Niche Marketing Secrets

As awesome as the idea of online passive niche marketing income may be, achieving this reality is another thing entirely. This guide dispenses with all the hype, exaggeration, and big promises. Instead, you get the framework you need to achieve greater success with niche marketing.

How To Pick A Niche The Smart Way

Picking a niche the smart way involves several filters. You have to make sure that you go through this process. You can't skip a step. You can’t assume that you know what's hot, and you can't wait to just build a website and get going. I’m telling you your impatience will ensure the early death of your business, guaranteed.

Step #1: Start with Your Personal Interest

The first thing that you need to do is to be clear about your personal interests. What kind of topics would you love to write about? What kind of topics would you like to build a business on?

What makes this difficult is that a lot of people think that there is some sort of right answer. This is personal. Some people might be excited over certain topics other people couldn’t care less. What's important is that the topic subject category is attractive to you.

Here's a shortcut. Ask yourself what would you talk about all day every day even if you were not getting paid for it? Give yourself a couple of hours to write down everything that comes to your mind. No need to edit it. Just write it down. Even if it's just half an idea or it’s just a faint glimmer of an idea, right it down.

Step #2: Filter Your Topics by Search Volume

Log in with your existing Gmail account and set up an AdWords account.

Once you're set up, look at the tools section and select Keyword Planner tool. Type in the topics you're interested in. Do this one by one. When you do this you get a list of keywords related to that topic.

Look at those keywords’ average monthly search volume. This is an indirect way of getting a rough idea of the overall demand level for those niches. Once you’ve found the keywords for one niche and have listed their search volume numbers, move on to the next keyword and then the next one after that.

Once you have gotten the numbers for all these keywords, pick the niches that are in the middle. You don't want niches that have too much search volume because they most likely have a lot of competition. On the other hand, you don't want niches that have too little search volume.

Each keyword’s expected monthly search volume is a dollar figure. This is the estimate AdWords gives you regarding how much advertisers will pay per click on ads that show that keyword. This gives you a rough idea of the commercial value of each niche.

Again, line up the CPC value of the keywords, come up with an average and then compare all the niches’ average values. You should focus on niches that have a decent search value.

By this step, you have shortened your list quite a bit. The next step is to enter each of the keywords related to the niches that are still on your list into Google's main search box.

When you do a search on Google, t will tell you how many websites ranked for that keyword. Take note of this. You will then see how many competitors you have on average per niche.

With this information, eliminate niches on your list that have too much competition.

Step #5: Filter Your List by Search Trends

Finally, go to Google Trends and enter the keywords related to the remaining niches on your list. Look for a trend line that is going up or at least is flat with a slight tilt up. This trend line tells you that your niche is not dying over time.

This is very important because you don't want to build your business on a niche that's actually on its way out.

While the five filters above should be enough for you to develop a viable online business, if you want to turbocharge your results and increase your likelihood of success, apply the following additional filters.

Optional Filter #1: Filter by Social Visibility

Enter your keywords on major social media platforms like Facebook,

Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest and Instagram. Can you tell if there are a lot of existing accounts on those places that talk about your niche? If there isn't, delete the niche from your list.

Optional Filter #2: Filter by Content “Virality”

Does it seem like there’s an organic active community built around these niches? If the answer is “yes”, keep the niche. If the answer is “no”, you might want to get rid of that niche.

Keep all these in mind because if at least the main five selection factors are present, there’s a strong likelihood your business will be successful. However, keep in mind that niche election accounts for 90% of success. You still have to take care of the remaining 10%.

Creating A Niche Brand

Unfortunately, a lot of online entrepreneurs think that once they’ve discovered a niche, they just need to build a website or a business. Wrong. If you don't build a brand, it's only a matter of time until your business stagnates or flat-out fails.

You have to build a brand. This is what people will gravitate to. This is what people will build an organic community on. You have to build a brand; otherwise, you're just simply pushing information as a commodity. That's a losing game.

The best that you could offer is content and information. You really don't have much of an advantage because your visitors can get that elsewhere. In fact, your competitors probably have been around far longer than you. There’s really no good reason for them to go to you for content when they can find that stuff somewhere else. You need to build a brand.

Your brand is a set of values that your community and a targeted audience would associate with your business. That is your brand.

Build a Niche Brand Website

Do not ever confuse your website with your brand. Your website is just an expression of your brand. It is not your brand.

When putting together the specifications for a website, understand that you're trying to create an experience.

Think of building a website as something like setting up a nightclub. When you're setting up a dance club, nightclub or some sort of social destination, you're looking to set up an experience because if you set up a club that serves alcohol and plays loud music, you've set up something generic. You’ve set up something that people could experience pretty much everywhere.

There has to be something that’s different about your brand. This is called your unique selling proposition. That's why you have to look at your website as a giant opportunity to communicate your unique selling proposition.

What is it about your treatment of your niche that makes your brand stand out from the rest? Unfortunately, only you can answer that question.

Once you have set down the design parameters of your website (again, these must be intended to create some sort of unique experience), you should then select design parameters for graphics that communicate your niche identity. You

should also look at getting graphics designed that highlights your brand identity. All these flow together.

Quick Shortcut: reverse engineer your competitors’ designs

The biggest problem with creating a niche brand home is that it's too tempting to come up with something that you think is awesome or hot. You’re more than welcome to brainstorm but, let me tell you, 90% of the time, whatever you come up with will fall flat. It turns out that you don’t see eye to eye with your customers.

You use that as a preliminary starting point. This is a “safe spot” for you to start your niche brand home design on. Later on, you're going to customize based on the actual interaction of your audience with your website.

Design Your Site for Intentional Niche Branding

Now that you have a clear idea of the “industry standard” design in your niche, make sure that your design notes would enable your selected web developer to come up with a design that is focused on building up your brand. At the very least, it must be easy to read. People shouldn't be intimidated by large blocks of text or impossibly small fonts.

Again, studying your competitors and checking out the “common design elements”

can give you a tremendous head start.

Key Design “Hooks” Your Site Has to Have

Given the tremendous amount of design variability out there, I admit it can get quite confusing. However, of all the different options available, your website must have three “hooks” that would enable you to get more traffic, more engagement and possibly more income.

Social Media Shareability

What I’m talking about is when somebody decides to share your content, the Facebook user looking at your content would see a well-formatted and highly attractive preview of your content. This means a really nice-looking header graphic, well- formatted teaser text and other features. This is the key to shareability on social media.

You have to remember that majority of Facebook users actually scroll through their timeline. They don't really read everything that appears on their timeline. This is why your content, when shared on social media, must jump out at viewers. This increases the likelihood that they would click the Share button after they feel that they've scanned enough of your content.

Mobile Responsiveness

As I mentioned above, the majority of people consuming online content use mobile devices. This is why mobile responsiveness is nonnegotiable. It doesn't matter how big or how small the screen of your users is. The version of your website that they see must be the best version of your website. Otherwise, you’ll competitor whose site looks much better.

Mailing List Responsiveness

You have to also incorporate your mailing list to your website design. This should not be treated as an afterthought.

Instead, you should look at your overall website design from the home page, the top level, the category level to the post level to see whether the design pushes people to sign up for your mailing list.

Your mailing list is one of the most important conversion devices on your website. Don't take it lightly. Make sure it's built into your website’s design.