Clarence’s Internet Marketing Insights

One of the biggest and most frequently asked question online in the Internet Marketing industry is “How do I get started”.

Most people, acquire a cheap “Make money online” E-book and then they read half way through it and think “well this helped me none.. I just don’t understand”.

I know some people will disagree, but breaking into Internet Marketing and being successful takes determination and is very hard to do.

FIRST OFF: I see too many people trying to just make money. They’re only in it for the money and only want to make some sales.

This is a big problem. Why?

No one comes online looking to randomly buy things. Everyone is looking for an answer to a problem they’re having or looking for a solution to something. Remember.. your job is not to make a sale but to solve someone’s problem and in turn.. that is what will make you a sale.

So what do you need to make money online?

#1: You need a clue.

Anyone can search google for answers to making money online, but you’ve got to have an understanding of what you’re doing or you’ll always be running around searching for answers.

#2: You need a plan/idea.

Brainstorm! You need to have a mapped out vision in your head of your business. Do you plan on purchasing a domain and starting a product on dog health care, buying domains and selling them, selling home made materials on e-bay, writing articles, etc. There are so many options out there for what you want to do, but you’ve got to have an idea and a plan before you can start making money. Brainstorm in your head and think to yourself..

“What am I good at?”
“What am I knowledgeable about?”
“What is something I really enjoy doing/talking about?”
“How do I plan on providing information on this product?”

#3: You need a website.

Unless you plan on marketing to forums and groups (which isn’t a very well played out business plan) you need to establish a website. Before you start thinking “I have no money for a website”. You can always start a blogger. www.blogger.com

If you’re looking at starting a website, I would highly recommend Host Gator to beginners and novice marketers. The options of managing/running your website are great and at such a low cost, it’s hard for me to refuse Host Gator when ever I plan on getting a website.

Hosting at Host Gator starts out at $4.95 so this is great for a beginner’s website or just starting out.

Now comes the part I had trouble with when I began. Website Design/Website creation. I am not a HTML savvy guy.. believe me. While I am sure there are many sources you could hire for you to create your website, I believe everyone should learn to create their own material at one point or another.

You need a website with an easy design/layout because anything hard to read or something that doesn’t look professional will have a much lower conversion rate than what you hope for.

Remember, when you’re writing your sales copy/creating your product… you’re speaking out to people that have a problem and are in need of a solution.

Make Money E-Book – People are broke.. who wants to be broke?
Train Your Dog E-Book – A loud and undisciplined dog is a danger to you and everyone around you.
A Guide To Smart Car Buying – Learn to save gas and to save earth

Do you see what I am saying? You have to speak to people in the certain niche you’re trying to sell in, because you’re trying to fix a problem someone has or answer a question that someone has.

In my opinion, fear and hype are two of the biggest sellers there are.

Trying to sell a vehicle? Examine your audience.. a young man will be interested in something fast and loud and will want to impress the ladies in his hot new ride. You have to know who you’re selling too and get them hyped, because a hungry crowd always comes back for more.

Don’t get me wrong now.. I am not saying a website is the only way you will ever make money period, I am just saying that this is probably the best way to create an automated source of income.

#4: Patience/Consistence.

If making money online was as easy as snapping your fingers.. everyone would be e-millionaires.
So many people quit trying once they find out how much work is actually involved in creating an online business and being good at what you do. You have got to keep consistent.

You’ve got a killer website but no sales, why not?
Get inside your market’s head and view your website not from your point of view but theirs. Do not think “how will this make me money” but “will this solve my problem”?

Be consistent and always add new fresh content and possibly new products to keep your customers/readers coming back for more. A hungry crowd can never get enough no matter how much they spend.

Now then, here are some suggestions as to when you do get a business up and running, but are not mandatory.
E-MAIL LISTS!

If someone opts in to your e-mail list.. chances are.. they’re interested in what you’ve got or curious. A lot of websites don’t offer a chance to opt in to an e-mail list and a lot of money is to be made off this. A lot of people who see a website once won’t purchase something because they simply don’t know the source. A couple of e-mails possibly sending out some free methods/tactics or newsletters might change Curious George into a buyer.

Remember.. Internet Marketing is not an overnight task.

You can either sell your own or someone else’s product.

If you’re new to the game.. I don’t recommend purchasing any products, because I guarantee you that 75% of the information you just paid for can be found on a forum for free.

The more consistent you are, the more determined you are, the more it will show. Don’t give up just because you don’t hit the lottery over night because like I said.. if making money online was truly “That easy”, everyone would be doing it.

Until next time.

Ok, now that we have a niche, it’s time to figure out the psychographics of your target market.

According to Dictionary.com, psychographics means “the use of demographics to determine the attitudes and tastes of a particular segment of a population, as in marketing studies.”
In simpler terms, it means looking deeper into your niche market, so you can serve them better by customizing your products.

Answer a few questions… but I warn you not to answer them too quickly. This takes a lot of thought and consideration to do correctly.

Question: Who would like to buy what you have to offer?
Don’t just say ‘Women’. That is a gender identification, not a target market. All women are not alike. They have a wide variety of lifestyles, values and interests.

Don’t just say ‘Golfers’. That identifies a group of people who partake of a sporting activity but it’s not a target market. Among golfers there are huge differences. Are you targeting the ever so often golfer with a cheap tips video or are you targeting the lifestyle golfer who travels regularly to play in competitions.
Be very specific. ‘Start up Fundraiser Coaching Professionals”

Question: Why is he/she interested in what you have to sell?
Don’t say ‘She will like it because she is a Mom’ because there are no products that ‘all moms’ are interested in. (Unless it’s an Artificial Intelligence Housekeeper and I think even then you’d get a few naysayers.)
Be very specific. ‘Start up Fundraiser Coaching Professionals” will want to secure this product because it contains the tricks and skill builders they need to attract their first clients.’

Question: What stage of life is she in?
• Young & Single
• Young & Married
• Young Motherhood
• Middle Motherhood
• Late Motherhood
• Empty Nest
• Older & Single
• Older & Married

These stages of life are important factors in identifying a target market. How you choose to communicate with your potential clients, you will need to take this information into consideration.

What motivates a young married woman isn’t going to motivate an empty nester.

For example, if you want to reach young singles you’ll probably want to use graphics and promotional materials that look trendy and highly relative or popular to modern day media.
On the other hand, to reach older married people you will choose a more traditional style and convey a stability that will resonate with older consumers.

Question: How much money does he/she have to spend?
• Frugal
• Average
• Upper Middle Class
• Wealthy

Financial income brackets are one of the most important issues in choosing and communicating with your target market.
The financially strapped customer will be attracted to messages that imply that they’re getting a great value or saving money.

Wealthy customers will be more interested in hearing that your product is made of the best ingredients and created for distinctive tastes.
Some individuals will only be interested in products that clearly demonstrate that they’re cheaper than everything else. They’re so driven by their tight budget or their personal commitment to frugality that they’ll choose one product over another on price point alone.

And in the other extreme, there are consumers who will purposefully choose the most expensive service provider on principle. Maybe even just to be able to say that they hired the priciest ‘most exclusive’ provider – or perhaps because they believe that the higher cost surely means that they’ll get the best quality. (Which may or may not always be the case!)

For some, impressions are everything.
Can you see how it would be literally impossible to create one sales message that rings true with all markets?

Well, that’s it for this section. Now you should have your niche and understand who it is you’re targeting. Next we’re moving on to setting up a website and finding ways to monetize it. I’ll write that thread tommorow, so for now – GET BRAINSTORMING!

Clarence Wang

I have been doing my Niche Market Research these days, and have managed to summarize a systematic way of finding a profitable Niche, Hope this will help you guys in locating your own market.

The first step to creating your Niche Empire is to find some profitable niches.

When selling a product, a lot of people make the mistake of developing their product first, and then trying to find a market for it.

Of course, the process should be reversed.

First, find a market that spends money, then find out what they want and give it to them.

Deciding on what product or service you will promote in a niche market should be based on a simple principle. There should be a demand for your product or service. You want to offer something that people actually need, something that will make their lives better, make them feel better physically, make them look better, or help them solve a problem.

The process I go through when looking for new niches to enter is as follows:

For starters, I’m always aware of trends and current events in the real world. I read several newspapers each day, many magazines, both general and niche-specific, I watch the news, I listen to the radio. Occasionally something that I hear or read will stick with me. I may jot down some notes, or draw a diagram to help me remember it. Sometimes I’ll call my phones voice mail and leave myself a message.

But at some point I’ll have several broad ideas to research. I want to look deeper. And I want to make sure there is a good market for them before I even think about creating a product.

To begin with, I check out the hottest search trends at Google’s Hot Trends. At this point I am just looking for ideas.
If I see that a particular topic is hot, I’ll make a note of it and look at more targeted sub-niches later on at more specialized sites (which I’ll show you in just a minute!).

The Lycos Top 50 is another site, like Google’s Hot Trends, where I will review the latest trends and look for hot topics to explore further. I will also look at Yahoo! Buzz for ideas as well.

The eBay Pulse site is a great place to start looking at sub-niches. What I will do is select the category first (using the topics I’ve gathered from looking at the previous sites), then look for profitable sub-niches by then selecting a sub-category.

The best chance for success is if I am as specific as possible with my niche selection. In the example below, I don’t want to sell to the “crafts” niche.
I want to sell to grandmothers who enjoy giving their latch rug hooking gifts to their families and friends. Whatever. You get the idea.

Also, I’ll always check the largest stores as well to see what they’re selling. There has to be a reason they are the largest stores. They must be doing something right.

TIP: eBay also puts out a PDF report of their hottest categories each month, available at http://pages.ebay.com/sellercentral/hotitems.pdf.

Now that I have some potential sub-niches to work with, I want to see how much of a market there is there.
Just because a sub-niche is popular doesn’t mean people spend money on it.

Amazon is a great place to see what currently exists for any given sub-niche.
Chances are, the more books there are written on that subject, the more that market spends on those topics.

For example:

First I specify “Books” to search. Then I enter my niche, in this case “crafts.”
Uh oh. There are WAY too many books returned. This niche is not targeted enough. It is too “mainstream.”

Much better! There are possibilities here.
We now suspect the following:

1) This sub-niche may be targeted enough.
2) This sub-niche may spend money.

Once you have an idea of which niche you want to target, it’s time to determine its profitability. For this, you would have to use the tools found at:

http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/
Or…
http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/suggestion/

Simply type in the idea you have in mind, and press the submit button. You will then be presented with a list of keywords and key phrases that are related to the subject you have entered. Each keyword or key phrase would have an indication of the number of searches that they have gathered from search engine users. The number of searches made for a particular keyword or key phrase is a good barometer of the demand. You’d want at least 5,000 searches for your main keyword.

Here are several other sites you can use to get niche ideas:

Nichebot – http://www.nichebot.com
Shopping.com Top Searches – http://www2.shopping.com/top_searches
AOL Hot Searches – http://hot.aol.com/hot/hot
Google Groups – http://groups.google.com
Craig’s List – http://www.craigslist.com
Delicious Popular – http://del.icio.us/popular
Dig – http://www.digg.com
Google Catalogs – http://catalogs.google.com
Google Suggest – http://www.google.com/webhp?complete=1&hl=en
Technorati – http://www.technorati.com

Also, I’ll do several targeted searches in both Google and Yahoo (for example, on the subject of “hobbies”).

And of course I will always Google my keywords and check out the competition in the Adwords ads. In this case I pay special attention to the ads that sell information products (or services like mine if I’m selling a service).
Some of the ads will be irrelevant as far as competition goes.
Ok, the next thing I’ll do is check how many magazines there are on the subject of my chosen niche.

Ok, the next thing I’ll do is check how many magazines there are on the subject of my chosen niche.
There are two places I go online for that:
Magazines.com – http://www.magazines.com
and
Amazon – http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/browse/-/599858/
At each site, I search by category to find the magazines in my niche.

Obviously the more the better, up to a point.

For example, golf has a lot of magazines, but it’s not a good niche by itself. It needs to be more targeted. But in that case I can always get more targeted sub-niche ideas within that topic by looking at the types of magazines for that topic.

The next thing to do to find out more about a niche is to visit the forums. By visiting forums and taking note of what people are most concerned about you can search the Internet for products and services that will help them solve those problems. Gather the information about the topic. Do some spy work.

Ok. By now you should have found a profitable niche market.
There are plenty of sites I use for research in addition to the ones above, but they are usually niche specific. These sites will help you to research practically any niche market effectively. Once you have this process down, you’ll be able to do this very quickly.

till next time.

Niche Market Search