As someone new in the business, you might find yourself asking, what is niche marketing exactly?
By the simplest definition, niche marketing is a marketing form where a specific group of people who have a common interest in a topic, product, service, or need is targeted.
The Two Sides of Niche Marketing
There are two sides of niche marketing that you should know: as an affiliate or as a product owner.
You can sell products/services of other people as an affiliate, or you can create your own and sell it as a product owner. But while niche marketing sounds as easy as putting up a website, hiring a ghostwriter, and sitting back to see sales come in on steady flow, it’s more complicated than this process.
The Two Biggest Woes and Challenges Of Niche Marketing
Marketers – especially new ones – must face plenty of woes and challenges when finding the right products or affiliates.
But given that there are two sides to niche marketing, there are also only two biggest woes and challenges that each marketer has to face. Finding the right affiliates for product promotion and creating a successful product.
Challenge #1: Finding the Right Affiliates
Finding the right affiliates is perhaps one of the most challenging aspects of niche marketing. Clickbank houses tens of thousands of products, but only the first three pages found on every market category are the only ones who get the attention of affiliates.
When you’re thinking of affiliates to help promote your product, you have to have an excellent Clickbank gravity. It is where you get as many affiliates as you can to make your product selling success.
But here’s where the dilemma comes in; all affiliates have been taught since time immemorial to promote products that are only high gravity. It brings you then to the second challenge.
Challenge #2: Creating A Successful Product
A great product is way beyond having or being a good writer and writing a good report. On the first challenge, you learned that the key to getting more affiliates is to have a product that will get high gravity of affiliates. Unless you can create a product that is in a brand-new niche and is not yet discovered, then you must be very creative and very good at your product creation. Most of the time, you only must deal with two questions when you think of a product: ‘will it sell’ or ‘will it sell at all’?
The Reasons for Being An Affiliate
So, you might want to ask again, why become an affiliate? The answer is simple, too – it has many advantages for a marketer like you.
- You don’t have to go through the tedious – and most of the time, painful – process of creating a product.
- No need to worry about finding affiliates given your lack of product to promote.
- You’ll find hundreds and even thousands of excellent products that you can promote and convert well.
- You can focus on sales page traffic and cash on commissions without the nitty-gritty details that product owners have to worry with.
- You don’t have to deal with handling product transactions or providing support to customers.
Why Do Niche Marketing?
If you’re only making money by focusing on the internet marketing niche – as most affiliates do – then you might be missing out on big profits provided by non-internet marketing niche.
You should know by now that each niche is driven by the targeted audience specific need or interest. There are plenty of people who want to lose weight; families who need a dog training guide for their puppies; ladies and gents who do not want to show any signs of aging on their face.
All these people attract the highest conversions when you do things properly. You don’t have to create a product. You must find the right product, offer it to them, and the rest will work out in your favor.
1. Putting Your Eggs in Different Baskets
You’ve probably heard the old saying about not putting all your eggs in just one basket.
It is a perfect analogy to consider because as a marketer, you cannot just rely on the internet marketing niche to bring you all the goods. What if one day, promotional emails will be banned? You’d need to have a niche that is evergreen, such as acne and weight loss to ensure that your marketing efforts are wasted on just one niche. Another reason for this is that smaller niches offer less competition, so it’s easier to dominate them as well.
2. Niche and Product Research
Before you enter niche marketing, the first thing that you have to do is not to single out a product to promote but identify a specific niche where you’d want to enter in. Your goal is to find a profitable and a broad niche.
Where to find a good niche
- Amazon and eBay. All you must see is looking for the most popular products, and you’ll have an idea of what the people need.
- Click bank. As a marketer, click bank is the first place you can go to find a niche that is profitable for you by only looking at sales statistics.
- These contain hot and popular topics for now. See what people are looking for, especially on issues like skincare, personal health, or losing weight.
Rule of thumb when selecting a broad niche
- Popular niches have sub-niches.
- Huge niche markets make it possible for everyone – even newbie marketers – to make money.
The One-Minute Niche Profitability Test
If you want to know the profitability of the market you’ve chosen, it will take you all but one minute to realize it.
- Use Google AdWords’ as a keyword research tool.
- Using the KW research tool, look for niches with 300000 monthly global searches; this means that that niche is profitable.
- Using AdWords, narrow down the broad niche to find more profitable sub-niches that are easier to target.
The next crucial question: are your buyers desperate enough?
One of the most important aspects of choosing a target niche is to see whether your potential buyers are desperate for a specific need. It is because higher conversions are to be expected with a “desperate” market.
Moms who’ve just given birth are desperate to lose the weight they gained during pregnancy. This niche is more desperate compared to the niche where men want to build their muscles.
In short, all you must do is to find desperate people looking for a solution to their problems. Be the one to give them the answer they’re looking for, and you’d put yourself in a better position with higher market conversions.
Product Research for Niche Marketing
Once you’ve settled on your niche, then the next step for you is to conduct product research.
During this process, you might want to consider Click bank as your first stop. It is because Click bank already has sales statistics in place which shows you right away which products are profitable.
So, what are the things you should look for when you are doing your product research?
- High gravity score – these shows how many affiliates have been successful in selling the products so far.
- Commissions or sales – choose products which offer higher commission.
- %referred – this refers to the percentage of sales that come from affiliates. The rule of thumb is that the higher the rate, such as 70%, the better the product is.
Also, you should consider the sales page of the product. If you are the customer, does it look attractive enough to you? How would you compare it to other sales pages from competitors? Sometimes, there are products which have low gravity, but that is just because they’re new. With the right exposure, these low gravity products – primarily if found better than the established products already on Click bank – can become a good product for you.
3. The Niche Marketing Process – An Overview
The concept of niche marketing is much more straightforward for an affiliate compared to that of a product owner. It is because you only have these three processes to work on: traffic, sales funnel, and the sales page.
But since you’re simply an affiliate, you only must take care of the first two parts: the traffic and the sales funnel.
What you do is send in traffic from various sources. But what goes into the sales funnel makes all three processes very crucial. It is because a lot of marketers make the common mistake of sending their traffic directly into the sales page. Doing so makes you do two things wrongly:
First, you fail to build rapport with your visitors because you hit them straight on with the sales page.
Secondly, you lose the 99 out of 100 visitors who came into your site simply because of the first mistake you made.
By using the sales funnel accurately, you can have as much as 1% to 5% improvement for your conversions. To better do this, there are two sales funnel models that you can use: the review site and the squeeze page models.
4. The Two Models of Sales Funnel
Now that you have learned about the two models of the sales funnel, what you will learn from here is how to create one using either or both models.
Sales Funnel Using Review Site Model
To build a review site successfully, you should…
- Do keyword research. You should first find a keyword that you can use for the content, description, and name of your review site. Make sure that you find several keywords to use.
- Optimize your review site. Do this by looking for a keyword with a moderate search count and low competition. You can do this by using Google AdWords or any other similar tool.
- Have your domain. The reason for this is because you get to control your domain and optimize it so that you can get as much traffic as you can.
- Purchase web hosting services. People who visit your website wouldn’t want to encounter you for the first time only to wait too long. Prevent down times, lock downs, or site overloading by purchasing a reliable web hosting service. A note of caution: avoid buying cheap web hosting or beware of unreliable hosting services.
- Create a mini site. The idea behind this is to help build rapport with your visitors. That is, the mini site should give your visitors a sneak peek and some thoughts on whatever it is you’re offering.
Five Crucial Elements of Review Mini-sites
Given that the mini-site is a potent tool that you can use as a sales funnel, you should consider incorporating the five crucial elements of review mini-sites to make it look professional:
- Individual product reviews
- Product and rating comparisons
- Pre-sell content for visitor education
- Recommended products and customer testimonials
- Professional graphics
Sales Funnel Using Squeeze Page Model
Also called the ‘list building model,’ the squeeze page model is the kind of sales funnel that you use to hook the 99 visitors who do not buy during their first visit. What it does it that it turns every visitor that joins your list as a potential customer whom you can promote your product for years.
The idea behind this sales funnel model is that you can sell more than one product to regular buyers. On the other hand, the squeeze page model takes time to build, and the success rates often depend on the follow-up system.
The most significant difference between review sites and squeeze pages is that the former offers quick cash. However, it depends mostly on a visitor’s first visit, whereas the latter builds rapport to the visitor with the possibility of making a sale.
Building a successful squeeze page follows the same pattern with the review site model except for the last part – making a mini-review site.
Choose A Reliable Autoresponder Service
What you must do instead is to choose and set up a reliable autoresponder service, usually Aweber and Get Response. It will become your primary mailing service to deliver your mails. The follow-up system is that you create a newsletter that contains seven emails at least and email them to people with the topics they are interested in.
Keep in mind to divide your emails into two: the first 3 or 4 emails should be to inform, and the remaining ones should be to recommend the product to the subscriber.
Remember, there is a big difference between hard selling a product and recommending it. When you hard sell, people think you don’t care about them but to make a sale. When you recommend, you do not sound too salesy, and they would think you are an expert to recommend a product that could be the answer to their needs.
Lastly, you must create the actual squeeze page of the opt-in page. Here are a few points to remember:
- Avoid using poor graphics.
- Make you squeeze pages look professional.
- Use the third person perspective in your content to sound neutral.
Squeeze Page Copies: Long or Short?
When making your copies, you do not need to make it a long one. Keeping it short yet sweet with substantial information is enough. Your goal is to tell your subscribers why your newsletter is beneficial to them and how it can help solve their problems.
That is, you don’t need to make your copy long. You have to make it appeal enough to be read by your subscribers hence the need for beautiful or professional-looking images and point form content for easy reading. You can also offer some gifts or free reports to make your visitors subscribe to you.
The Battle for Better Sales Funnel
When it comes to deciding which sales funnel is better, you cannot choose between review sites or squeeze pages. Why a review site offers quick cash, but squeezes pages also build your customer list for possible future sales.
5. Traffic Generation
While creating powerful sales funnels are essential, they’re just one part of the equation. The other part – which is the most critical – is traffic generation.
Traffic is the driving force behind the success of any niche marketing. Without traffic, all your efforts for creating powerful sales funnels would be useless. But generating traffic is not just about letting a hundred visitors into your pages. You must learn how to drive people into your pages and ensure that there are not only hundreds but tons of them into your pages every day.
Traffic: bought or free?
You read it right. There are two kinds of traffic: the one you buy through advertising or the free one you get doing SEO and all types of marketing where you don’t have to pay for every click. So what traffic techniques should you follow?
Article marketing. It is perhaps one of the most powerful techniques you can use to drive traffic. When you optimize your articles with the right keywords, you are making yourself found on search engines easier. But of course, there are a few tips that you should keep in mind when using this form of traffic technique.
- Keep the keyword density to 1% of the total article word count.
- Create a catchy resource box to draw the attention of your visitors.
- Make unique content, or else Google will kick you out of its search engines for plagiarism.
Blog commenting. Another guerilla in the marketing technique is making comments on the blog. It is one technique utilized by both top and underground marketers who want to send tons of traffics into their websites. It is because blog comments hyperlink your profile name into your website, which allows you to put in your sales funnel link. To use this marketing technique effectively, avoid spammy comments. Instead, sound intelligent and professional to make other people curious enough about you that they’ll click on your profile and be directed to your website.
Web 2.0 marketing. This kind of marketing uses Web 2.0 sites to help promote your sales funnels. Examples of these websites are Hubpages and Zimbio, to name a few. The tips noted for article marketing is also applicable to use on this kind of traffic technique.
Forum marketing. Among all the methods of marketing, this one is by far the oldest. Forums are well-known to attract people to talk about a topic of interest. It’s an excellent place to set up to gather all your potential customers. However, not all forums are profitable; participate in those forum communities with the most prominent members.
The Ultimate Game Plan
After reading all those things, you are now one step ahead from your competitors who didn’t know these facts. The thing is that you might choose one or some from all these techniques you have learned so far. But if you want to make a great start and stay on the path of niche marketing success, you should use all these techniques together as your ultimate game plan to draw in massive traffic into your niche.
