The Niche Think Tank » Niche Market Strategy

The Secret to Successful Blogging or Marketing.

Larry C. — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 21:39:26 +0000

Old Dog

I’ve been in the business of making money on the internet for about 10 years now. I started in the dating site niche back in 1997 back when the internet was still young and growing. I wasn’t making any money at the time, but I was running a dating site specific for people with a certain medical condition. I would receive emails with an ad and then I would post it by hand myself and people would then be accessible for dating.

At this stage of the game I didn’t know much about SEO, or traffic or html for that matter but I was doing it. I was also the first and only dating site for this genre of people, so I obviously stood out in the searches. I continued to be a stand out and then I noticed something, there were other dating sites in my niche but they were charging money. I got a little angry, then got over being angry and started to charge money too. This is when I started my marketing career on the internet.

“New” Old Trick

In my years of being in this niche I have had a very nice steady flow of income from this dating site even though there are bigger and better corporate entities around. I come up on the 1st page of Google, within the first 5 results for most if not all of the search terms for my specific niche. So how is it that, even though I am still pretty much the oldest site in this niche; I am not making more money than I am currently?

I decided to go to Compete.com and look up my traffic stats as opposed to that of my competition. I typed in my URL and I had about 250-ish uniques, per month. Ok, not bad I guess considering a lot of traffic is repeat people coming back to check their mail, profiles and see what new profiles are on the site, Ok so it’s a little low but it’s not bad. Right? I then punched in the URL for my competition and my jaw hit the floor. My competition was getting 250, 000 uniques per month, 100,000 times more than I was getting.

The Secret

It hit me square upside the head, Traffic. I didn’t have the traffic. I had gotten so desensitized to the Basics of Traffic, that I forgot to continue with the basics. I hear it all the time, everyday, all day long about “generate traffic”, “marketing”, “more traffic…”, and so on that I had gotten completely desensitized to the fact that I still needed to generate traffic coming to my site.

Even though I am still in the top search engine results, I was not getting the traffic I needed or wanted to make more money. The secret to making money in ANY niche, market or blog, is TRAFFIC. If you have none, you have no money. Period. Sure people search the net for things, but they don’t always search for everything. So what I needed to do was return to the basics of traffic generation.

Forum posting, comment posting, link directories, link trades and talking anywhere and everywhere about my site. I needed to do this so people know it exists and see it, instead of having to go hunt for it. In effect I needed to get it to the point that whenever someone turned around, my URL was in their face. How did I find where to put my URL? I’ll tell you grasshopper.

And the truth shall set you free…

If you go to Google and type in “link: domainurl.com” and hit enter. The domainurl.com is the URL of a competitors site that you might want to know where they have back links coming from. Once you know this, you can go to each of those results and see if there’s a place that you too can post your link and get some back link traffic and page rank. This is one of the EASIEST ways to find good places to put back links. Do this with several sites that you know of and you will have enough places to begin re-marketing your site. This is how I started to get my traffic to go up again, hopefully eventually as much as my competitor in the near future.

Have a great holiday weekend,

Larry

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Duplicate Content Hurts EVERYONE

Larry C. — Sat, 29 Aug 2009 20:41:22 +0000

In my quest to learn all I can about Niche Marketing and Niche Marketing Strategies, I have joined a membership site that has a pretty good track record and following. I first learned about this site from Yaro Starak and one of his Podcasts. I listen to podcasts all the time, everyday in fact when I am walking.

Anyway I like the philosophy behind this membership sites method, so I joined. In the style of making money online, they give a prebuilt website kit to all members each month to use as a learning tool. The kits are a bunch of articles for article marketing, keywords for SEO marketing, Graphics and the articles for each site.

Once you get these sites you’re supposed to customize them to be unique and your own. However, as it is with most people just learning or trying to make money on the internet, to trying to get rich quick, they will put up the defacto site and not even change it at all. This not only hurts the other people who are doing the same thing but it hurts themselves as well. Here’s a video I did for this article, which continues after the video.

Google doesn’t like duplicate content in the first place, second the person who had their site up first gets the higher page rank(if they even get a page rank). Anyone after them to put up a site with the same duplicate content will rank lower and lower. The other problem is when someone does a search for this specific topic and they come up with a list of SERPs(Search Engine Results Pages), The see a ton of Clones.

My example is here:

Type this is your google search engine:

Get your free Rose Growing Mini-Course Here

Or just click the link it will open in a new window, and start clicking on the links that you see, no need to delve into each site just click a link and then hit your back button. Go down the list of site and then go to the second page of search results. What you will see here is an army of Rose Growing Mini Courses.

While some of people have taken the time to customize the graphics and text, many of them just threw up the sites as is. Unfortunately some of the sites are half done and still have beagle training stuff still on there and I am sure many of those site owners are wondering why they aren’t getting any sales at all.

Google is going to index the first sites first and anyone that comes after that is going to get SLAPPED for duplicate content and possibly get sand boxed. Now if I started looking for sites that teach how to grow roses and I saw that each site I went to was the same as the 0ne previous I wouldn’t want to buy. I would also get very suspicious of the product being sold, especially if part of it still had some sort of beagle training course on it.

I started typing in combos of the words on the pre made sites and I found a plethora of interesting sites. Some were half done and some were completed but may have missed a “beagle” word here or there. It’s really a shame, because if you really want to learn how to make money online you have to practice also trying to be unique, even in a sea of Rose Growing Sites.

I knew one of the prebuilt sites that were given out were for wine making, so I typed in a phrase for wine making and I found a site which I think is a good example of someone customizing the site to make it unique. The site is here:

http://growgrapesandmakewine.com

Now this site doesn’t exactly follow the model from the member site I belong to, but its close. The member site I belong to have specific ways of doing a website but the point I am trying to point out here is to customize the product site and make it unique. Re-write the content, change the graphics, make it your own and so there is not any duplicate content on the site so no one gets dinged not only by Google, but by a prospective customer.

Something I saw when I clicked on the “our eBook” link, was the great looking cover. It nicely done, and it’s obvious someone took the time to give a great presentation. In many industries including sales and marketing “presentation is EVERYTHING”.

What I am getting at here folks is that if you want to get this right, take the time to customize graphics. Re-Write articles, or write your own, don’t just throw up default packages you may be given. If you do decide to just toss up a defacto prebuilt website don’t whine and moan about how you’re not getting any sales, or that the program you are in is a scam.

Duplicate content hurts not only yourself, but the other people you may be duplicating, and that isn’t right.

BTW The Member site I joined and Really like the Method and Theory of is Niche Profit Classroom 2.0 It’s a pretty cool system, check out the video on the home page.

Enjoy.

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My office the coffee shop, one of them

Larry C. — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 03:12:47 +0000

Do you ever go to a coffee shop late at night and just sit there and relax and people watch? or take your laptop and headphones and browse the net, and people watch? I do and I love it. As long as I have my laptop and an internet connection I am good to go. There are several sites I like getting podcasts from and free pdfs reports and blueprints, and I will just sit and read or listen to a podcast and zone out.

These are some of my most favorite ways to come up with ideas for more niches or ways for online marketing. At a coffee shop I can sit and watch people and just totally relax, and when I relax that’s when the creative ideas start to flow. I see things, people, interactions, needs or wants and they give me ideas. Ideas turn into pdf reports or downloads or attachments I send out to my email list. Sometimes they go viral and the next thing I know I am joint venturing with someone doing a new niche site or membership site.

All you need is:

a laptop
headphones
a couple of dollars(for coffee)
nothing else to do
and a cool loungy coffee shop

I go to coffee shops to get away from it all, to get away from the house, the wife, the daughter and just decompress. Unwind from a long day of either coding that new niche site or dating site and not being bothered by anyone. In my own little world.

I can even watch a netflix movie or some TV episode if I want from netflix, with the watch instantly feature. I can also go to Amazon.Com and get some episodes of Battlestar Galactica or some other TV or movie and watch those as well. The list goes on…

I love being wired…

Larry

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Hellraiser Puzzle Box meets the economy from hell

Larry C. — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 04:01:52 +0000

Time…to play…

I have a favorite movie called Hellraiser, some of you may have heard of it, you know that movie with pinhead? Anyway, I love that movie for some strange reason, and I love that little box that everyone is always trying to get their hands on. I found a site that sells them and I ordered one a few years ago.

Quality Lacks

Well I finally got the box after months and many emails hassling the guy for either my money back or the box. when I finally got the box, it was already falling apart. the brass plates were peeling up at the corners and it was tarnished and it looks like he tried to sand the brass to shine it up. It was an unholy piece of crap.

My Vow to the world, or how I sold my soul…

I was pissed. No one should ever have to put up with what I did ever again, nor should this guy ever sell another piece of crap like that ato a Hellraiser fan, ever. So I decided I would make my own.

I got a scan of the box faces, had a friend who does autocad make a blueprint for me of the box faces. I found an etching house to etch the brass that is .005 of an inch thick, it’s thin as paper! Then I found a place that could cut me the 3″x3″x3″ cube of wood. I bought some black lacquer and some clear lacquer and off I went, I started making my own hellraiser boxes.

So I started making these things and I started giving them away to all my good friends. I had made about 15 that first run, and I realized when I was down to my last 2 that I had given them all away and not sold any of them. Well ok, call it self promotions, that was a good rationalization.

Ebay’s time to play…

I started to make my next batch and I decided I would sell these on Ebay and gt my money back to order more plates. The face plates alone were $800 for 25 sets. Each set is 6 plates, one for each face of the six sided cube. $32 for each box just for the brass plates alone, $5 for the lacquer which one can covered approximately 10-15 boxes. The cube of mahogany were about $5 each. Then there was my time into making them, and it took about 2 weeks to complete one box completely from start to finish. However I make the boxes in lots of 10-15 at a time so about $10 per box for my labor. Ok so roughly $50 for a box, what was my markup going to be?

Oh good, Competition…

I looked on Ebay and saw another guy selling them for an insanely low price. I had to email that guy and tell him he was hurting the market and to raise his prices. The theory behind this is that if you lower the price too low it hurt the industry and the other people in that industry who are trying to make a living. It’s called devaluing the product by making the price so low there is no profit margin.

Well the guy actually did raise his prices and now I had some competition at $150 per box. He was selling them before for like 50$ per box. Insane. Well we both sold our boxes for $150 per box for a while and made a decent profit for a while. It’s not the same today in this economy.

The economy from hell…

I can tell that the economy is pretty bad because no one is buying the boxes anymore. I tried putting up 4 boxes a few weeks ago and deliberatly lowered the prices to about $75 and not a single one sold. I even put one up that was signed by Ashley Laurence, the girl who played Kirsty in the first 2 Hellraiser Movies, and no one bit on that either. A quality prop replica like I make is not easy to find at that price and for no one to bid even the lowest one any of them, it’s pretty bad out there.

I digress…

It’s the same in a lot of different industries that are luxury oriented. The boxes are a luxury, so is photography. I do photography on the side, and the only thing that is happening is baby photography right now, and that is a bit scarce.

So why is baby photography happening and the boxes aren’t? like I said, the boxes are a luxury and people don’t NEED them. Baby photography is somewhat a necessity for people. The need to document their families for historical purposes, for the sake of having pictures of their darling little babies. This is definitely something that people want and they consider it a NEED. Hellraiser Puzzle Boxes aren’t a NEED. They are a WANT. Big Difference.

Reeling it back in…

This is how I find my Niche markets that I plan to cater to. I find something that is a NEED and that people are desperate for. Sometimes its not really a NEED, it’s more of a desperate WANT. One of my Niches I am getting ready to exploit, is a segment in the dating industry. Yes that’s right I said exploit. The definition I prefer to use is “To advertise; promote”. And not unethically.

I will be advertising and promoting a site that is geared towards a segment of the dating population that doesn’t seem to be hit right now. I found this at Google Insights. That is one place to find up and coming Niche markets, another place is Google Trends. And yet another place is Amazon and Ebay. Just got to each one and look at the best sellers lists. Ebay has Pulse.

The think tank…

Another why I come up with my niche’s that I delve into is right here at The Niche Think Tank. Thats what I do here, I brainstorm and think and doodle and come up with new and nifty( that’s right, nifty) Niche Markets to Exploit. While I was sitting here writing this I started thinking about how I could get more people to bite on the Puzzle Boxes.

I go for several walks throughout the day and I am usually listening to one of Yaro Staracks Podcasts. While I was walking today thinking about the puzzle boxes and listeing to one of Yaros Podcasts, I had the idea to sell just the brass plates at a discount so that people could make their own. Then my Wife suggested a kit, sell them a 3x3x3 inch block of mahogany and the plates and instructions on how to put it all together. what a great idea. So there you have it, the start of yet another little money maker. Anyway I am hungry and I am going to go get some tacos at Ponces in Kensington.

See you all later.

Larry

P.S. If you would like to see some of my boxes head on over to my Hellraiser Puzzle Box Site:

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The Niche Think Tank » Niche Market Strategy

The Secret to Successful Blogging or Marketing.

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My office the coffee shop, one of them

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