I have also noticed that many other bloggers have been doing affiliate marketing too. I can understand that we all need to make some money and blogging becomes second to that. I don’t mind just posting once a week but i will try to make more of and effort to post more in the comming weeks.
Bruno
Why is Forum Marketing Effective?
Internet forum marketing is the form of marketing where you market your business through online discussion groups. First you join a forum and start adding posts to the discussions. You are though not allowed to advertise or market directly through your posts, this is called spamming. After registering as a member of the forum you can create your own signature file.
In this signature file you can hyperlink a keyword phrase back to your website, which when clicked can bring on the traffic to your site.
The following are the five benefits of forum marketing.
1. Always remember when you are posting you are helping out someone. It is a great felling when you are of any help to the other person. If you are a believer of the law of when you give you always receive something then online forum marketing is the place for you.
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