3 Steps in Executing a Niche Marketing Model

Niche marketing, just like other branch of internet marketing is an IM field that meddles with the game of keyword researching, building hype around it and build something that the market wants to hear, and not what we (marketers) want. I define niche marketing a method of building a hype around a hot trend for money making purposes regardless of whether the niche is your liking or not.

Most people tend to choose this type of method even though the niche that they have selected is not in their liking or have passion about. As long they have passion about making money which will be the ulterior motivation, they should be alright to work with.

Niche Market Research

Self-explanatory. First and most importantly you will have to research a market with keywords. Keywords can sifted from Google’s keyword Tool in many ways. One thing distinctive that you must clearly differentiate broad searches and exact matches.

As for me, I will never (or rarely?) take broad searches into account. This is because broad searches gave you results with keywords scattering around the sentences or phrases in a sporadic manner. Some results does not qualify being results as some broad match keywords that scattered around in sentences does not give a good value of the niche related to the search. In other words they become gibberish and thrashy.

For example, lets search for dog training lead in Google. That phrase clearly mean I wanted to find information about dog lead for training, not the other way round – not about the dog. The results will give you:

1. Dog Training Leads and Long Lines – this is what you want, because they are talking about dog lead.
2. Dog training – Advice on dogs pulling on lead – this is what you don’t want, they are trying to teach you how to pull dogs on a lead.

See what I mean?

I prefer exact phrases and in Google, you can use “…” for exact match for example “dog training lead”, in Google it gives you 90% accuracy and the remaining 10% is gibberish. Broad matches only gives you 50%-60% meaningful results, and the rest is gibberish. Exact matches narrow down results, and therefore you will see the indexed results is lesser than broad matches.

Exact matches keyword phrases are ideal if you start building blog entries or websites, they can be used as your meta tag title. This is powerful once big G indexed this, it will appear the first, top uppermost.

Another issue that most noob IM’ers seemed to get confused is the indexed results and monthly searches. To be able to select the best profitable keywords, both aspects is important. Profitable keywords normally work around 100-1000 searches per month. Global or local depends on your scope of domination. Lets say if if you wish to compete with IM’ers in your home country, use local monthly searches instead. If you are targeting internationally, then use global monthly searches.

As for profitable keyword based on indexed results, is best to keep it less then 20,000 results. 20,001 – 50,000 is doable but tough and need extra effort on SEO and marketing with PPC (if you have the budget), and more than 50,000 results is down right competitive. You should avoid it if you are a new player.

Determine Platform

This stage is where you decide what sort of platform that you need. This is your central working headquarters before putting marketing method in strategy. This is the fundamentals, the core or simply, the main thing for other marketing methods to work around it.

The traits of a platform:

1. It has got to be a website
2. It has got to have a domain name
3. It has got to have a webhosting
4. It has got to have a web platform – HTML static pages or CMS (content management system)
5. HTML static pages can come in few flavors:
   • Squeeze pages – drive traffic to capture lead. Normally a single page and it complement hand to hand with email marketing.
   • Mini sites – few page HTML site that capture lead or make sales or both. May come in few pages usually pre-sale with heavy pitching.
   • Turnkey websites – like blog but made with static page where the URL is friendlier than most CMS (except WordPress and some others). Very niche specific but usually runs into problem with Google for duplicate content. PLR (private label rights) are being used my thousands, and if you don’t spin them, they will run into problems. Not recommended.
6. CMS websites/dynamic website can come into few flavors:
   • Blog – the recommended way of doing it. Optimized with social media, easy to maintain and most of the task of running a blog is automated. All you need to do is to ‘I-STEP’ it – Install the Software, ThemE and Plugins. Blog is versatile as it can be turned into a news site, review site, turnkey site, a dynamic mini-site (usually work on subdomains by using WordPress’ ‘Page’ function) of your main blog and also squeeze pages. WordPress is the recommended blog platform for many IM’ers these days.

Marketing The Platform

Now you have found your candidates and platform, it is time to put them to work.  To sell a product that is related to your short-listed keyword, you need to entice users by convincing them via those sales pitches. The good way to get around this is to create:

1. Review Blog – people love reviews. A good review entails all the good and bad things about a product. You might want to keep those in a balance. Be fair and honest. Start with what you are going to tell them. In the contents – tell them in and outs of the stuff, and to sum up everything, tell them what you have just told them. Remember past, present and future tense? A good review are simply based on that.
2. Ebooks/Products – If you tried the products you can simplify the complicated manual into your own simple words. You can share useful tips, tactics and shortcuts that you can put in together to add value to the ebook. Create a squeeze page or minisite to capture leads. If you are generous enough, just put a hyperlink in your blog and serve them as a free download. It’s entirely up to you. In the ebook you can put affiliate links and also a link back to your site. If you can’t write them, you can outsource them to freelancers or freelance agencies such as:
   • Elance
   • Freelance
   • Guru
   • Donanza
   • Freelance Switch
   • Freelancer
3. PPC Advertising  – Sign up for the Google Adsense or Bidvertiser revenue sharing program at Google Adsense. Each time someone clicks on one of the ads on you website you will get paid a percentage of what the advertiser pays to Google or Bidvertiser. You can also try PPC for in text advertising such as Infolinks, Text Link Ads or Kontera. They behave slightly similar to the PPC contextual ads.
4. Social Media – this is the hive where hordes of people gather and mingle. It is divided to 3 significant type:
   • Social media networks: Facebook, Linked-In, MySpace & Myyearbook
   • Social microblogging: Twitter, Plurk and Friendfeed
   • Social hub: Posterous and Multiply is just some example.
   • Social aggregator: This platform bridges different social media together. Ping.FM, TwitterFeed, Hellotxt & Moonitin are good examples
   • Social bookmarker: Such as Digg, Delicious, Yahoo Buzz, Google Bookmarks and Mixx.
5. Article Marketing – just like a blog posting, what’s different is you are submitting them in an article database viewed and judged by editorial team before they pass your article in. This is good way for backlinks and traffic generation. Just adhere to their rules and you are set. Some article base allows affiliate links and some does not. Read their T&Cs before enrolling. Here are the top 5 article database based on their pagerank:
   • Ezinearticles
   • Article Base
   • Buzzle
   • Webpronews
   • iSnare

Marketing your campaign involves hell alot of game of numbers and make sure that keyword research was put up as the utmost important before anything else.

Remember that the right pitching, feel (as your site provides them), marketing and keywords outlaying is the key in generating traffic.