Niche Marketing the Right Way!

Niche marketing is hot these days.Membership sites pop up everywhere inviting you to maketons of money. All you have to do is find or buy thehighest paying Adsense ads and add them to your pagesfilled with automatically generated content.

That's NOT niche marketing, that's Adsense marketing.It's a numbers game and it's dangerous. I'll explain thatbelow.

How did this so called Niche Marketing develop?Solid niche marketing advice already existed for some time.Very often you were advised to follow your passion orexpertise and set up a site for that.

Then, RSS feed techniques lead to software programs thatscrape content from directories. You have to do absolutelynothing but entering a bunch of keywords and presto ...thousands of new content rich pages are automatically addedto your niche site.

And when Joel Comm presented his Adsense Secrets showinghow he went from $30 a day to $500 a day - mind you, agood book with solid advice, no doubt about that- suddenlywe had three variables that are responsible for the hype:

1. niche marketing,

2. content generating software and

3. high paying Adsense keywords.

Let's have a look at each of these variables in reverseorder.

High paying Adsense keywords.

Suddenly someone discovered that there are certain keywordsthat are of great value. Advertisers paid a lot of money tohave their products displayed on pages using these specifickeywords.It was said that a keyword like 'mesothelioma' or derivateswould pay 50 to 70 dollars a click.I just entered this in Google Adwords, bidding 90$ perclick and it returned with an estimated number of clicksper day of 6.2. Now, these figures are just estimates, butif this is true, with a 1% click-thru it means you wouldhave to wait about 16 days to earn my 90 dollars!

Again, just assumptions, I only want to make a point.Adsense is a numbers game. You'll need thousands ofvisitors AND good click-thru's to make decent money.

To get thousands of visitors you either have to buy traffic(Adwords or other PPC's) or create search engine friendlypages. Now, type in 'mesothelioma' in Google and observethe PageRanks of the resulting pages. PR 5 or higher! Hardjob to beat them! That means ... work!

To get great click-thru's you'll have to test where youplace your Adsense code. Dang, even more work!

But there's something else, something more important. Readthis carefully ...

Do you really believe ...

that advertisers are going to pay that much money only ...

to have their expensive ads displayed on ...

automatically generated content pages?

Huh ... do you ... huh?

OF COURSE THEY WON'T!

There's a fine line you have to follow playing the Adsensegame. And generating content automatically, no matter whereit comes from, is like walking an elephant over a paperbridge. It kills the system!

Now, let's have a look at ...

Content generating software

I'm sure in the past you have used the search engines tofind information about a specific topic only to find thatif you click the resulting pages ...you'll see another 'search-engine'-like page.

That was the work of a niche marketer (specific info)scraping search engine result pages (SERP's) with 'pagegenerating software' to quickly generate thousands of pagesabout the topic.

Search engines don't like that.You see, they are looking for great, valuable and originalcontent. That's what they want to provide to their users sothey keep coming back.

And here's another biggie ...

they want SATISFIED ADVERTISERS!

The last thing they'll need is another copy of their ownpages.And that's exactly what this software will generate.

Mind you, the software IS good, it does exactly what itpromises. I've used one of these packages long time ago andthat one certainly DID work.

But this kind of software also leaves fingerprints for thesearch engines who are getting smarter all the time.Eventually they will discover automatically generatedcontent, ignore these pages of even penalize them. That'swhy I stopped using such software long, long time ago.

The only way to use this kind of software in a responsibleway is to change the templates that come with the package.And to do that right means ...

(a lot of) work.

And that's something that wasn't included in the deal!

These days this strategy has changed into scraping articlesfrom directories. All you have to do is enter a keyword andpresto ...an article containing that keyword is placed in your page.

That won't work either and for the same two reasons:fingerprints and copies.

Search engines don't like duplicate content and that'sexactly what this software generates.

The latest trick is software that uses a thesaurus tochange article content on the fly. Apart from copyrightissues, I've seen results of that and they were justhilarious.

If you want to use reprint articles for keyword richcontent, you have to at least add some unique content tothe page. You could write a review or your own opiniontelling what you think is good and bad about the articlethat you posted below.

Dang, work again!

Publishing a reprint article every now and then won't hurtyou, but it does when you do nothing else.And the article content better fit well into your pages andeven into your site. If it's way of topic, you won't getfar.

Here's a great tip: find unique Public Domain Software! Go here: http://www.anownsite.com/products/public-domain/

Now, let's go down to the core of the business ...

Niche Marketing

Let's define a niche first:

A niche is just a tiny, (highly) specialized marketplace.

A marketplace means that there's demand and supply.Basically there are two ways to enter a niche:

1. follow your passion (supply) or

2. follow the money (demand).

If you follow your passion it will be easy to developcontent: you're the expert and you do what you love.But you still have to find out if the passion you'refollowing is profitable!

And if you follow the money, you're already on the righttrack, but you will have a difficult time to developcontent.Recently I found one on Ebay. But I didn't do a thing withit. Know why? Cause I don't know squat about millinery!(THERE you have it! a niche market!)

In order to follow the money, you have to develop some ... passion for the niche otherwise you can't fill your siteproperly.

So, either way you have to do something extra.Now, let's redefine a niche. Let's define a ... profitable niche!

A profitable niche is a highly specialized marketplace with few competitors, high demand and money to pay for that demand.

That's what you have to find out.

"Gheesssss Case, you really make it sound like ... eh ... work!"

Not necessarily.

If you have no idea how to do that, read my article about niche markets. http://www.anownsite.com/articles/niche-markets.shtml

It's just to give you an idea. Right now I'm working on a special guide on how to find profitable niches, so stay tuned.

If you don't want to do all the work to find profitable niches, just have a look at the 50 hot niches that were selected by niche expert James. B. Allen.http://www.anownsite.com/products/niches/index.html

Or, if you act quickly, you can join what looks like a very, very promising and brand new niche site where everything already is done for you called Niche Site Special.http://www.anownsite.com/cgi-bin/u.cgi?nss

Now, if you really have found your niche and you've foundprofitable affiliate programs that you can gently pre-sell,then and only then you can consider adding Adsense to yourpages.Provided that you deliver unique, high value content!You CAN add some reprint articles, but most of your contentshould be yours.

And you'd better use a search engine optimized website forthat! (Right now I'm developing such a system, so again,stay tuned.)

Bottom line: you still have to do some work or buy theresults of such work!

THAT is the right way to perform niche marketing!

Have fun!

Case Stevens

Case Stevens, owner of AnOwnSite Internet Marketing, is experimenting with different marketing techniques, websites, traffic and lead generation. He publishes his experiences in a newsletter featuring understandable, successful low cost Internet marketing techniques, ideas and strategies, articles, news, tips & tricks and interesting (free) downloads.

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