Niche Marketing Strategies
Many bloggers often wonder some of the best niche marketing strategies are. That can be somewhat of a challenge to answer as your strategies can vary on the niche you are marketing. Here are some simple and universal thoughts that will help and guide with you through your ventures in niche marketing. These are general strategies that will help you overall. More or less, just some common sense things that I think many people including myself tend to neglect. So here goes:
-
Branding: So many blogs that I find are spreading the products or things that they are trying to sell way too thin. I can visit just many niche blogs that are marketing many products and it gets overwhelming. Many months ago, I stated that new niche sites that are trying to market products and services should really pick just a few and roll with them. Even though these products aren’t your own, you should act as if they were. The product that you’re marketing is your brand, in essence you become an extension of the product your support and promote.
-
Timing: In the world of niche marketing and developing strategies, timing is everything. I focus on seasonal niche marketing. I have quite a few blogs that take full advantage of the deals market and I promote heavily holiday based products. Most profitable for me have been Black Friday, CyberModay and The Day After Christmas.
-
Awareness of Demand: Another reason why I work in the seasonal niche market is because I know in advanced when spikes in business will occur. People don’t shop for Christmas items in July and these same people don’t buy fireworks in October. I am always aware of supply and demand.
-
Effective Marketing: You need a channel to promote your business, product or service. I use WordPress primarily. Why? Because WordPress is a glorified web based version of FrontPage. It is well designed and produces web pages that are of very high quality in code. WordPress is very search engine friendly and with a few minor tweaks and modifications, a WordPress blog opens up a huge pipeline with many of the major search engine web crawlers. Effective marketing means everything in your niche marketing strategies. I also use online video syndication services such as YouTube, AOL Video, Revver, MySpace Video, etc. to promote my niche blog. Additionally, I use Digg, StumbleUpon, Sphinn and Propeller to thrust out mass awareness of anything I am trying to flood and promote into the blogosphere and Internet.
-
Micro Management / Bean Counter: Give me a blog with 100 daily visits and I’ll produce a golden brick. I am very particular with things and I micro manage my traffic. When I get a visitors to my blog(s) I act as if they are physical people entering into my brick and mortar storefront. I closely control where my visitors go and what they see. My job is making sure their actions on my sites create revenue in my pocket or converts into regular readers. I closely control my outgoing links and provide very useful information.
I hope you enjoyed this article. This was written in a freestyle manner and what you see is what was on my mind at the time of writing. If you have any questions, comments or even want to add to the discussion, please feel free to drop me a comment using the comment form.
Here are a few posts that I have written in the past that I think you’ll enjoy reading:
Popularity: 1% [?]
20 comments
Great article Garry.
You said, “I stated that new niche sites that are trying to market products and services should really pick just a few and roll with them.”
Or as my parents used to tell me, “Jack of all trades is the master of none.”
This article confirms what brick-and-mortar businesses have known for years. You have to have vision and focus to succeed in business and that is especially true of internet marketing. Throwing up a bunch of random pages and ads will only get people to click the back button, not the ad or product.
Paul,
Thanks for dropping the comment, and YES!!! Agreed 110%.
There is nothing wrong with ads on a site. But if you have low amounts of traffic you’ll spread your traffic out way too thin and not get much money or happy advertisers. Sites that have high volume can afford to spread their traffic thin.
When I have a niche site, I usually have Adsense up which does very well. On top of that, I’ll choose about 2 or 3 products to market that I claim as my own.
A Prime example of traffic management is me clicking on one of your other posts that you think I’ll enjoy reading!
For an off-the-top of your head article it reads very well and I think gets the points across.
Great Tips Garry ! I don’t quite agree with your assessment of Wordpress compared to FrontPage, but, you are entitled to your opinion.
I do think you have some excellent strategies listed here. Especially the Timing and Demand issues. Those are not things most Marketers talk about, and they should.
Garry , two things, good post and freestyle writing lets us (freestyle readers) see who you really are, that is important.
Niche sites are their own being, too many people get lured in to the make money online niche. When in fact as I have posted and I’m sure you have making money online can be done in literally thousands of ways. 100 visitors a day huh? Come see me big boy , lets see what we can do, lol
I asid this once , but stick to the freestyle, I love it
@ Owen,
Thanks for the compliment bud! I really appreciate it. I am glad that you find fluidness in my writing. That is awesome!
@ David,
LOL!!! I don’t agree with myself either on that one! LOL!!! I guess what I meant to say is that back in the day FrontPage was an easy tool to build pages. But in modern days, WordPress is now a very very easy and highly effective way for me to build pages.
I totally agree with you about Timing / Supply and Demand. These elements are very important. Maybe I can talk more about that in the future. Thank you so much for the comment!
@ Don,
This freestyle stuff is kinda new to me… but very very natural. David, the commentator and good friend above, said to me the other day that I should write my posts and speak directly to my readers as if we are just hanging out together at the local pub. So, special thanks to CyberCoder.
I’m doing ok with my adsense earnings but really haven’t been able to sell any products yet. I think that I do need to focus my niche product and only sell 1 or 2 instead many different ones. I just had a new theme coded which should help me control what my customers see and click.
Good advice.
@Making Sales Making Money , You are exactly right about the MMO. Garry and I have discussed this in-depth over the past year.
If you have a (Micro)Niche site and 100 unique visitors a day, you better be making a little money. The more Micro, the better. Don’t setup a blog about Music and call it a Niche. If you a want a Niche, cover Grunge Rock or Classic Rock or any other genre, and that is a niche.
@ Aaron,
I really like the layout you have for your newest niche site. I think that will do well. I can’t recall your other ventures off hand but yes… staying focused on one or two products is the key. Not sure about your Adsense earnings, if you want to come back and drop me the link of the site you’re referring to, I’ll take a look.
@ David,
I remember that conversation… we are talking about music stores such as the ones you find in a local mall and how they have their CDs categorized on the shelves.
You know… on that note, it would be smart to build small but also build something that will allow for expansion.
For example, you mention Grunge Rock… I could toy with the idea of having a universal domain name that would cater to the broad topic of music… but because its new… I wouldn’t focus on the main site, but have the domain going live and build build from inside out…
Like instead of exploding, it would be imploding… working from the inside by developing the individual niche music sites within the global domain.
I never tried that but it almost seems like something like that might be effective.
I think it’s important to also choose a niche where there is money to be made. I mean, it’s easier to have a lot of celebs or humor trafic, but the traffic is almost worthless. Try to find a niche where you can compete an that have a good value by visitors.
Very nice tips and I have been trying to work on my writing style as well. Without knowing, I guess I do a little bit of freestyle I guess and I have to work more on it as that’ll probably put the reader at ease.
Garry, love the new style and the look of the blog. Very clean and pleasing to the eye. I particularly like the ‘Related Posts’ section and how it’s blended with the post. I might try to do the same.. makes a lot of sense!
Have a good weekend.
@ Francis!
Yes indeed!! That is a very important… It’s one thing to have a niche blog about Beanie Babies running Adsense and a complete different ball game running a site such as my Airplane Blog with Adsense. I totally agree with you there 110%
For me its a balance between having niche sites covering topics I know about that also have a lucrative yet low competitive market. Another example would be my Optical Blog. Before I got into doing my own independent businesses I was a certified and state licensed optician of 11+ years. Consequently, I know the eyeglass niche very well.
@ K-IntheHouse,
Thank you so much for your warm compliments. It goes to show you that sometimes its good to change things up. However, I think I finally “GOT IT” I think I finally have refined my writing style and blog formatting that connects one on one with my readers. That makes me totally happy. I am glad that you enjoyed my article and your visit.
Branding Branding Branding – We couldn’t agree more. Without branding, you might as well pack up your bags and go. Today’s society is purely focused on brands. Nobody wants to go with brand X when given the choice for a product they recognize and heard about before.
Another great read, especially when it’s an off the top off your head post!
Anticipating what to blog about and when to cater to your potential customers is a very important point in any business and one that bloggers need to consider – I know I need to get into this habit more!
With respect to niche blogging, you’ve really given me food for thought on that – I’d been looking at creating some niche blogs and now I’m wondering whether they are too general and need to focus in even more detail!
How many pages/posts do you think “micro niche” website needs to have to bring in up to a couple of dollars a day? I read somewhere that you need at least 10?
It’s all about the brand, Garry! That’s what makes you stick out and grab mindshare. With all the noise noise noise out there, it’s the clear signal that gets the best reception.
I definitely recommend the seasonal stuff. The trick is to set up the site and prepare it at least 4-6 months in advance so that its fully indexed and you’ve had time to set your rankings prior to the seasonal traffic rush.
Good stuff!
@ John Cow,
Branding is extremely important, indeed. You’re blog is a perfect example of that. I really like what you have done and accomplished in the last seven months. Congrats with your successes.
@ Zath,
I don’t think that its the number of pages needed. I wouldn’t look at it that way. I would look at it in terms of promotion and marketing instead. If you want an example, you can use this post.
As many are mentioning including myself, branding is very important. However, marketing is extremely important as well. In this post, you will discover that I used Revver to promote it. I pull up number one in Revver for the term Internet Marketing Strategies, Internet Marketing, Niche Blogs and number 5 or so for the term Make Money plus a countless number of terms not mentioned here.
Revver doesn’t have enough traffic? Ok… rightly so, then how ranking in YouTube: Niche Marketing Strategies and quite a few other terms.
Maybe that’s not quite good enough… lets look at Google Video: Niche Marketing Strategies, Niche Blogging Strategies and many more.
What about AOL video? I have it there too, not once but twice: Niche Marketing.
Promotion and marketing is extremely important. In this one post alone, I created and uploaded a video to five video networks. YouTube, Google Video, AOL Video, Yahoo Video, MySpace Video.
I submitted the post into Digg.com, Propeller and also into StumbleUpon. Within just a few hours this post can be accessible in a multitude of places on the Internet.
So, really… it’s not the number of pages that you have in your niche blog, its more about how much energy you put forth into marketing the pages you have.
@ Joel,
You’re awesome… thanks for stopping by and dropping a comment. You’re like the king of Internet marketing… and you’re dropping a comment here. Totally cool!
Very excellent point… I believe Mark Sierra and I were talking about that a few weeks ago and you’re definitely right! The blogosphere is toally full of noise, and those who can broadcast a clear signal and attract the most people win. Right on… and thank so much for stopping by. I love your new blog design.
@ Kyle,
Seasonal stuff rocks… I love it. It is always a toss up between holiday niche blogging and aviation. Airplanes are amazing… I love aviation a lot and blogging about airplanes delivers a nice constant flow of income. However, seasonal blogging such as what happened during Christmas was just totally nuts… I had to pinch myself a few times on Dec. 26th.
Great post Garry. I need to get into the holiday gift blogging.
[...] my blog attracts the interest of really high profile people such as Joel Comm, Kris Jones, Andy Beard and Thor Schrock. I stir up a lot of controversy, I speak my mind and that [...]
Who can tell me? What is the term niche holiday product mean?
please, send me that define
Leave a Comment