About About.com: "expert guidance from real people searching the Internet for the information, goods, and services that you need to know related to your passion."
I'm going somewhere with this, btw.
Remember back when About.com results would show up every now and then for your online search and you'd click into a dry topic expert "Guide" that had encyclopedic know-how of a bright topic? Maybe a few dozen About expert Guides plugged away at their "niche" at the time. That was back in the late 90s...
Well what have you noticed about About.com lately? That sucker shows up for thousands of searches! Why? Because this site is a veritable Gold Mine of niche knowledge. The company boasts 60 million online visitors every month and has become a content skyscraper. The q
uote above.... is courtesy About.com, but the key is "information, goods, and services...related to your passion" because if you have a pool of topics from popular to obscure that people are truly passionate about, even topics you believe obscure, but are actually little motherlodes of search traffic-- then my friend you have a niche-finding tool that you should wield like a light-saber.
Explore the About "mine" by Channel, Topic and "What's Hot."
AdWords Guru Perry Marshall has some smack down advice for you if you're grabbing at the same niche as millions of other sorry wannabes (that Twitter clusterf@#%k of lemm
e-sell-you-a-get-rick-quick-plan-for-earning-internet-millions heehee haha hoho). Find it here on his blog.
Eureka! I've Struck Gold! Niche-finding 101
Setting Up a Wordpress Niche Site
I spend time reviewing many of the pre-packaged niche website products on the market, which make it extremely easy to launch a successful review-styled website in minutes. But you can also do it yourself with a little know-how.
- You'll need a domain name and web host.
- From your host cPanel go to the Fantastico service and install a new Wordpress blog installation.
- When the software is installed make sure you note the WP admin and login information so you can access your blog. You get two or three very basic WP default themes to choose from or...
- Choose a Word Press template either from the Wordpress.org > Extend > Themes site or through one of the dozens of external Wordpress theme sites. You can find hundreds of free and beautiful templates.
- Download the theme(s) to your desktop and unzip.
- Upload the theme to your site via one of two ways: If you use Dreamweaver you can uplaod the theme directly to the blog > content > theme folder on your site. You can even upload a few themes so you can test them later; or from your cPanel you can choose Unlimited FTP and drag and drop the theme directly from your desktop into the site folder (personally I've never been able to get Unlimited FTP for Bluehost to work and according to other users on hosting forums the problem is widespread); if you can't get unlimited FTP to work you can try downloading a free or shareware FTP program, like Fetch (what I use) and upload your themes that way.
- Once uploaded, log back into your WP admin and configure a theme.
- Make sure to enable some widgets, you might want to download a few plug-ins (stats, SEO pack, database backup, Akismet, and more), and consider setting up a subscriber sign-up form so you can begin building a customer/visitor list.
"Niche Review Templates.com" reviewed - one of the best on the market..
My TOP RECOMMENDATION in this market. Review-styled templates Extreme designs and elegantly optimized so beginners and experienced alike can reap competitive cash rewards, quickly...
Not sure exactly how you could lose with this one...Niche Review Templates is one of the original such products.
Sign up and every month you get...
- 2 custom-designed review-style affiliate templates...you know the snazzy ones you've seen the super affiliates pull thousands with;
- each website comes with built-in newsletter form sign-up so you build a lead list, which you know is critical for your long-term success;
- markets are already pumping cash, so you really only need to get a host and domain-name and honestly if you can't do that then you're not ready for these powerful tools...
- each website comes packaged with 20 long-tail keyword-targeted SEO articles to flesh out the content for a micro-site AND really boost traffic;
- and other essential components of any professional IMer's site.
They do a much better job telling and showing their product. Here's the link to the site.
Two videos on the page---you can watch both, of course, but I want to make sure you definitely watch the 2nd and I think you'll see everything you need to make the smartest choice in this market.
If you're going to jump into affiliate marketing, then this is one of the easiest ways to get your feet in the water, grow an instant cash base, all without getting knocked out of the boat...so to speak :)
Niche Review Templates
Come back and drop me some "love" later for how much money you make on this deal.
Cash Making Power Sites - "Breakthrough" Cash Getters
If you know how to point and click you can make these automatic niche sites work for you...
Brad Fallon, infamous leader of StomperNet, was promoting these a few days ago. Cash Making Power Sites promises to set you up with 5 niche websites--all proven cash generators, like, dude, they are right now making money.
What you get "out of the box" so to speak:
$ 5 niche sites that you can personalize to sell whatever you want.
$ 5 sites that are already making money--they are built to convert visitors into paying customers.
$ Automatic lead generation so you can begin building a customer list..VITAL component in your marketing business.
Here's the direct link to them.
Get a New Kind of Website that actually "Forces" Money into Your Pocket!
I recommend you watch the video and I think you'll see how these websites can work for you with little tweaking, automatically. It's possibly a really great idea and certainly a reasonably small step to take if you've been fretting over diving head first into the niche marketing game.
Try them and let me know how well they work for you.
Basics of Finding a Niche
The term 'niche' has become an over-used IM industry buzzword. AND it's vastly misunderstood. A niche market is a very small, micro-targeted segment of a much larger industry, in which there would be dozens, hundreds, maybe thousands of other niches. One of the popular IM guys, I think it was Andy Jenkins of StomerNet, reported that some guy was generating a huge cashflow selling bird cages online. That is an excellent example of a niche market that's working.
But just because you have a market doesn't mean you're necessarily going to make money. YOu still have work to do: generating buzz, building followers/customers/clients, converting said followers, and ultimately continuing to pull a growing audience AND appealing over and over again to those who have bought from you previously.
Don't ever say, "what's the hottest market right now." That's just dumb. Here are some niche getting ideas:
Where to do some niche market ID research
- Amazon
- About.com
- eHow.com
- Your local bookstore - look at all the headlines of the varios niche market magazines and take notes, then visit the various topic sections of the store and do the same with the books.
And you can certainly distill your own starting with your hobbies, intellectual interests and then carving them down using drill-down keyword tools like WordTracker.