Choose a niche, or choose a market?

It's kind of an age-old argument: is it good to choose a niche, then go headfirst into it; or is it better to find a market and follow the numbers?

I encourage you guys to check out the source of the articles (links included) to see the nice little custom graphics that go with each of them and to see if any other articles on the site interest you.

The first article is from Cashbackaffiliates.com/finding-your-niche and is titled "Finding Your Niche."

At first, youâ€™re not going to be a big ad company. There is no way for you to cover a broad range of topics, so the best thing for you to do is find something thatâ€™s not being completely over-covered. If there are hundreds of very good sites with which to compete, itâ€™ll be extremely hard for you to get yourself on the first page of Google search results.

If you decide to create a site focused on ski gear, for example, youâ€™ll probably want to type â€œski gearâ€ into Google, along with a whole host of other terms relating to skiing. This is the best method to quickly find your toughest competitors. The sites that come up in the top rankings on Google will likely have been going at it for years. If you do succeed in finding an under-covered topic, youâ€™ll have a much easier time attracting visitors to your site.

A service like â€œWordtrackerâ€ might be worth your while so you can get a detailed look at what keywords are popular. Alternatively, Googleâ€™s own tool here could do the trick. When you search for the popular terms on Google, you can also get a sense of the quality of the top search results. If the top pages are executed beautifully, itâ€™ll be hard for you to offer something that theyâ€™re not. If you see all sorts of problems with the pages, youâ€™ll then be able to go ahead create a better site. The point here is innovating in ways that these sites do not. Knowing popular keywords will also help you improve your page ranking in the search results (by integrating these words into your site).

Profitability is another key concern. The space youâ€™re looking into might not be very profitable. This is a bit harder to pre-determine than the likelihood of your site being popular. There are some general rules, however. Your niche should not be too general. â€¨If it is, targeting your audience becomes too difficult, which carries with it a host of other concerns. Being too specific, on the other hand, limits your options. You need to strike a middle ground.

Letâ€™s take clothing as an example. Building a site around clothing is far too general of a topic, so we get more specific and call it winter clothing. This is probably still too general, so we limit ourselves further to a review site about winter coats. You probably donâ€™t want to limit yourself any further than that or youâ€™ll become too confined in what sort of information you can include. From here, we Google â€œwinter coats,â€ along with a host of other phrases like, â€œbuying winter coats,â€ â€œbest winter coats,â€ â€œwarmest winter coats,â€ and dozens of others. We can also look into popular keywords and phrases related to winter coats.

Thatâ€™s just an example to illustrate how you might go about breaking down your chosen category. Finding a sparsely populated field in which to stake your claim is by no measure an easy task. Just take your time and be thorough. Donâ€™t become frustrated when the answer is not immediately obvious, and youâ€™ll eventually hit upon a good topic. Unless youâ€™re really lucky, youâ€™ll likely fail several times before you succeed, which is really the best way to learn. You need to actually get your feet wet!
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and the counter-argument, Don't Pick a Niche

First let me break it down. There are 8 things that humans are biologically programmed to desire. Survival, good eats, no pain/fear/danger, sex, a comfy home, to win/succeed, to protect those that they love, and social approval. Tap into any of those with your method of advertising and you will be off to a great start. Hit them on multiple levels? Even better.

This may all seem like marketing 101 to some of you, but if you ever sit back and watch what goes on where marketers congregate, you will quickly realize that these are some of the most asked questions:

Whatâ€™s your niche? Whatâ€™s a good niche? What niche should I promote?

Let me just tell you straight up right now, itâ€™s not about picking a niche. No, itâ€™s all about picking a market. Youâ€™re a marketer, after all. Most people fall into the trap of trying to choose a niche but that is just putting an artificial limitation on how successful they can be. In order to really monetize your traffic, you need to pick a market that you can market to. Picking a market allows you to advertise a variety of products or services that appeal to the market, rather than just attempting to sell them on one thing. Niche selection implies product selection. Market selection on the other hand means youâ€™re picking a market that youâ€™re able to send multiple different products to. This will of course require a couple of steps to pull off, but lets start with finding a market.

To begin with, marketing is all about offering up a timely solution to someones problem and profiting off of it. So the absolutely best place for market and idea research in my opinion is: http://www.ehow.com/how-to.html There you literally have all the questions people can concievably ask. You also receive the added luxury of having virtually everything categorized and segmented perfectly for you to comb through for the perfect idea. Every single one of these how to articles is an ebook waiting to happen. They address a problem people have and describe how to achieve their desired results.

If you have done any sort of marketing on Youtube, I 100% guarantee you have stumbled across one of their videos at some point.

The best way, in my opinion, to find a good market from this place is to pick a sub category from any of the main categories. The deeper that you go in, the more targeted you obviously get. The added benefit is that you also get all of the questions AND answers that apply specifically to any chosen category. You have the ability to know everything that people are trying to find an answer to when it comes to XYZ-subcategory. XYZ-subcategory is your market. As a result, the majority of the how to articles you see in any given sub category, are potential products/services that can be marketed to all those type of people that fall under it.

Itâ€™s much easier to come up with solutions to problems (in the form of a product or service) if you know what they are to begin with. Especially if these problems are the type that people have consistently. Someone thatâ€™s into work out exercises from home, will likely be susceptible to fitness products/services and someone thatâ€™s looking for wrinkle cream will likely be open to trying more than one skin care product. So how does one consistently manage to market multiple products and services that give them multiple chances for sales? Well thereâ€™s a few ways of doing this but the most accessible way is byâ€¦

Building a list!

How else do you think PPC and PPV marketers make bank long term? How do you think they can afford the cost of a couple dollars a click for the competitive stuff? Donâ€™t get me wrong: there are plenty of unknowing newbies out there who will just pay a few bucks a click and drive it directly to a landing page, thinking theyâ€™re going to make bank (they very well may). There are also plenty of businesses out there with a ton of money that can do it just because they can. The fact of the matter is that this is a poor business model and itâ€™s far from sustainable. The people who can truly separate themselves from the amateurs are the ones that understand the value of building a relationship with their visitors. Unless you have some way of getting in touch with your visitor in the future when the moment occurs that they leave your website you may never see them again.

So instead, you should always attempt to initiate a relationship with your visitors in order to re-market to them over and over again. The better your relationship to your target market is, then the more likely you will get repeated sales from the same people whenever you suggest a new product.

Donâ€™t feel as if you have to be an authority in the field in order to sustain a relationship with your subscribers. Just keep offering up relevant content and hit them with a good offer regularly.

How does this fit into an incentive gateway network?

Hopefully at this point you should already understand how this fits together with at least picking a market. Unfortunately, a lot of people are fixated on TV/movies (which is fine), even though itâ€™s far from sustainable and riddled with potential problems. Thatâ€™s another conversion entirely, though Iâ€™ll simply say that thereâ€™s a massive amount of opportunity out there beyond that â€˜nicheâ€™ that a lot of people are missing out on.

Whatâ€™s the point of an incentivized offer? What IS an incentive offer? Clearly, itâ€™s something that someone is willing to do in order to get what they want. Thatâ€™s all you need to know. Now, itâ€™s just a matter of determining what market has consistently desperate people in it. How do you know what people are desperate for? By finding out what questions they need the answer to. Either combine that withâ€“or make it oneâ€“of the things that they are programmed to desire (like I mentioned at the start of this) and tell them how to achieve itâ€¦as soon as they fill out an offer from your gateway.

Just remember that a gateway set-up gives you the ability to lock any content on the web. Any content, not just videoâ€¦something like a written guide can be equally if not more effective than offering the ability to see a TV show.

So how can you tie everything together?

This depends on many variables and how you decide to approach your market. Hereâ€™s one suggestion and perhaps some of you can spin this into something even better. Itâ€™s simple. Ready?â€¦okay:

Find yourself a question that can apply to anyone in your market that they desperately would like the answer to. Take a few articles from the how-to site and have someone rewrite them into a small guide. Give away the guide for free when they sign up for your email list. Now, add a gateway over the download page for them to unlock to gain access to. You can go beyond this by also including a related CPA offer below your download link and make sure the guide has affiliate links in it as well.

This can even apply to those who mess with TV/Movies, although you would approach those people differently. Building an email list would typically be the most beneficial to those that are doing straight CPA. You, on the other hand, have an entertainment portal. Make it entertaining, and people will come back and even tell their friends. So give them the ability to. Add a refer a friend widget to your unlocked pages, and get them to market for you. You should also create a mailing list to inform them about new episodes, movies, sites, whatever. You get the idea.

So there you have it. Pick a market, not a niche. Turn your visitors into long term buyers and visitors at which point you will have created a long term model for success that will over time grant you the ability to print money at the push of a button. I donâ€™t want this to be misconstrued as me saying thereâ€™s no money in niche CPA marketing. There obviously is, but itâ€™s short term, a constant battle, and if you slip once you risk losing out a lotâ€¦and all of this over 1 sale from someone. Why not instead tap into a market that you can access over and over again?
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Which one do you guys agree with?

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Choose a niche, or choose a market?

Niche, or market?

Niche!

Market..

jehnidiah Active Member

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Choose a niche, or choose a market?

Niche, or market?

Niche!

Market..

jehnidiah Active Member

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