In this article, we’re going to talk about the simple five step approach that you can use to find a niche to blog about or put up a blog post about. This can be very useful if you are interested in niche marketing, and/or are looking for topics to start a blog about or a blog post about.
Before we begin, I just want to give a quick explanation of what niche blogging is: It is exactly what it sounds like: blogging about a specific niche. Often times this is for the purpose of selling a niche product, such as a dog training manual. Other times it is for marketing oneself as an expert in a niche, such as a real estate flipper. For many people who want to start making money on the internet, niche blogs and niche product sites are an easy way to start. For some people they already are passionate about a hobby that monetizes well. For others, they may not be sure what niche to blog about.
With that little intro out of the way, here are five steps to finding a good niche to start a blog about.
First: it helps if the niche already has some money on it. Some people will try to invent brand-new markets. While being novel is a good idea, niche marketing is often about where people are already spending a lot of money so you can just put up a blog as a way to stick your head in the niche and say “Hey, I have a site here too! Come visit and bring your money”. In other words, it’s a good idea if money is already being spent in a niche if you plan to Niche Blog as a way to make income.
Second: you have to ask yourself whether or not you have a product or service that you can sell to the niche market. Niche marketing is all about selling products and services. Therefore, do not make the mistake of finding a niche for which there are no products or services that you can turn around and sell to people who are interested. If you don’t have your own product, there are many other products out there you can still sell whether it is through resell rights or through affiliate marketing.
Third: take focused action! The overwhelming majority of people who begin niche marketing ultimately fail because they have no clear idea of what it is they’re trying to do. What you need to focus on doing is finding a niche that you can attack with a variety of different traffic methods. Remember, the name of the game on the Internet is to have a niche market that you can actually make money from.
Fourth: You need to have some degree of personal interest in whatever topic you select. Niche marketing is hard enough when you are interested in it, but if you have zero interest in the topic, it will be very difficult for you to be successful. When you really stop and think about it, that makes sense.
Fifth: pick a niche you can compete in. This means make sure that the competition is not too thick, and that the supply of information (niche sites) does not drown you out. It’s okay to make it a fight for yourself to try and conquer your niche, but make sure you have a reasonable chance too as well.
And those are my five things to think about when picking a niche to blog in and market in. Overall, niche marketing can be a bit tricky and it just takes time and experience and trial and error to figure out what works best for you. Just remember to look for all five factors: find a niche with buyers and action, find a good product or service to provide, be ready to do the daily tasks, make sure it is something you’re interested in, and give yourself a reasonable chance to succeed.
Because it is so cheap to start a blog and get an online business, it will ultimately be up to you to succeed and fail often to get a feel for how appealing a niche will be TO YOU. By following this advice, you will be able to find a niche, and successfully employ a variety of niche marketing techniques that can make you a lot of money. Go out, do some research, start a blog, and we’ll see you next time.
So how do you start a blog? Stop by Emil Yau’s site and watch his free step-by-step video which walks you through how to start a blog.
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If you own a local business with a website, you really want people to be able to find you through the search engines. We will now share with you some proven search engine optimization practices that will get you higher rankings in the local listings.
As a local SEO marketer you should try to think like your targeted prospects/customers/searchers. A crucial part of search engine optimization is thinking like the customer. The trick is to imagine that you were someone doing a search engine query for a product you are marketing, and consider what words you would most likely search for. Imagine that you are the owner of a store that sells only one kind of item, golf accessories. Search engine users who type in “golf” are doing an extremely broad search and are mostly not going to be looking for what you have. Likewise, people who type in “golf tournaments” are looking for something other than what your store offers. However, if they put in “golf accessories,” that’s where you want to target such keywords.
Many small businesses with websites bypass keyword phrases that are not the most popular but that could still generate customers. They tend to target the same keywords everyone else is trying to rank for, the very top ones with the most traffic. Putting yourself in the place of your prospect is what gives you the best insight into creative and profitable keywords. As you start to learn which keywords work best for your campaigns, your website traffic will increase and you’ll start to rank well on more and more keyword phrases.
It’s a good idea to take advantage of services such as Google Places, Bing Local and Yahoo! Local, and claiming your profile is your first step on these sites. Each of these sites has a fairly straightforward verification process to claim your profile, and all you have to do is complete some boxes and verify your address and phone number. This doesn’t take much time but it will definitely give you an edge over the others who haven’t done it. People who search are impressed with pictures, and it makes them assume someone is more authentic, so it’s a good idea to upload pictures to your profile on these local site listings. Just find some good quality pictures from your site and upload them to give you a more effective listing. Use the best pictures you can to show your business in a good light, but they don’t have to be taken by a professional photographer.
Therefore, your title tag should always include those keywords you’re trying for along with the city and state you’re targeting. This is just what the search engines need to make sure your target audience sees you. This is so important to your SEO efforts and it must be used if you hope to be successful. Finally, only use a few keywords as too much is too much.
Diversifying your anchor text is something you need to do. All SEO marketers understand that long tail keywords are valuable and that they can help raise your business’s rank in the search engines and if you are working with local SEO, those are the keywords you are using. Not only does this allow you to expand your opportunities to tweak your keyword anchor texts, it also gives you the opportunity for better diversification of your anchor texts. For example, you want to use more than just “New York Chocolate Store” if you sell chocolate in New York. Go ahead and create incoming links for other variations of the same keyword phrase, such as “Chocolate Store in New York”, or “Chocolate Stores in Manhattan, New York.” Whatever you do, just remember that the search engines highly value the anchor text, which means you should try and put in as many variations as possible to increase your rankings. To sum up: local search engine optimization does require you to do more work but it all pays off in the end when you have an easier time of reaching your target market..
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