Effective Niche Marketing for Home Based Business
Written by: Don Miller
Posted on March 3, 2008
Filed Under Guest Posts, Starting your Online Business
This Post was written by Monika Mundell
As many of you already know by know, there is a lot of money in niches. But niche sites aren’t straight out niche sites. There is a slight distinction in regards to how a niche can be built and this post will touch on this a little more closely.
But before we go into this I’d like to look at why niche sites hold so much fascination with small home business owners. What gets us excited about building niche sites opposed to building a blog or a website?
Could it be that niche sites are turned into profit much faster than a conventional website or a blog, or is it their simplicity that allows us to concentrate on the marketing factor, instead of spending hours tweaking code and changing the display, like we seem to frequently do with blogs?
As a matter of fact, both of these apply!
From a small home business owners perspective I see niches in two different categories. Either of them allow us to build a niche site applicable to our existing business or knowledge. In the first instance (as per point one) we use niches to earn residual income, in point two we will use them to supplement our existing website and leverage the niche to earn more money and build traffic to our main site.
Let’s look at how we can separate the two primary kind of niches:
1.) We can build niche sites to earn additional revenue, or
2.) We can use niche sites to complement our existing business
Let me explain how these differ in terms of execution and setup.
1.) Niches to earn additional revenue
As previously mentioned, point number one reflects on building a niche site for the sole purpose of driving traffic to it through search engines and then cash in with strategically placed ads that are placed on the niche site.
We can use a combination or a single entity of the ads shown, using:
- Google Adsense
- BANS (EBay)
- Affiliate products
- Our own product
Google Adsense optimized niche sites are perhaps the fastest way to start earning additional income. With decent knowledge on how to write highly targeted SEO articles and a good understanding on how to optimize our “on site SEO”, we should do very well with these type of niche sites.
BANS is a more slow approach that utilizes a great software to automatically pull related EBay products onto the site. Naturally it will have to be set up first but then it kind or runs on autopilot - except of course the promotion of the site.
Another aspect of niche sites that many seem to overlook is to release our own product in a related field. Let’s say you are a cat lover and think about starting your own cat related niche. You could produce your own kick butt ebook complete with articles, slap some Google Adsense onto it and optimize the site for SEO to rank well in the search engines.
Now you have the potential to earn money through Adsense and also to build a list (if cleverly done) by giving away a free ebook that is full of related information and affiliate links.
Which platform do I use for these niche sites?
Many new niche marketers get very confused on whether they ought to use a specific platform to build a niche site.
These are your options:
- WordPress (on self hosted domain)
- Blogger blogs (Blogger allows you to make money, despite the fact that it is a free platform. They are owned by Google).
- BANS software
- Simple website using HTML
By far the best results can be achieved with WordPress blogs if you are looking at SEO. WordPress is just an amazing software that not only looks great, but also has tons of great features. Search engine friendliness is just one of them, but nonetheless very important.
Blogger blogs are easy to set up and within minutes you can have your own niche site. With some coding knowledge and a bit of work they can also rank very well in Google and be sufficient enough to use for niches. The best part of Blogger blogs is that they are free.
BANS is a software that can be purchased for a once of cost. In my eyes, it is well worth the investment and ideal to let new domains age gracefully while pulling in the occasional sale.
Simple websites can be built with notepad or free HTML software such as NVU. They would be my last choice simply for the fact that they are much harder to rank compared to WordPress and Blogger blogs.
2.) Niches to compliment an existing business
The second way to build niche sites is to use them as an extra business source. A client of mine for example owns a B2B website platform. On there he connects business owners and service providers.
Now due to the complex structure of his site he finds it very hard to rank well in Google. This results in very little search engine traffic (the site is rather new) and a higher cost in advertising to him.
To save him money and rank better in Google we are now focusing on building niche sites that target a single keyword that is often searched for on his site.
I can get him to rank well on this niche site rather fast which will do two things for him.
- First it will send him a lot more targeted traffic once the site ranks well in Google
- Second he can use affiliate products related to his industry or Google Adsense to earn extra revenue
And another bonus is that he can stop paying for expensive Adwords ads and use this money elsewhere in his business.
As you can see, niches aren’t just simple niches. Depending on whether you want a niche to earn extra income, or supplement your existing site, you can do very well with either of them.
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Tags:, 1 home based business, adsense, bans, blogging, blogs, blue host, home based business, how to start a home based business, niche marleting, seo, Site Sell, start your own home based business
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Effective Niche Marketing for Home Based Business…
Some different niche marketing strategies explained by Monika Mundell who guests posts on Making Sales Making Money. She provides information on Bans Sites , Adsense and explores the different options one can employ in setting up niche sites. Whether y…
Niche marketing is actually one of the best uses of a well designed, thought out, maintained and updated blog. It allows you to target your efforts to gain the best return on your investment and your marketing dollars.
Great post.
@ Grant: you are so right. It’s like funneling our concentrated efforts into something good. Thanks for the heads up.
[…] is especially important in niche marketing, when you are trying to rank well for a certain keyword. Inserting a keyword rich slug […]
[…] is especially important in niche marketing, when you are trying to rank well for a certain keyword. Inserting a keyword rich slug […]
[…] is especially important in niche marketing, when you are trying to rank well for a certain keyword. Inserting a keyword rich slug […]
Nice blog and a great topic! Niche marketing is certainly catching on. I will be back to see what other “tips” I can pick up. I still prefer blogs over making web sites any day though. They are so much easier.
You said: “Simple websites can be built with notepad or free HTML software such as NVU. They would be my last choice simply for the fact that they are much harder to rank compared to WordPress and Blogger blogs.”
Why on earth would you say that building a HTML website manually is much harder to rank.
I totally disagree on this but I do agree that this method would also be my last choice. Not for search engine rankings but because it is a hell of a lot faster building sites with blogging software.
There is nothing wrong with building web pages manually, you can get them to rank just as well if not better.
You don’t have the social benefits of a blog, but if it is a niche site aimed at making dollars then social traffic probably isn’t woth worrying about.
Also with regards to pinging feeds, you can set-up a feed on a static website in a couple of minutes and then use that to ping the likes of pingomatic. This isn’t a problem.
Nice simple plain HTML webpages have always performed very well for me in the past and they still do today, but like I said I also prefer WordPress and Blogger for larger sites, simply for the time it saves.
Saying that HTML webpages are much harder to rank simply isn’t true.
[…] does add to the beauty of the site. As most of you know she guest posted a couple of weeks ago and her article was a most popular one. She will answer her own comments and I feel privileged to have her on board. Now I have a request, […]
@ Stonkin: thank you for your input. In regards to the HTML pages, they were simply meant as an additional option to give people more choices.
It isn’t to say that they would perform well or even look great. But some people just love to know all their options.
On the subject of ranking. I think it is clear that WordPress is loved by search engines for their markup and the way they are structured. I’m not saying that you can’t rank well with a HTML site, all I meant was that in the overall scheme of things WordPress performs better.
If however you are great at SEO and able to rank basic websites well, then great! But please bear in mind that most people wouldn’t.
Only a few people (in the bigger scheme of things) can do this, therefore using WordPress as the best choice does make sense because with some optimization just about anybody can rank well with a WordPress site. Plus obvious link building.
I apologize if you felt offended, this certainly wasn’t my intention and I hope you see where I’m coming from.