Just what is a Niche Market?
A dictionary definition of a Niche might be “a limited or specialized portion of a greater volume of an item, idea, or concept”.
Every product can be considered to be part of a niche, depending on how it is marketed. A product with a very wide appeal might be marketed to sub groups of customers depending on several factors, including price point, age, gender, marital status, or geographic area.
A given marketing campaign might focus on a low price point this week, and another campaign might market the same product focussing on a specific area of the country the next week. It all depends on the plans of the manufacturer.
In context of online marketing, a Niche Market is more typicaly a specialized segment of a type of product, or even the greater world of online marketing.
Choosing a niche market can change your effort from the random, scattered approach of a shotgun to the precision and accuracy of a sniper rifle.
By targeting a very small niche, you can focus your marketing campaign to be more effective and profitable.
Also, when your message sends targeted traffic to your web site, your conversion rate is bound to improve.
Even with smaller overall traffic numbers, a higher conversion rate will generate more profits than a lot of traffic and a low conversion rate.
Choosing the correct niche market for your marketing efforts is very important to efficiently generating online income.
We’ll explore how to find a hot trend or niche market in a later post.
Adsense and Adwords
Adsense is a specific pay per click program with Google. Sellers sign up for Adwords and pay a specific amount per click when web surfers click through the ad to their web page.
If you are a website owner (or blog operator) you can display targeted ads alongside their online content and earn money.
You have four basic methods of generating income from Adsense: Content, Search, Mobile and Feeds.
Most of you will be interested in Content, where you display targeted google ads on your website’s content pages, and earn money from valid clicks or impressions.
Some may be willing to have users search your web site or the internet and earn from ads on the search results pages.
If you’re interested in connecting with Mobile users with the right ad at the right time, and you may generate income as mobile users seek information on the go.
Individuals with RSS feeds can earn revenue by displaying targeted test and image and in their feed content.
Tne majority of people reading this blog will probably get initially invovled with adsense if they have a blog on Blogger, as it is certainly the easiest way to become involved with adsense.
An online program that shows the specifics of setting up a successful blog and use adsense is Ewen Chen’s Money On Demand program.
Though using adsense ads on your blog aren’t a method for generating additional traffic to your own web site, it can generate income along the way.
If you sign up for Adwords, you bid on the amount you will pay for each click. This can range from a few cents to quite a bit, which means you need to have a profitable product to use the higher priced Adwords. Knowing your conversion rate is also essential in being successful using Adwords.
Next post, we’ll look at niche markets…
Just what is blogging?
A dictionary definition of a blog might be: “A Web site (or the contents of a web site) that contains an online personal journal with reflections, comments, and often hyperlinks provided by the writer”
The word is essentially a shortened version of “Web Log”.
Simply, a blog is a sort of diary of entries (called posts) usually on a single topic. Some blogs are more general, like social networking, where the blog is more typically a relatively random series of posts that define the daily actions or interests of an individual.
With a blog targeted towards generation of online income, it is usually much more specific, often focussing on a single niche market. This blog is much more general, to give you a wider perspective of the options available for generating online income.
As time passes, the general topics explored in this blog will undoubtedly result in several specific blogs on much narrower segments of the markets typically covered by the online income topic.
One example is about Jeff Dedrick’s Automated Traffic. That blog is specific to a single program or system that provides a proven mechanism for generating targeted traffic for your web site or affiliate marketing efforts, automatically.
Generally, a blog is updated anywhere from several times a day (such as one on Twitter) to a couple of times a week. Most have updates daily to two times a week.
Starting a blog should be looked at as a commitment, as they need regular updates. However, most any online endeavor that successfully generates long term income also requires similar dedication.
Though it is much easier for most authors if they are, you may not need to be a good writer or have a passion for a given topic in order to have your own blog so long as you are willing to commit a reasonable amount of time to it, and are willing to research and learn.
Over the next few posts, we will explore a few more methods of sending targeted traffic to your web site, or directly generating income online. Stay Tuned!
What is Ezine marketing?
Ezine marketing is a very specific and ethical version of what is known as “Parasite Marketing”.
Parasite Marketing is any situation where an individual derives benefit from a larger organization through actions that take advantage of the larger organization. All forms of ethical parasite marketing also provide a benefit for the larger organization.
Just what is an Ezine?
The word Ezine is actually a shortened version of “electronic magazine”. Like their paper counterparts, there are Ezines that focus on very specific topics. Ezines, also like magazines, tend to survive through selling advertisements. As the publishing costs of an Ezine are very low compared to magazines, they don’t have to have 50 or 100 pages to support 8 or 10 articles each issue, and they can be published much more often than a paper magazine. Of course, with no printing or mailing costs, an Ezine can afford to take a few risks with unproven authors or topics.
So how does Ezine Marketing work?
Typically, you write an informational article that is placed on the Ezine web site. In turn you are allowed to place a link back to your web site in your “bio box” at the bottom of the article.
This if one of the relatifely few instances where the transaction can be a win-win-win situation. The Ezine owner gets new, fresh content on his web site for free. You get exposure on his site, and a “backlink” to your site. The reader gets information about the subject they wouldn’t otherwise have found on their own. Win-win-win, neat, yes?
There are a large number of Ezines out there, and many of them are accepting new authors for content on their sites.
Once we get through more of the basics, we will have some detailed posts about obtaining Ezine accounts and writing your own Ezine articles. Stay Tuned!
Just what is this “campaign” I keep hearing about?
Today’s post is to answer a question posed by a blog reader. After years online, we’ve learned that if someone takes the time to actually pose a question, then there are probably a lot of others out there that wanted to ask, but didn’t know how or just didn’t take the time to ask.
Websters Dictionary defines a campaign as “a connected series of operations designed to bring about a particular result”.
In terms relating to generating online income, a campaign is what you do to create income. Each different list of actions is a different campaign.
If you have a blog that recommends a particular link could be considered a campaign, if you are doing anything to measure the results of that link, however, a typical campaign will have several elements, not just one.
Usually a campaign involves multiple actions on your part that are an attempt to generate more income. The value of any given campaign (series of actions) can only be determined if you provide some sort of tracking of the results.
How do you track the results? I’m glad you asked, but that is the topic of a future post. However, there are some more basic topics we need to explore first.
Come back for the next post — we’ll talk about a very popular method of generating traffic, known as blogging.
What is Conversion Rate and why do you care?
Conversion rate is the percentage of the traffic you send to a site that actually makes a purchase. If you send 1000 visitors, and 23 actually buy the product, you would have a conversion rate of 2.3% With online marketing, conversion rates for targeted traffic can vary greatly, but typically aren’t above a percent or two. If you were looking at untargeted (spam) email you would be very lucky to get 1 in 100,000 emails sent, which would be a conversion rate of 0.001% (one thousandth of a percent).
So Why is this important?
Well, if you are paying for clicks or otherwise purchasing targeted traffic through one of the paid methods, if your conversion rate is 0.5% (one half of one percent), and your commission on that product is $20, you break even if you are paying 0.10 per referral (0.5% is 1 in 200. $20 divided by 200 is $0.10) . Some adwords can be much more expensive than that, so you really need to know what your click cost and conversion rates are…
Simply put, if you don’t know your conversion rate, you don’t know if you can afford to participate in any given marketing campaign.
Withoug knowing your conversion rate, you can’t determine if you are running a profitable campaign, and advertising costs can easily sprial out of control, or at least beyond profitability.
If you are not paying for clicks, such as when you are using a blog or ezine articles or social networking to drive traffic to your web site, you may think you shouldn’t care about conversion rate.
Despite what many people think even with these types of marketing, conversion rate is still important, even if it doesn’t cost you out of pocket dollars. Even if you don’t spend out-of-pocket dollars for your traffic, you are spending your valuable time, and as we all know, time IS money.
With blogs, ezines and social networking, your credibility, or “street cred” must be protected at all times.
If you lose your street cred, you won’t be able to generate the results you want, and in extreme instances you may even lose followers or even your accounts on the various social media sites.
Bottom line, you need some method of tracking your links so you can compare sales with the traffic you sent, which will allow you to determine your conversion rate.
More on tracking links later down the blog!
Do you really NEED your own web site?
If you are serious about making decent money online, yes you do, and for a number of reasons. If you want to test the waters, you may be able to run awhile without one, but your results may not be as good as if you had your own web site.
When you are generating targeted traffic, you typically direct the user to your web site. Once there, you can not only give them a pitch for the product you originally attracted them to, but you may also be able to get them to look at other pages on your site, or sign up for your newsletter or blog posts.
Getting their email address to an opt-in list allows you to legally send them emails on related subjects. Having a good email list can be very profitable as you find other products you wish to represent. Of course, there are a number of rules you need to adhere to, and you always need to provide a mechanism for the user to unsubscribe from your list, so you don’t get reported for spam.
Besides being able to generate an emailing list, you can also monitor the traffic your various campaigns generate. If you have specific pages for each different method you use to generate traffic, you can track which ones are worth their cost (in either real dollars or your time).
If you don’t have your own web site, any traffic you generate would usually need to go directly to the affiliate link, and you have no idea of how much traffic is generated, nor of the conversion rate for a particular advertiser. If a product costs you $10 for the traffic for every $9 you receive in commissions, you won’t be doing this very long. There are limited resources for measuring traffic if you don’t have your own web site.
On the other hand, if a product costs you $3 for the traffic for every $10 you receive in commissions, you may want to run more campaigns for that particular product. Any time I can get $10 back for $3 spent I’ll repeat it until it just stops working! You can see how important it is to have good statistics on your traffic.
To determine how well you are doing, you need to know the conversion rate for a particular campaign. Briefly, conversion rate is the percentage of the traffic you send to a site that actually makes a purchase. We will explore this topic in more depth in a future blog post.
If you don’t have your own web site, you can still track your clicks by using one of the following sites, but you are generally better off if you DO have your own site.
Opentracker.net, Idek.net, Budurl.com, Bit.ly, Zi.ma, Tinyrul, or u.nu.
Though you can get by (at least for a while) without a website of your own, you will certainly find greater options and possible profit if you do have one.
Given that you can secure a web site and get it up and running for under $30per month (sometimes a lot less) plus a few hours of your time, it is a worthy investment.
One important thing to remember is that with blogs like blogger/blogspot.com and blog like social networking sites, YOU don’t own the blog, the hosting company does. Only when you have your own web site can you make your own rules…
Next post we’ll talk about Conversion Rates, something you should really know about if you are at all serious about generating online income!
So what should you sell?
Honestly, nobody should tell you what YOU should sell. It all depends on your demeanor, what you want to do, and how you want to live your life.
Many people enjoy the challenges of selling physical products, and do quite well with them.
A lot of people also do well with downloadable products, so there are obviously products for both kinds of advitisers.
Looking at the current crop of programs available out here, the online promotion or sale of downloadable products seems to be increasing and is certainly the current “hot market”.
Downloadable products are by far the easiest to sell, once you have the necessary information and processes in place.
To quote an old manufacturing manager that told me in my youth, “When you manufacture a physical product for sale, you have the typical problems. You have one, you sell it, you have to make another one before you can make another sale. On the other hand, with software, it’s a lot like prostitution, in that if you’ve got it, you can sell it, and you still got it.”
Selling downloadable products is very similar. You’ve got it, you can sell it, and you still have it to sell again. This really allows you to make a considerable profit, if you can generate enough sales to cover your marketing efforts. If you don’t own your own products, you can still participate through affiliate marketing.
For most people, selling downloadable products is much easier than physically manufactured products.
What you decide is totally up to you, but you will likely find more opportunities to sell downloadable products.
Next blog post, we’ll look at whether you really need your own web site. Come back soon!
What is Targeted Traffic?
Traffic on the internet is much like traffic on a roadway. It is the stream of users that are going a particular direction. On the internet, you care about the traffic coming to or going from your web site. If someone comes to your web site and reads your page, then clicks on a link to another page that has a specific purpose or topic, that traffic is considered to be targeted, because the link has lead the visitor is to expect some specific topic at the next page.
Targeted Traffic is a term used to describe visitors that you send to an affiliate link (or any other web site, for that matter) that is pre-screened for a particular product or topic.
Why is it important?
To an individual or company with a general interest web site, any traffic can be considered good, and the more the better. However, if they’re trying to sell something, they really don’t want to waste a lot of their bandwidth on people that aren’t looking for their product. If they aren’t getting as much traffic to their site as they want, they may put together an affiliate program to pay others to send traffic to their site, but they want that traffic to already be interested in their product.
As you are not yet a big advertiser, you are probably looking to be an affiliate that sends traffic to the advertiser. In return, you receive a commission on any sales that are made from that traffic.
Traffic is the life-blood of any web site. No traffic means no customers, and no customers usually means the site fails. To be effective, visitors coming to the site need to be interested in what the site has to offer, and that’s where you and I come in.
There are a number of methods of generating targeted traffic. Some of them are considered “free” because you don’t actually give cash to someone else as a result, but these free methods typically do cost you, in the form of your own time. There are also a number of other paid methods to generate targeted traffic, and some of them can get pretty expensive. Depending on the Conversion Rate, one type of paid traffic can be more effective than another.
Conversion rate is merely the ratio of the number of sales you get from the number of visitors you refer. If 2 people bought the advertisers product and you sent 50 visitors to his site, your conversion rate is 4%. Usually, conversion rates aren’t this high, so you need to be careful when directly buying traffic.
Methods that you can use to generate targeted traffic include:
- Blogging
- Ezine marketing
- Adsense
- Social Networking
- Safelists
- organic Marketing
We will explore each of these and other methods in future posts… Stay Tuned!
Just what is Affiliate Marketing?
Simply put, it is a program where you (as an affiliate or publisher) can get paid by a merchant (retailer, manufacturer or owner) for actions that lead to sales of that producer’s product.
You may get paid for merely sending a web surfer to a specific page on a merchant’s site, though in most cases, it will be mere pennies. The commission can be more if the visitor signed up for a newsletter or to get more information.
You could also get paid for sending a customer to a specific page on their site. Note that I used the word customer, because the visitor actually bought something from the site. Commissions for customer purchases can be pretty good, with some of them as much as 60% of the sales price for certain informational products.
You can be an affiliate for either physical products or downloadable products. There is a vast array of affiliate programs out there for you to choose from.
Affiliates fall into two general categories, Direct and Indirect.
Direct affiliates work with the merchant directly, and are paid directly by them.
Indirect affiliates use an affiliate aggregator. This can be the best way to get started. It also gives you a great selection to choose from, all in one place.
If you prefer to work with physical products, you may want to feature Ebay ads on your web site. Pay for being an Ebay affiliate is dependent upon the click quality, and is a pay per click program. Click quality takes into account how many visitors you send actually purchase the product, and whether they use additional Ebay features like PayPal. Some affiliate aggregators such as Commission Junction have lots of physical products for you to sell.
If your choice is downloadable products, there are a lot of affiliate programs available out there. We like clickbank, which allows us to pick and choose various programs and get a check from one central place. It also helps starting out, when you don’t have very big commissions, as they will send you a check on their next pay cycle if you have commissions over $100 (total from all of your links).
We like ClickBank. Please note that we do not recieve any commission for referring you to them.
By the way, if you are a product producer, please use this link: ClickBank Producer. In this case if you sign up a product with them I DO get a (very small) commission. Even the few cents from such a referral help support the costs of keeping this site operational.
To get paid, you need to send targeted traffic to the affiliate link you are provided.
To generate targeted traffic, there are a number of methods available to you.
You can develop a web site of your own and place pages on it that pertain to the advertisers product. You then generate traffic to your site and when the visitor clicks on the link on your site, they are forwarded to the advertisers site. If they buy the product, you get a credit. When your credit amount is high enough, you receive a check.
The key is generating targeted traffic, and that is the topic of the next posting on this blog. See you there!