Niche Marketing 101


Niche Cheese from spiritwarrior on Comiqs

The basic rule is that you need to find a niche which is not so competitive and one which you can contribute something special and relevant based on your past or other people’s experience, knowledge and skills. Everything else will just fall into place. Every day, the Internet world is becoming increasingly busy and competitive. This means that niches are becoming increasingly vital and critical to online success.

What is niche marketing? It is simply making people buy a product or service that have little competition in a particular area. As an example, putting up a grocery store in a residential area that does not have one will likely be successful in contrast to a place where there is a grocery store in every corner. This is true whether you have an offline or online business.

Bringing in customer and business together is essential to any marketing endeavour. Building a strong customer base will take time but will guarantee your online success because they will be your repeat buyers. If you sell a product or service online that customers do not need or can be easily purchased from other online businesses, your marketing effort is bound to fail. When you sell to a niche market remember to sell the benefits of your product or service and not so much the features. Do not overemphasize the features because customer buy based on need. For example, would you buy a vacuum cleaner based on horsepower and sturdiness, or because you need one to protect your baby from crawling on a dirty carpet? A good salesperson will emphasize the latter reason and the features later. That's what niche marketing is all about, creating a demand for your product and services to customers who will likely buy.

Lack of competition in a niche market can bring both positive and negative results. Positive because you are the only one or a few selling your product or service. Negative because there might not be a need for what you have to offer.

Internet business is very competitive because it can be accessed anywhere in the world and anyone can offer the same product or service. Therefore, a savvy niche marketer will target a small segment of a larger market base, create a demand and supply the need. So the secret of niche marketing is "creating a demand". Good luck.


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Commercialize or Monetize Your Blog

As a blog owner, you may not be consciously doing it but may happen without you even noticing it. Below are certain aspects that might help you understand the difference.

Commercialization: When you commercialize a blog it is heavily dominated with advertisement, content promoting commercial products and a lot of embedded affiliate links redirecting visitors to products/services on various sites. Visitors find it difficult to distinguish between the actual content and commercial part of the blog. In a nutshell, a commercialized blog would want to use every possible opportunity to make money online by using various ways of doing so.

Monetization: When you monetize your blog, you do not overly involve yourself making money online by using various ways outlined above. You would rather focus on the content that your visitors like and keep coming back for more information. Monetization involves using AdSense and other contextual advertising programs to a limited extent to make money, and occasionally writing about some products with embedded affiliate links. In this case, visitors can very clearly distinguish between the actual content and commercial aspects of your blog.

Payoffs and drawbacks of a commercialize blog: You may make money, may be a lot of money in a short period but lose visitors in the long run. How will you make money when there are no visitors to your blog?

Payoffs and drawbacks of monetize blog: You may make nothing at first or a very small amount of money but retain visitors and gain loyalty from them. One can expect to grow with this approach and then make large amount of money over the long term. Focus on the content and money will automatically come to you.


Commercialize or Monetize Your Blog from spiritwarrior on Comiqs

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