Improve Your Internet Marketing

For me, the most challenging aspect of Internet marketing is finding and researching niches that I can actually make money in. How do you go about finding a good niche? How do you do research? What criteria makes a niche “good”? I get asked a lot by friends who are just starting out.

A “good” niche should have multiple opportunities to sell, enough interest to make it worth pursuing, and of course low enough competition to make it viable. No competition is preferable…

Here’s a method I’ve developed using ZamDoo’s ad spying application, however the steps can be applied using any of the ad spying apps. It’s already beginning to bear fruit; in one particular case, maybe even an entire orchard:

I recently went to Barnes & Nobles and browsed the magazine section, something I’ve done in the past for niche ideas. I chose a magazine that was itself somewhat niche oriented - not too broad like “Time Magazine”, not too narrow like “Nascar Digest” - this one happened to be “Wondertime”, a magazine about motherhood and parenting young children. I picked one of the lead articles, a piece on dealing with young children on long trips.

I took all of the key words and phrases from the lead paragraph and fed them into ZamDoo (many of them were two- and three-word phrases to make sure they were in context i.e. “travel games” rather than “travel” or “games”).

After a couple of days, I took a look at the results with “Ad Type” set on “All Ads”. I got back a pretty wide range of ads, everything from family-friendly resorts, to car games, to travel discounts for children. What they all had in common is that while they may never have appeared together before, each one promoted something that would be interesting to the same group that would find the article interesting.

Voila - a niche is born!

Next I set my “Ad Type” to “Affiliate” in order to see just affiliate ads. I examined the destination URL of the ‘best’ ads, looked for affiliate networks I belonged to, and grabbed links for 8 offers.

Then I went up to Rentacoder and had a nice 4-page mini-site built for $125. At the same time, I posted to “gigs / writers” on Craigslist and had 8 articles written for $80, each one written around the topic of one of the offers. Total time for the mini-site and articles - 4 days.

I now have a unique site fulfilling a specific need simply by grouping otherwise-common offers around a theme that I knew would have a good size audience - a pretty good bet since it was the subject of a lead article in a nationally distributed magazine.

I “spun” each article a little to avoid duplicating the content on my mini-site, and then submitted them to a few article directories including ezinearticles.com and goarticles.com, did a few posts on some forums and Yahoo groups on the subjects, and created two PPC campaigns using low-cost long-tail phrases from step 1.

The project took about 6 hours of my time and $205, and was completed start-to-finish during a single week. I have budgeted another $5/day for one month (I am paying about .15/click, which will give me about 1000 very qualified visitors). Total cost approximately $350.

It’s still early on, but I can tell you that I’ve already started getting traffic (the site was indexed almost immediately thanks to the Craigslist post, it was pretty well SEO’d by the Rentacoder guy, includes an opt-in form, and I pasted Google Analytics code onto each page), it’s generated enough sales to pay all my expenses twice over already, and from what I can tell so far, conversions are exceptional - but why shouldn’t they be? My ad spying showed me exactly the right offers to combine to perfectly meet the needs and expectations of anyone showing up at that site!

Hopefully this will get those creative juices flowing!