To your online success

Finding your niche

Hey everyone, sorry about the lack of updates during easter. I´m now back from the vacation and will update regularly again.

When you decide to start working on the internet you should sit down and think about what you would like to work with. The Internet is a place full of different products and services and you can find pretty much anything you want to work with. But in order to find something to work with you need to know what you are looking for.

When I stared working online I tried to go into a field that I knew nothing about. Sounds silly doesn’t it. And it was. I was swept away with the idea of how much money was actually in circulation in the market I wanted to break into. I thought that if there´s that much money going around it should be easy to grab a piece of it. Guess if I was wrong.

I knew nothing about the thing that I tried to promote which meant I knew nothing about the people I tried to sell products to. Knowing your potential customers is a key in all business and the internet marketing business is no different. I thought that I could be very general and get people to be interested in the product I tried to sell. Again, a product I knew nothing about since I didn’t really understand what it would do for the customer.

The point of the above rant is that you need to know who you are trying to sell things to in order to know what your customer needs. We can try to sell people the best product in the world, but if we don’t know what problem it solves for our customers, we can never convince them to buy the product. Which makes sense. If you go into a car dealer and the sales person tries to sell you a van when you’re actually looking for a sports car, the chance is slim that you get even a little interested in what he has to say.

My suggestion is to pick something that you are interested in when you are starting up. It doesn’t matter if you write articles, blog or make landing pages for PPC search engines, if you know what you’re talking about you can better sell the products. Worth mentioning is that most niches have smaller niches within them and only someone who are really interested in the topic might know about these micro niches. Knowing these things will make it easier to sell things too since you can talk about how the product solves exactly this particular problem for people.

After my first failure at just picking a random area to work with, I actually did pick something I’m interested in. It’s been my hobby for a few years now and I know what I’m talking about in this field which makes the material I write seem a bit more convincing. So, what you decide to work with is really up to what kind of person you are but it could be basically anything you are interested in and know a good deal about. Hobbies, sports, work related things - there are a lot of options. Find the niche you want to work with and then find a product or products that you think would help the people you want as customers. Most often it´s people with an interest for the same thing as you, so you know how to talk to them.

If you can’t think of anything that you would like to work with or there are simply no products that you think would sell you might have to learn a new thing. Pick something you would like to know more about and start reading about this subject, become an expert in what you want to do and you will have better results.

Do you have suggestions for other ways to find niches to work with, please post your thoughts.

Bookmark and Share

Hide Sites

Promoting with social networking sites

Hey everyone! First off, I´m sorry I didn’t write as much this week as before. I´m currently on easter vacations and I didn’t have as much opportunity to get to the computer as I thought I would.

That said, I hope the people who have already started their easter holidays are having a good and relaxing time and happy holidays to you and yours.

This article will cover some basic ideas about using social networking sites to promote your business. Social networking sites have been around for quite some times but they have just gained more popularity over the recent years with a few of the most well known being FaceBook and MySpace.

If you are not familiar with a social networking site is, I will quickly explain it here. Simply put these sites are designed for friends to keep in touch or so that people can find new friends of similar interests. When you sign up for the sites, you get a personal profile page where you can post a profile picture and some descriptions about you as well as list interests and such. The profile page can be customized and you can make it really personal. How much the profile can be customized vary on each of the sites.

I mentioned MySpace and FaceBook before since I know that both these sites allow business profile pages. And even though it´s not necessary to turn your profile page into a sales page, it can be very useful depending on what you are selling or promoting. I’ve seen people who just use their profile pages to socialize and they talk about the product to their friends and drive traffic to their sales pages that way.

Both of the techniques work and what you decide to go with is really up to you. Maybe you already have a FaceBook and MySpace page but you just didn’t use it for this before. However you decide to use these sites, remember to read and follow their rules since each sites rules are different.

What you also should do is to use several social networking sites. You can easily use Wikipedia to find a list of a bunch of networking sites to get you started. Apart from the ones I’ve mentioned here (facebook.com and myspace.com) I will also mention Yuwie, since Yuwie is a social networking site with all the regular features, but with the added perk of getting payed to use it. Because of this feature, Yuwie seems to attract a lot of people working online or being interested in working online, which might give you a pre-targeted market already (again, depending on what you’re promoting).

When you’ve signed up for a number of social bookmarking sites it´s time to start designing your profile. Make your profile eye catching and nice looking, don’t just plaster your profile with banners and links to the things you are promoting because that will just make it look bad and not very personal. Try to make the profile page sell by showing how the product helped you, if possible. And use the social networking sites for what they are, make friends.

Apart from being a good source of possible customers or such, you can also make good connections to people who work online and you might find new friends to learn from and share ideas with. And as a bonus, the social networking sites are also quite fun.

I will try to get more posts up during the easter holidays, but I will not promise anything. So, if I don’t find the time… Happy Easter!

Bookmark and Share

Hide Sites

Sticking to the plan

I know I nag about the whole motivational part quite often, but it´s just because it´s a really important part. Being clear on why you do what you do and how to get there are some of the more important things with running your own company.

You have decided to start you own online business and you are excited about working from home. That´s great, making a decision is the very first step to anything.

When you decided to start your company, did you also make a plan how to go about with your start and with your work?

Even though making the decision is a big step, it will be just that if you don’t have a plan. And you can’t stand on one foot for too long. The plan is the path you lay out in front of you so you know where to put the other foot.

My suggestion is that you first of all decide how much time you can invest into the company. Make a schedule for your daily, weekly or monthly time investment and stick to it. Working from home takes a lot of discipline since you don’t have anyone standing over you shoulder to see if you are doing the things you are supposed to do. And you will be surprised how many distractions you can find in your own home if things are a bit slow one day.

Don’t get distracted would be the next logical thing to say. No matter what the distractions are, they are a form of procrastination. You go do ”just take care of this little thing” and all of a sudden you have found yourself doing five other ”little things”. When you sit down to work with your company, work. Don’t let little things get in the way and work the hours you have set aside.

The next suggestion I have when you start up a business is to do research. No matter what kind of business you are starting you should research. This becomes more important if you are going to work with affiliate marketing and promoting a product you are not 100% familiar with. Research, research and research. You want to become an expert on the product you are promoting. Or better yet, you should become an expert on the problem this product solves.

People who are looking to buy products or services do so to fill a need. If you know what problems or issues the might have, and why they want this product, you will be much more convincing in promoting it.

I mention this in a lot of articles I write. Goals. Set goals for yourself. If you have a plan but you don’t have a goal, you don’t know what you are working for. Be sure you know why you are doing what you are doing and what you want to achieve. If you are working to be able to buy your dream house, then get a picture of your dream house and hang on the wall so it serves as a constant reminder of why you are doing what you are. It will help you on days when things feels really slow.

Doing these three things will help you be closer to success in what you do, no matter what kind of business it is.

Bookmark and Share

Hide Sites

Internet marketing mindset

I guess this post shouldn’t be named internet marketing mindset specifically, since the attitude and mindset I mention here goes for everything you do. Anyone who start their own business need to learn how to be able to motivate and ”speak” to themselves in a positive way.

Something you should always remember is that a positive attitude goes a very long way, even if that phrase feels a bit over used.

Working with internet marketing is a fun and challenging occupation. Because of these challenges we face, it can also be a frustrating job at times. That´s the reason you need to be in the right mindset all the time.

I´m no guru or motivational speaker of any sort, but I know that having a positive attitude is important in everything you do. Sometimes, it´s easy to forget that when you are working like this.

While you are working online you will have days when you feel like you are getting nowhere and you will be ready to throw in the towel. These are the days when you log in to your affiliate account (or what for of income stream you use) and for the X number of days in a row, you still just see $0 in the money made.

What you need to remember when you are working online is that you are building a company, most likely from scratch. All companies have slow periods, especially in the start-up period. What you need to do is keep a positive attitude to what you are doing even when things are not going so well.

It´s been said over and over, but it´s still true, the mind is a powerful thing and if you keep telling yourself you will fail then most likely you will indeed fail. But this goes both ways, keep being positive about what you do and keep your spirit high about the work and things will eventually pick up.

I am still learning the internet marketing ”game” and my philosophy is to try to learn at least one new thing every day. This have gotten me to a point where I’ve read countless pages, reports and e-books about this business. Some of these things are good, some are… less good. But if I’m able to just learn that one thing every day, I have accomplished my goal. And I most often do.

My point with this is, break things up and don’t expect everything to ”explode” at once. It´s like they say, the first sale is the hardest one to make. Until you get that first sale, you are still learning how to speak to your customers. Sure, some people go into this business and make a massive income in a very short amount of time, it happens. People also win the lottery.

Most of us will struggle when we start a company, it takes time and effort and we will have bad days. The important thing is to not get stuck in those bad days and look forward, because the in the end, this struggle will be worth it.

Bookmark and Share

Hide Sites

Landing pages and PPC

Pay-Per-Click is a good way that can make your internet business take of fast and ”easy” if it´s done correctly. However, if you do it wrong, it can leave you with an empty wallet wondering what went wrong.

When I started out with PPC marketing I think I managed to make all and every thing you shouldn’t do, including the things I will tell you about in this article. Hopefully, I can save you some money and help you to a better start than I had.

In this post I will just cover some basic things to avoid when you start out with PPC marketing. There´s a bunch of information you can find on the internet about how to master the search engines that use PPC. One of the better resources to learn a lot about Google Adwords is Perry Marshall´s Definitive Guide to Google Adwords.

Something that is quite common for people who start out with PPC marketing is to not narrow the traffic for the campaigns down enough. If you are promoting kitchen knives you want to make a campaign for kitchen knives and not just knives. However, that´s way to wide in itself, but you get the point.

Another very common mistake that people make is to send the traffic to the main site without considering what term was used in the search.

In one of my previous articles I used an example of someone running a site about poodles, and I will use that here too. So we say that you are running a site about poodles and you are getting traffic targeted for that from the PPC campaign, but it´s targeted only to everything related to poodles.

What you want to do is to narrow it down even further. Let us assume that your poodle site have at least one page related to grooming. We can also assume that poodle grooming is a popular search term for people interested in poodles. Since this is a popular term, you are bidding on it and getting a fair amount of hits from your poodle grooming bids, but you send the visitors to your main site that lists everything related to poodles. This is not the best way to do it. In fact, it´s quite a bad way to do it.

You want to send the people who are searching for poodle grooming to the pages on your site that is related to this specific topic. Considering how easy it is to find information on the web, surfers have become increasingly lazy. If you can’t provide the information they are looking for right away, there is a good chance they will just press the back button and find a site that can. All that will do for you is to cost you the click through. Always assume that your surfers doesn’t want to search for the things they want. Smack it in their face.

People who are good at PPC and make money from it usually send their PPC visitors to something referred to as a landing page. These landing pages are pages designed specifically to turn the PPC surfer into a customer or get them to opt-in to an e-mailing list, or both. To build a good landing page that convert the PPC traffic into customers or such is a science in itself and I will not go into that here.

If you send your traffic to landing pages designed for each of the search terms you will have a greater chance of making money from them. Give them a lazy way to find what they want and they will be happy with finding your site.

Bookmark and Share

Hide Sites