How To Profit From HOT Niche Markets - Every Time!

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by Dr.Mani Sivasubramanian

Do you want to learn two proven niche marketing business models that are virtually guaranteed to succeed - in all niches? So do hundreds of my clients. They ask me every day. Beg me to share them. Demand that I reveal them.

So I did. In a short article. This one. I'm sharing it with you, so you can benefit from this powerful insight too.

There are TWO approaches to niche marketing:

* Following your PASSION
* Following the MONEY
Both can lead to wild success - if the finer points are managed correctly. Let's talk about them.

FOLLOW YOUR PASSION

This route is popular among beginners and experts alike - because it's easy! You already are (or can quickly become) an expert. And as you love what you do, you'll be good at it.

Here's a niche marketing model you can adopt to succeed using this approach... Building your 'Content Site'.

Your niche website will be chockfull of valuable content. Articles, special reports, ecourses, audio tutorials, video presentations, information products - anything your audience will find useful.

Your revenue models will include:

* ADVERTISING - Relevant, high quality content sites are an advertiser's delight.

* DIRECT SALES - In-context selling of related products and services is easy on a niche content site

* MEMBERSHIP SITES - Your content itself can be your product, and you can sell access to it... one-time, or on an ongoing basis as a subscription.

* LICENSING DEALS - You can license your content to other users for a fee.

The drawback to this approach is that you'll first need to invest a lot of time, effort and money to build your content site - even if you have fun doing it!

FOLLOW THE MONEY

Your field of interest - even passion - may not be lucrative. While it's fun, you won't get rich!

So some prefer the alternative approach of going where the money trail leads... even if it doesn't excite you, the financial rewards are greater.

If you're considering this route, remember - the approach is different too. Here's what you'll need to do:

* Research hot niches which are highly in demand.
* Find what keywords prospects are using to search for information.
* Design websites optimized to rank high on search engines.
* Put up as many web pages as possible on related keywords so you reach as large an audience as possible in this niche.

Your revenue model will include:

* TRAFFIC BROKERING - Direct the traffic hitting your site to others who want this audience - and are willing to pay you for it.

* PAY PER CLICK ADVERTISING - Display ads that earn you money each time a visitor clicks on them.

* LIST BUILDING - You can later offer list members relevant products and services - your own, or as an affiliate.

* DIRECT SELLING - You could sell on the website itself, though the results may not be as good as on a content site.

The major drawback to going this route is the need for expertise in niche research, search engine optimization and the ability to create multiple web pages quickly. Some products offer a ready-made, off-the-shelf solution to speed up the process.

Whichever path you choose to your niche marketing success, one thing is abundantly clear.

There's money in niches. BIG money. Grab your share of it - TODAY!

About the Author:
Dr.Mani Sivasubramanian is a niche marketing expert and webmaster of Instant Niche Business. His breakthrough 'Quick Niche Profits' newsletter - - offers near-instant 'Follow the Money' niche marketing solutions... Get started in hours!
http://www.QuickNicheProfits.com/artmel.htm

To Link OR Not To Link...?

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March 30, 2005

To Link OR Not To Link...?
by Ed Duvall

Sometimes it's hard to tell a good idea online from a bad one.

Take for instance the idea of search engines adding in the factor of link popularity to their relevancy ratings. Sounded great at its inception, and still sounds good today.

However, if you look at the way most people approach developing link popularity for their web site, it's kind of similar to playing blackjack in a Vegas casino. The dealer deals everyone at the table a hand. He then asks if you want another card or to stand. If you want another card you tell him "Hit Me". You get another card in the hopes that it's the one you need to win. You don't win every time, but sooner or later you'll get the right card and win a hand.

Website owners trying to get their link placed on other sites in a true reciprocal link fashion seem to approach the matter in much the same way. They know the cards they're holding (description of their website) but don't seem to use that information, they tend to just randomly try to take another hit (usually some useless measure such as adding link farms,etc.) to build on what they have. Generally speaking it doesn't work.

If you've never played blackjack in Vegas that may not have made much sense, but anyway.

All of the search engines are factoring link popularity into their algorithms and using a more sophisticated approach to analyzing it. Including the page the link comes from, the page content and the page it points to.

For all intents and purposes Google has become the leader and premier search engine for a lot of changes including link popularity. Although recently page rankings in Google seem to have gone out the window as they re-organize and initiate their new algorithim for this year (they seem to do this about once a year and it seems to disrupt an otherwise effective system), but we'll wait and see what's going to happen next.

You might want to note that Google uses recoprocal linking as one of its most important factors' in ranking pages for now. There is however, like everything else, an upside and a downside as to how they proceed to use link relevance in their rating of a web page.

First and foremost you must understand that link popularity is only a small but growing part of the overall rating of your website. Most all of the major search engines include other factors such as title, keyword relevancy, description, meta tag optimization and directory listings.

Good, relevant reciprocal link popularity can dramatically increase your search engine positioning as well as traffic to your site. Notice I said "relevant" reciprocal linking. In the initial formulation of the link popularity factor you could use almost anything to create links to and from your site, including using FFA sites, link farms, cloaking, etc, and have it affect your positioning.

If you're a website whose main focus is on vacation information and a lot of your links are to construction sites I think that would drop your relevancy for reciprocal links to zero. If it doesn't compliment your site or is not presented in a fashion that compliments your site a link won't do you much good - at least not from google's perspective.

If you're not familiar with the methods above, they are web pages that create hundreds if not thousands of links for your site by creating copies of the same page. However most of the links you create will never be looked at because the basic reason they were created was to give the appearance of link popularity, more or less an early model of linking that's gone by the wayside. Now most of them are looked at by the engines as spam that does nothing more than create extra indexing for them.

The same thing goes for cloaking, hidden text links and invisible graphics with alt tags containing invisible links are viewed as spamming and trying to fool the search engines. In other words, if it doesn't get looked at by another human being how could it be relevant to your site?

By today's standards you can now, and most likely will be in the near future, penalized and possibly have your website completely removed from the search engine, for using those kinds of tactics mentioned above. And now-a-days with the tie ins of a lot of search engine indexes to one another, that could be disastrous for your online business.

My, how things change.

Just what are the search engines looking for in link popularity anyway? Just as your desktop PC (Personal Confuser) is a wonderful machine, it is just that, a machine and it has limits. So, all search engines also have limitations. It's a program using a mathematical algorithm to determine what it sees. And what it sees are similar words, content and websites with similar interest linking to your site to determine if it is worthwhile.

Basically a search engine uses various criteria to see and weight the information contained on a webpage. It feeds different information into different analyzers to come up with a relevancy for the page. And as you may know, search engines can change criteria by which they analyze data with absolutely no warning to you.

A very simple explanation of how google determines relevancy for reciprocal or link popularity, is by using the enormous link structure of the web as an indication of the a pages' value. It looks at a link located on a page as a vote for that particular page it leads to. So a link on your web page tells Google that it's an OK page in your estimation.

Sounds like the more links (votes) the higher your search engine position. Not exactly because the next thing it looks at is the page that the link is located on. That's right, it's going to analyze the content of the page in order to determine its relevance to the page. If it decides its relevant to it, then your ranking should increase.

Hey, that sounds great. But what makes a page relevant to a link? That's a tough question - for which Google doesn't provide a very clear answer. But it does point to the quality of links and not sheer quantity of links as the important factor. The main thing is relevance and the more sites you can link to and receive a link back from that are related to yours in some manner, the better your chances are of improving your search engine positioning with reciprocal links.

Ed Duvall owns and operates http://www.cashway.com and http://www.instantnettraffic.com Two sites loaded with inside information to promote your website, increase visitors and ezine subscribers.

What's In It For Me

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by Michael Domeck
April 05, 2005

I'm sure most, if not all of you, have heard the term "sell the sizzle, not the steak". But what does that REALLY mean?

In any market your potential prospects have only one thing in mind. "What's in it for me", more commonly known as WIIFM (or problem solving). If you're selling anything, be it a product or a service, you must understand this buyers' phenomenon.

Think about the last thing you bought that you were shopping for. What was the ONE thing that made you finally decide to buy that particular product?

Granted - the product must be a good one, and the quality of your product, or service, is important. But this is not what gets a buyer's interest - or rarely, what actually makes the final sale.

Why is product "X" selling on one website for twice as much as other websites? This should be proof that sizzle can sell more steaks than anything else.

People don't buy products or services. People will only buy benefits that benefit them! If you're selling an opportunity, people want to know realistically how much they can make and how easy is it to accomplish the perceived goals.

The hype of hundreds of dollars a month, OR a day, will definitely fall on deaf ears. What happens then is Click - they are gone. Why?

Because people secretly and truly believe this is an unrealistic goal. You must point out the benefits someone will receive.

However, when you make these kinds of outlandish claims, buyers will click away before you can say dollars!

Another point to remember: you will get busted by the FTC and hit with major fines by making these outlandish claims. Let me illustrate a point to you.

For years I sold Data and Telcom systems to medium and large businesses. These Data and Telephone systems costs from $40,000 to $500,000 dollars - each. Many times the buyer would call in the top two or three vendors for a final presentation to top management.

When it came my turn I would present a list of benefits, based on the customer's actual needs. I discovered what these needs were during my research phase so they were real and not "perceived". I never talked about the hardware except to point out that it would fulfill the customer's specifications.

The other salespeple would sell very hard on why their hardware was the best. They would go into all the techno babble - the "bits, bytes and BS" - as my boss would call it. They would give reason after reason why their equipment was the best for the customer and why they HAD to buy it. If they did point out any benfits it was usually as an afterthought.

At least 90% of every one of my presentations was based on the benefits. Benefits that would be derived from purchasing my solution. In 9 out of 10 cases I won the contract. Most of the time I was even the higher priced solution.

Here's what I actually did:
I solved a problem(s). I spent very little time or effort on the actual hardware specifications - I simply drove home the benefits of what my proposed solution would do for the customer.

If you are going to do any business at all you must let your prospects know you can meet their needs. Whatever product you're selling - it's irrelevant to the buyer how it's made, who designed it, or even how it was designed. All the buyer cares about knowing is "What's In It For Me" (WIIFM). Putting it bluntly, you MUST show the buyer the benefits they will get by dealing with you. The benefit you are offering over one of the other ten people selling virutally the same thing.

If you're selling a business opportunity or an affiliate program, like so many other sites, why should the customer buy from you. What makes your offer different?

If you ever hope to succeed you must understand this buying issue and properly address it. Read the ads of others promoting the same thing? Don't they all say virtually the same thing? Are some of the sites different?

I can tell you - VERY FEW, if any, will be! If you look at the really successful netrepreneurs you will see that their sales pages are NOT the same old affiliate pages that everyone else has. They push benefits and more benefits.

And people wonder why they fail so miserably at the varied programs they try to sell and promote. They get What's In It for Them - NOTHING!

Analyze your offer - get your friends to look at it and tell you what turns them off about the offer. What can you do that others are not doing to make your offer better?

Here's a scary thought:
Actually BUY the product you're promoting and read through and study the material. Write a report about what the offer actually gives the customer - the benefits. Take the report and turn it into an outline. What benefits do you now see from using the product?

If it's a service, or an affiliate program, study the program and do the same thing. What can the program, or service, do for the customer. What are its benefits?

Can a benefit be that you will help them? Can you give them a written one - two - three type guide to get them started? Or what else can you do to help them that others are not offering to do?

Almost everyone who is trying a program like this will need a lot of hand holding, help and guidance. If you can promise, and deliver this, you have a 1,000 times better chance of winning a customer than someone who doesn't. If you can't do this get your sponsor to help you - it's to their benefit also.

If you are in the market for a DVD player what is the main function you are looking for? Given the fact that it has:
- Dolby 5.1 technology
- handles up to 10 DVD's
- has "S" video jacks and
- a multi function remote is all well and good.

Those may all be features that would be nice to have. But what you really want is to be able to play any DVD movie through your TV. Right?

To be successful you must be able to figure out what your potential buyers are really looking for. While they may be looking to buy some "steak", it will be the "sizzle" that actually sells them your brand of steak.

Michael Domeck is the editor of the Beacon News and has been marketing on the Internet for over 3 years. He consults with clients on Internet marketing for Home based businesses. His site is http://www.the-best-light-houses.com

Ten Effective Ways To Reduce Your Business Costs

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by Dan Brown
March 30, 2005

Business cost for everyone can get out of control very fast. Here's ten simple yet POWERFUL ways to reduce cost that can have a GREAT effect on the health of your business.

1. Barter: If you have a business you should be bartering goods and services with other businesses. You should try to trade for something before you buy it. Barter deals usually require little or no money.

2. Network: Try networking your business with other businesses. You could trade leads or mailing lists. This will cut down on your marketing and advertising costs. You may also try bartering goods and services with them.

3. Wholesale/Bulk: You'll save money buying your business supplies in bulk quantities. You could get a membership at a wholesale warehouse or buy them through a mail order wholesaler. Buy the supplies you are always running out of.

4. Free Stuff: You should try visiting the thousands of freebie sites on the internet before buying your business supplies. You can find free software, graphics, backgrounds, online business services etc.

5. Borrow/Rent: Have you ever purchased business equipment you only needed for a small period of time? You could have just borrowed the equipment from someone else or rented the equipment from a "rent-all" store.

6. Online/Offline Auctions: You can find lower prices on business supplies and equipment at online and offline auctions. I'm not saying all the time, but before you go pay retail for these items try bidding on them first.

7. Plan Ahead: Make a list of business supplies or equipment you'll need in the future. Keep an eye out for stores that have big sales. Purchase the supplies when they go on sale before you need them.

8. Used Stuff: If your business equipment and supplies don't need to be new, buy them used. You can find used items at yard and garage sales, used stores, used stuff for sale message boards and newsgroups etc.

9. Negotiate: You should always try negotiate a lower price for any business equipment or supplies. It doesn't hurt to try. Pretend you are talking to a salesman at a car lot.

10. Search: You can always be searching for new suppliers for your business supplies and equipment. Look for suppliers with lower prices and better quality. Don't just be satisfied with a few.

Author Dan Brown has been active in internet marketing for the past 4 years. Dan currently is working with the Zabang search engine, introducing their new affiliate program...due out April, 2005. http://www.zabangaffiliate.com/

Keyword Article Writing: the Key to Your Success!

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by Dina Giolitto, Wordfeeder.com

Ready to jump on the keyword article bandwagon? Billions of companies are using keyword articles to gain free exposure on the internet. Whether you're a netpreneur marketing a product or a writer seeking freelance work, odds are you can benefit tremendously from keyword articles.

Why use keywords? The point is to be "found." Internet users across the globe are searching for information. How are they searching? The same way you do; they type specific words into a search engine. If you don't incorporate these words into your web content, the other guy will... and then your reader is lost on someone else's copy. Help them find you... with keywords!

Never written a keyword article before? Have no fear. The process isn't much different from writing regular articles. Don't let lack of experience stop you from profiting through keyword-rich content. Just follow these easy keyword-writing guidelines, and get ready to key in some great article copy!

1. Learn the buzzwords. Every industry has its own jargon. If you're well-versed in a particular subject, it's likely that you already know the buzzwords and you don't need to read up on it. If it's a relatively new topic for you, do some research. Read four or five different articles to get an idea of the lingo used and the most popular sub-categories of the industry. I'll give you an example. Let's say your article is going to be about... keyword articles. Some of your keywords might be: keyword, "keyword article", keyword-rich, "web content," "web article," RSS-feed, "keyword writing." How do I know this? Not because I did a keyword lookup. Because I read lots of articles! Reading is a great way to load up on catch-phrases and terminology. You can get your fill of keywords without even trying!

2. Write the article without paying attention to keywords. Don't bother trying to plug keywords into an article the first time you write it. Just write it, period. Keep the flow going, craft your sentences without paying particular mind to word selection. It's likely that if you know what you're talking about, keywords will very naturally fall into place as you write. Those sneaky keywords... they tend to just slip right in without your even knowing it happened!

3. Select your keywords. Once your first draft is written, you can concentrate on building a list of keywords to insert throughout your text. Sit down with a pen and paper (or a blank document if you prefer) and write down words that you frequently come across in the industry you're covering. Imagine if someone were doing a search on the web for your topic. What words and phrases might they key in to the search box? Don't forget search terms that contain two or more words. Such words work together and would be placed in quotes if someone were typing them into a search engine box. Suppose you were writing an article on email marketing. You would include terms like "drip list" and "email newsletter" to name just two.

4. Assess the popularity of your keywords. Find out how many times internet users searched the web using specific keywords, with the Overture Keyword Selector Tool. The tool is free and available through this link: http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/. Just type in the word and hit return. The higher the rank number, the more popular the keyword, and the more likely you'll want to use it in your article.

5. Select keywords that are specific rather than general. Let's say I'm writing an article about negotiating fees with a freelance copywriter. My goal should be to include popular words related to that particular topic, and not just the general category of copywriting. "Freelance copywriting rates" is a much better keyword phrase to use because that's probably something a user would actually type in when searching for such information. "Freelance copywriting," on the other hand, is more general and therefore might bring up thousands of higher-ranked sites than yours. Burying your article is no way to be found... so, keep it specific if you can!

6. Scan your existing text for keywords. Your article draft is complete and your keywords have been selected. Now, just put them together. Scan the article copy for the first keyword. Did you find it? Great! If you know your stuff, you probably slipped the keyword into a few places without even realizing it.

7. "Find and Change." Suppose in your article about copywriting, you included the word "writing" several times throughout the piece. That's no serious problem by any means, but "copywriting" is the term of choice among marketers and advertisers. Consequently, it should be one of your keywords. Locate where you've used the word "writing" or "writer", and replace with "copywriting" or "copywriter." Do this for each of your keywords and keyword phrases. You may have to reorder some of the sentences, but this shouldn't be a big deal.

8. Proofread your article. Now that you've added keywords, the article is probably somewhat different from its original form. Do a thorough read-through for mistakes, correcting as needed. Check for spelling errors, grammatical inconsistencies and repeated words. Hey, did she say repeated words?? Yes, even in keyword articles, a good writer should try to vary his vocabulary. Your article should be keyword-rich, not dull and repetitive!

9. Write a keyword-rich headline. Why did I wait until the end of this article to mention the headline? Because the best headlines usually come to the writer at the end of the writing and researching process. With all this talk of keywords, you should be primed to write hard-hitting headlines!

Keyword article headlines waste no time. Get right to the point with a headline that uses your three or four most popular keywords at the beginning, not at the end. Allow me to critique an article from my own collection. The headline: "How to Negotiate Rates with a Freelance Copywriting Expert". I confess, this headline could have been better. Why? "Negotiate rates" is not a keyword term that someone might type into a search engine. "Freelance Copywriting," however, is. The better version of this headline: "Freelance Copywriting: How to Negotiate Rates." If I had simply reordered the words, this headline would have been that much more powerful and achieved a higher web search ranking. Live and learn!

Feeling a little more comfortable about keyword article-writing? Great! Now get out there and start making money writing keyword-rich content for the world!

Copyright 2005 Dina Giolitto. All rights reserved.

About the Author:
Dina Giolitto is a New-Jersey based Copywriting Consultant with nine years' industry experience. Her current focus is web content and web marketing for a multitude of products and services although the bulk of her experience lies in retail for big-name companies like Toys"R"Us. Visit http://www.wordfeeder.com for rates and samples.