Internet Marketing with Josh SpauldingMaking Money through Ethical Marketing.

There’s no Secret to Niche Marketing

Over the past several years I’ve been profiting from small, niche mini-sites. Lately I’ve sold several of them and shifted my focus to email marketing, blogging and other things, not because it’s a weak business model, but because I wanted to shift my own business model to things I personally enjoy doing more.

Niche marketing is typically one of the first business models people get into, whether they realize it or not. The purpose of this post is to advise against those who are now doing exactly what I was doing when I first began and that’s searching for the “secret!”

I honestly believed for the longest time that there was some kind of a secret that successful niche marketers were holding from me and the general public as a whole… you know, the “thing” that separated them from me

If you’ve been keeping up with my blog, reports, or coaching forum for any time at all you’ll notice there are a few things I CONSTANTLY say over and over and over again. Every time I get ready to mention one of these things I question whether I should mention it AGAIN or not, but I always decide to go ahead and mention it because these things are just not mentioned enough in my opinion and they are VERY important for “newbies” to understand. Things like the importance of retaining visitors and realizing there are no secrets to success!

That goes for just about every online business model out there! There are certainly important factors that you need to know before becoming successful with anything, but all of that important information is out there and 99.9999% of the time it’s absolutely free! (Buying ebooks is still a good idea from time to time… it’s kind of like outsourcing research, as Andy Beard once put it.) But you are not being kept from any secrets that are keeping you from being successful with niche marketing!

I won’t get into the specifics of what it takes to succeed with niche marketing because I do that for free in my niche marketing report, but I will tell you the basics:

1. keyword research and competition analysis are crucial! If you aren’t researching you might as well just invest in lottery tickets!

2. Ad placement is crucial, as traffic that doesn’t convert into income might as well not be traffic at all! Use a proven template if you’re doing html sites or a proven theme if you’re a WordPress user. If you go with just any template or theme you may find yourself working much harder than you need to in order to get your site(s) to convert!

3. Target high-paying markets. That doesn’t mean you have to compete for phrases like “debt consolidation.” Dig deep into high-paying markets like debt-consolidation and target low competition phrases WITHIN highly competitive markets! This can make the difference between $10 from 25 visitors and $1 from 25 visitors!

4. Don’t spend an eternity on one site. If you’re spending months at a time per site, you’re not going to get very far! I’m not saying you should create a bunch of incomplete sites, but once a site is complete and you’ve done some promoting move on. NOT every site is going to make you alot of money. Some do and some don’t. Put 100% effort into each one then move on.

5. NEVVVVVVVVER give up! I spent months and months and months and months before i started to see a decent return on my time and monetary investments. Some people profit much sooner and some later. But 99 out of 100 people who just stick with it no matter what eventually make big profits with niche marketing and that goes for just about every other business model as well!

I promise you making money with niche marketing isn’t all smoke and mirrors. Thousands of people do it every day!

Whether you leverage WordPress to do it like Garry Conn, you use powerful software to do it like Andrew Hansen or you leverage the power of article marketing to do it like Tim Gorman and myself, the basic principles are always the same, there are never secrets and those who realize that and NEVER give up are those who are successful in the end!

photo credit: andercismo

Popularity: 5% [?]

Internet Marketing Forums are Counterproductive!

Years ago I spent a great deal of time in Internet Marketing Forums each and every day. I even wrote a blog post about the benefits of participating in them a little over a year ago, which shows up as the most popular post on this blog… you can see that in the right sidebar.

All of the points I stated in that post are indeed true, except one, which I must have written when I was half asleep (#6) it was “knowledge” and boy was I wrong!!

With time and experience comes knowledge of what’s true and what’s false and [...] Continue Reading…

Popularity: 10% [?]

Merry Christmas

I just wanted to write a very quick post wishing all who celebrate it a very Merry Christmas and a Happy and Safe New Year!

It’s been a fun, exciting and successful 2008 for me after getting out of the Army last year and I couldn’t have done it without you! So Thank You for the support and if I’ve been able to earn your trust, Thank you for allowing me!

Whether you had a similar 2008 or not, here’s to new beginnings and a successful 2008!

Popularity: 4% [?]

Proof that Manual Link Building still works!

The traffic chart above is from a site I refer to frequently here. It’s of my Germany Travel Website http://www.EverythingAboutGermany.com/ which was the second site I ever created, back in 2004. The data begins when I put the site on my new server in March of 08.

I like showing you this site because it’s proven several SEO myths that are taught by so-called SEO experts wrong. One of them is that manual linking is no longer effective! 98% of the links pointing to that site are a result of some form of manual linking! If you do a link [...] Continue Reading…

Popularity: 15% [?]

Beating PPC Competition using Common Sense

If you’ve been following me for any time at all you know I’m not afraid to admit I’m not a pro at everything online. One online business model I’ve yet to make big profits from so far has been PPC. My “bread and butter” has been email marketing, niche marketing etc. but I’m starting to get into PPC after about 5 years online and I’m starting to see results. I want to share those results with anyone who cares to read it.

I’ve actually been playing around with PPC for several years. The problem for the longest time was that [...] Continue Reading…

Popularity: 14% [?]

phpBay Pro Review - Extra Monetization with a Niche Shop!

A few weeks back I created a new GeoCaching Blog, so I could start talking about one of my new hobbies, GeoCaching. Of course I created the blog because I just love the hobby and want to write about it, but it’s always good to make some money with your hobby while you’re at it!

So, I was speaking with my buddy, Mark Mason and he mentioned some software he had been using called “phpBay” to create stores on his sites. He sent over a few examples and I was sold. I bought a copy and set up my first [...] Continue Reading…

Popularity: 17% [?]

Introduction to RSS and Feed Readers

If you already know what RSS and feed readers are and what they’re used for, then this post probably isn’t for you.

But, I know there are many people out there who still aren’t sure, so if you’re one of those people, I’d like to tell you the basics of a very cool and very popular technology… I felt like saying “new” technology, but RSS has been around for a while now.

I’ve been marketing online for several years now, but I didn’t get started blogging until about 3 years into all of this. When I started my first blog [...] Continue Reading…

Popularity: 16% [?]

Duplicate Content Case Study - Proof Duplicate Content Ranks!

A while back I was looking to add content to my Germany Travel website, but I just wasn’t in the mood to write and didn’t want to outsource it to someone for mediocre quality.

Believe it or not I made that website to honestly help tourists in Germany, so I wanted good info. So I turned to Wikipedia. Although there is no guarantee the info is 100% accurate, it’s typically relatively good stuff.

So I created a new page about Mountains in Germany, copied a bunch of content entirely from Wikipedia onto the new page and published it.

A few months later, [...] Continue Reading…

Popularity: 23% [?]

Why I won’t Teach my own Sister Internet Marketing

(*edit* Just to be clear, my sister and I get along great and I have a great deal of respect for her for what she’s overcome in her life! I’m not putting down my sister in this post, I’m simply using a situation involving her as an example to teach others!)

After several years of hard times, one of my sisters got her act together, began to stay out of trouble, live a healthy life and she’s been doing it for a few years now. She’s been managing a furniture store and although the pay could be worse, it could [...] Continue Reading…

Popularity: 22% [?]

Top 5 Most Profitable Internet Marketing Business Models

A couple weeks ago I shared 5 Overused, Ineffective Internet Marketing Techniques. In the comment field of that post Peter Tremayne suggested my next post be on the top 5 “underused, effective techniques.” I liked the idea, so today I’d like to go that route, but change it up a bit.

Today I’d like to share with you the top 5 most profitable Internet Marketing Business Models. #1, #2 and #3 can all be nearly just as profitable depending on how they’re worked, but I believe the order I put them in is pretty accurate.

You’ll notice that blogging isn’t one [...] Continue Reading…

Popularity: 26% [?]