How To Avoid The #1 Biggest Mistake That MOST Internet “Newbies” Make!
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July 8, 2009 by Steve Peachey
Filed under Finding the Niche, PPC Tools and Services, Tips For Success
Ready to start your very own highly profitable Internet business? It’s easier than you think!
But BEFORE you get started, there’s one very important thing you’ll need to understand, in order to avoid wasting days, weeks, even months of your valuable time…and throwing literally hundreds — or thousands — of dollars out the window.
See, what most Internet “newbies” do when they’re just starting out is to decide what they’re going to sell first, and then build their website around their product.
This is a mistake!
In fact, it’s likely the BIGGEST mistake you can make with your new website.
We know from years of experience helping thousands of people get wealthy online that the BEST way to start an Internet business is to find a hungry market FIRST, and then decide what to sell to them.
So in this report, we’ll walk you through the exact steps you need to follow to find your very own “niche market,” and start building a successful website worth potentially $5,000 to $10,000 a month (or MORE!)… without the usual hassle, frustration, and wasted time!
Read on to learn how you can realize your dreams of financial independence.
To your success,
The Internet Marketing Center Team
_______________________________________________________________________________________
Why a small “niche” is big business.
No matter what you sell online, it’s just not possible to sell it to everyone… so instead, you should focus your energies on a specific group of people who are crying out for someone to sell them what they’re looking for!
Set your sights on a smaller, motivated group of people looking for answers they just can’t find — your very own niche market.
This is important, because a niche market can change your life.
What the heck is a “niche” market, anyway?
Everyone thinks of niche markets a little differently…
Traditional marketers may define a niche market as a large group of people sharing several characteristics (for example, men aged 30-35 earning between $50,000 and $75,000 / year).
However, when you’re selling online, you need to narrow the focus A LOT more than that! So we define a niche market as: A group of people who are searching the Internet for a solution to a problem — and NOT finding many relevant search results.
Many people mistakenly try to go after huge general markets where they couldn’t hope to compete.
Here’s what we mean. The following might seem like good niche markets at first:
Golfers; People on a diet; People over 65; Pet owners… But the truth is that these markets are WAY too big!
Try entering the word “golf” into a search engine. You’ll get about 613 million results!
Do you really want to try to compete in that market?
Narrowing your focus to a small, niche market gives you the following advantages:
• There’s WAY less competition.
• Small markets are much easier to dominate — so you can become the main source for your product or service online.
• Since niche markets are often close-knit communities, your reputation can quickly spread by word of mouth — providing you with an ever-growing base of potential customers.
• You can easily gain the loyalty of your customers — which gives you plenty of opportunities to expand your offer with related products and follow-up offers.
Remember, people go online to find information and solutions to their problems.
You need to determine what problem your future customers are trying to solve and money. But either way, you’ll make money!
Finding Your Niche: A step-by-step guide
Finding a solid niche isn’t that complicated. You just need to be organized, and have a reasonable amount of time to spend doing it.
And while it’s not something you can do overnight, remember that it is the foundation for your entire business, so the more thorough you can be during this stage, the more solid your entire business will be!
Here are the four steps you need to follow to find your lucrative niche market:
Step #1: Start with your passions and interests
We urge people to start with a subject they’re passionate about — it just makes sense! When you’re emotionally invested in your business, it’s far less likely that you’ll give up on it!
There isn’t some kind of magic bean for Internet businesses, or a hidden switch on the back of your computer that will cause money to suddenly come pouring in.
Starting an online business does require some effort. And since no book, teacher, or guy with a whip can make you do something you don’t want to do, it’s much easier if you really want to do it from the get-go!
It’s simple to find your niche, once you know what you’re looking for, so do some brainstorming…
What subject or topic do you have a lot of knowledge about? What would you enjoy learning MORE about? What do people ask you for advice about? What’s your favorite way to spend time?
Consider these questions carefully, then come up with a “top five” list of interests.
Step #2: Prepare for doing keyword research by collecting “seed words”
Once you narrow you list of interests and passions down to the top five, you’re going to take your TOP interest and find as many synonyms for it as you can (words that mean the same thing).
You’ll use these words — called “seed words” — to do important keyword research as you look for your niche.
So if you were going to start researching something to do with cars, for example, you might start with words like:
• car
• auto
• truck
• vehicle
Even though you might not use the variations when you’re talking about a car, they turn up all over the place online: “auto parts” is more common than “car parts,” “vehicle registration” is on more sites than “car registration,” etc.
To find similar terms quickly and easily, try entering each term into www.Thesaurus.com or the new Google Sets .
Another tool that can be helpful at this stage in the game is KwMap.com (www.kwmap.com) — good for generating related seed words you may not have found otherwise.
Start with the words you come up with on your own, then try the tools we just talked about. They’ll give you long lists of related phrases that you can skim over and select the appropriate ones.
Step #3: Generate keywords related to your niche
Once you have a list of seed words that relate to your interest, it’s time to plant
them and see what comes up!
In this second step, you’ll use keyword research tools to uncover hundreds of problems that people with similar interests are trying to solve:
Keyword Tool #1 — Wordtracker (wordtracker.com)
Wordtracker is an easy-to-use, comprehensive tool that will show you what people are searching for online and also how many other websites are competing for the same audience.
Wordtracker keeps a record of how many times a particular keyword or phrase was searched during the past 60 days on several of the largest search engines and metacrawlers on the Web.
It then allows you to search its database of over 330 million searches (or “queries”) to see how many times the particular keywords and phrases appeared that you think your market might be searching for.
Once you have this information, it will be much easier to decide if you’ve chosen a good niche market! Even better, Wordtracker makes it easy to discover which keywords are popular with your target market… but aren’t being used by your competitors! This is really powerful information!
Wordtracker offers a free trial version, or a paid version that gives you access to results from several different search engines and directories.
Keyword Tool #2 — Keyword Discovery
For more comprehensive and accurate keyword analysis, Keyword Discovery is currently the best tool on the market.
Their interface isn’t as easy to use as Wordtracker’s, and it doesn’t offer quite the same step-by-step help, but if you absolutely need better results, then this is the one for you.
There’s a free trial available for this one, too, and although it doesn’t give you complete access, it’s a good indicator of the kind of results you can expect.
The process is basically the same for all three search tools, but we’ll take you through it using Wordtracker.
Doing the Keyword Research
Here’s how you’d do your keyword research using Wordtracker. Don’t worry if you use a different tool for your keyword research. The process is basically the same…
1. Log in to the Wordtracker homepage and click on the database option called “Keyword Universe.” It’s the best place to start your search. Whenever you want to return to this page, just click “Home” at the top of the screen. We’ll use the Popularity Search tool for our research.
2. Add a query word to each seed word. Add the word “how” to your first interest word. We’ve found that this word consistently pulls out the best problem statements that are unique to each interest area.
Once you enter your search term, a list of related keywords will be generated.
3. Record all unique “action” words. As you scroll down the list of keywords of “how”+[your interest], your next step is to identify the action words in your interest.
4. When you think you’ve collected enough terms, you’re ready to search further.
A. Take that list (if your interest was “kitchen”, you should have things like “kitchen
install,” “kitchen paint,” and “kitchen redecorate”) and enter it into the Popularity
Search section of Wordtracker.
B. Add your new keywords to your Wordtracker basket by selecting “Add all keywords to
your basket.” You now have a complete list of action-oriented search terms related
to your interest for further research.
5. Repeat steps 2 – 4 for each synonym. Now you’ll go through the same process for each of your synonyms.
6. Sort your results.
Now that you have a thorough list of action phrases and synonyms for your top interest, sort this list by clicking on “Keywords for Wordtracker,” then on the link that says “Click here to get a list of tab delimited links.”
Congratulations! You now have a full list of problem-specific keywords!
Remember: Be patient and take your time with this step… You want to explore all the phrases that relate to your keyword. Don’t worry about collecting too many keywords in your basket — the more you explore, the better!
And be sure to include any phrases that have spelling mistakes — they can turn out to be some of your best keywords!
At this point, you’ll still need to do a lot more research to figure out if you really HAVE found any good niche markets.
You should also do a lot more keyword exploration to see if there are more keywords to add to your list. But the good news is that you just may be sitting on a few “magic” niche keywords that could turn into a gold mine for your business!
Step #1: Cluster your keywords by “intention”
Your next step is to take all those keywords you’ve unearthed and sort them into “clusters.” Your goal in this phase is to sort your keywords into groups that are conceptually related… where you believe people are searching for the same thing.
For example, if you were searching under dog-related keywords, you might have clusters of keywords related to:
• dog pictures
• dog grooming
• dog training
• dog diet
Create a spreadsheet to copy your keywords into, then add a “cluster” column and assign each key phrase a number or a single word according to the user’s intention.
Once you’ve done that, use the “sort” or “filter” functions in Excel to cluster these intentions together and then paste each grouping into a new page in your workbook.
And congratulations again, you’ve clustered your results for one of your interests!
Step #2: Find out which niches have the highest market demand
Here’s where you get your first Aha! moment. For each cluster, add up the numbers in the Count column and do the same for the 24 Hrs column. The clusters with the highest numbers in those columns have the most people searching for a solution to a specific problem.
In other words, they’re the niches with the potential to make you money!
If the cluster only has a few keywords in it, go back to your keyword research and see if you can find more ways of saying the same thing. Plug those new keywords into your spreadsheet and see how the numbers add up.
These high-demand niches will be the ones you look into more deeply to find solid,
viable markets and discover what kinds of products you can sell them.
Now you know where to start, what’s next?
Identifying a niche market and generating product ideas that can solve that market’s problems are two of the most challenging experiences you’ll face while developing your business. However, they’re also the two of the most rewarding.
The research you do now, at the very beginning, is the most valuable research you’ll do. It will save you more time and effort than anything you do later, and it can set you up for success from the start.
And using just the instructions we’ve given you here, you should be able to start
building your own profitable Internet business.
But as you can imagine, growing a KILLER web business that earns potentially $50,000… $100,000… $250,000 a year (or MORE) requires more advanced training and personal guidance than we’re able to provide in a report of this length.
So we want to extend a special invitation to you…
We’d like to offer you the opportunity to review the ENTIRE start-up system that thousands of our clients have already used to build profitable Internet businesses of their own (MANY are now earning six- and seven-figure incomes).
And because we know you’re committed to getting wealthy online — but you’re just starting out — we’d like to give you the chance to review the COMPLETE system for the very modest investment of just $1.00.
We think you’ll agree that’s a pretty minimal risk in exchange for the opportunity to earn a life-changing income.
And all we ask in return is that, once you’ve used the strategies, tool, and tips you discover in it to earn your fi rst $50,000 online, you simply recommend the system to your family, colleagues, and friends.
You can’t ask fairer than that, right?
As we’re sure you can appreciate, though, giving away a profi t system this powerful (and this BIG) is pretty costly, so we must carefully limit the number of review copies we make available.
To avoid missing out, we encourage you to claim yours right away.
To find out how YOU can easily and quickly start Your Own profitable Internet Business for the low investment of $2.95… Click Here Now
Copyright © 2009 Steve Peachey
Permission to reproduce this article is granted if left without modification and in it’s entirety.
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