Article Marketing: Choosing Niches & Products
Posted on August 14th, 2007 by John Cow under Guest BloggersWant to Learn How to Build a Business Not Just a Blog.. for FREE? CLICK HERE Now to Find Out How!
This post is part of the guest blogger experiment.
John Cow was meant to be about making money online. The past few posts really have moved away from this. For this reason I decided to post this here. This is part two of a series I am writing on a new make money online blog over the next couple of weeks. You can read Part One Here. Part Two is about Choosing Niches for your Article Marketing. In part one we looked at timetables, in part two we will talk about Sunday:
Generally, a niche is a special place within the scheme of things. It sometimes denotes the function or position of a thing within a structure. Niche is an English word of French origin.
Basically, a Niche is a sub-market. In marketing, you learn that a market is too broad and general to market a product to; everyone has different needs and wants. This means that we want to target people who are a smaller group with particular needs and wants. This is known as Market Segmentation.
You are not reading this report for a marketing 101 education though so all we
really need to understand is that there are thousands of ‘markets’ out there and these are known as Niche’s.
To pick your niche (or 3 as per the schedule above) you will need to think about the following:
· What do you enjoy doing
· What do you have knowledge about
· What is a skill you posses
· What would you enjoy learning about
As you may well know, writing articles about 2 or 3 different niches every week we are not going to be an expert and sometimes not even know much at all, about every niche we write about. It is not our job to do that, our job is to write an article (10 in fact) that contain information the reader is seeking and then link them to a source that IS an expert. When starting out though in our first week, let’s make it easier by writing about what we know about.
To find a good niche, the best ones are ones that customers have a need or a desire or a problem, then find a product to solve this problem. Places to use to find Niches are everywhere. Talk to friends, find out market trends and read online websites. The thing to do right now is create a bookmark folder in your favorites in your browser of choice. Call it something to do with your article business. Then create a sub folder in that:
“Finding Niches”. Here are a couple of sites that you should bookmark into that folder and use when searching for niches:
EBay Pulse
IM Newswatch
WarriorForum
Yahoo Answers
Now you need to make sure there is a good product in that niche. The good news is that there is a product in basically every niche (and if there isn’t, you can make one for it, but let’s stick to the basics for now.
When choosing the product you are going to promote, you need to look at it from a potential customer’s point of view. There are many companies that facilitate between merchants and affiliates, but to start with we are going to look at ClickBank.com. Click on The marketplace link and you will see categories.
From here you select the niche you are interested in, or just type it in the keywords. Find products that have higher gravity and then review the sales page to make sure it is good. Gravity is basically the number of affiliates that have made a sale of that product, it is not an exact number and is based on the last 8 weeks. Affiliates are given a grade between 0.1 and 1.0. So what does all that mean? Well basically, the higher the gravity, the more people making sales. This highlights the fact that the product does sell and convert. Don’t read too much into gravity though.
The % Referred pertains to the % of product sales that come from affiliates. If this % is quite high that is a good thing, it means that other affiliate like and are having success with this product, which of course means it should add weight to you promoting it. At the end of the day, these are just interesting guides and not to be read to far into. In the next section I go more into detail on picking good products.
Now, in your bookmarks folder, make another subfolder called: “Finding Products”. Clickbank is great, it is digital, easy and they handle your payments for you but depending on your niche it may not suffice. Here is a list to bookmark:
ShareASale
Clickbank
Commission Junction
ModernClick
Linkshare
You should apply to join those programs and add them to your bookmark folder. In the Next Part we will continue with ADVANCED techniques on how to choose the best products to promote. Be sure to join our Blog Feed to make sure you catch it!
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Mooooooooooooooo!
Nice post.
Yes. It’s all about a niche market. I try to focus on sales, marketing, business side of blogging.
how many cows does it take to make money online?
LOL according to the banner, two.
And they should be electric blue florescent cows.
It seems everyone is blogging for money these days rather than for passionate reasons. While there are a few that blog just to blog, they are rare and few in between. I was surprised to read the follow up story on Mobile Jones adventures of having a Google check bounce to find out that rather than deal with adsense at all, even during the time period of the site’s Digg, all ads were removed. Very few can say they do it without having intentions of monetizing their blog now-a-days.
I don’t know about that. If you only read blogs about making money then sure, but almost all of the blogs I read normally have no interest in making money.
Just because they don’t blog about making money online doesn’t mean they aren’t monetizing their blogs. Most blogs prefer not to add any monetizing structure to their blogs until it grows bigger. The few blogs that are large in size and do not monetize their blogs are rare although they do exist. At least this is from my observation and of all the blogs I’ve come across (most of which were not making money related).
Yes but Steven I think it is a trade-off. Whilst we want to blog about things we are passionate about (and must do so or it shows in our posts) we are also spending time blogging. I’m not sure about your views but I feel my TIME is worth a fair bit, and hence would also like to get compensated for it
hi nice post, i enjoyed it