Niche Selection
091: How to Choose a Niche for Your Internet Marketing Business and Decode the Science to Making Money Online
"Fail in private, succeed in public." -- David Ogilvy
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Stage 1: Quick Research
- Find the intersection of: what people want, what people need, what you're good at, and what's fun for you -- forum search, Amazon table of contents, ask your list if you have one
- Build a better mousetrap than your competitors, find their holes, absorb the changes, combine things from two competitors, give away one piece that your competitors normally charge for
- Important: teach something you've already known for several years, that way you're saying "something" (as opposed to bizopp stuff), and you don't have to do any new learning
Stage 2: Find Competitors Making Money
- Are there high ticket items, seminars, and membership sites about this?
- Paid ads?
- Do the high profile guys keep promoting it and keep their websites around for a long time?
Stage 3: Is There a Future In It?
- Why is weight loss a good idea but back pain isn't? Weight loss is an ongoing problem you can continuously help them with, back pain isn't.
- Huge offer: what can you sell for $100 that's worth $1000 to $10,000?
- What can you checklist and systematize to "dumb it down" and make it super easy
Resources
- Dropship CEO (Build an Amazon business)
- Profit Dashboard (Build a Fiverr business)
- Income Machine (Build an Information Product Business)
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How to Create the Perfect Information Product and Make Money Doing It
I know you have at least one idea for a product. Maybe you haven't made a product yet or you've made many products in the past.
How do you know that your big idea is something that everyone else is going to pay money for? We're going to figure out right now if your idea will be profitable in two stages – the research stage and the creation stage.
Stage 1: Research
I don't believe in doing more than 30 minutes of research to figure out if your idea will make you money. I say this because I know of too many marketers who have spent a month or 6 months or a year researching as an excuse not to do anything. Let's spend 30 minutes and figure out if your idea is worth it.
The first thing you should do is check forums. What's the hot topic inside the #1 forum in your niche? When I go to my favorite marketing forum, I find that the threads with the most replies are about articles, membership sites, and ClickBank.
When I go to my favorite programming forum, most of the replies are about PHP frameworks, WordPress plugins, and outsourcing.
Don't bother making a report about something unless it's a hot topic that a lot of people in your small niche are talking about. I'm not a believer in going mass market unless you have a lot of money to invest. If you're just starting out on a niche, start in the niche.
Now that you know what everyone is talking about, figure out what people are paying for. You have friends in the same niche you're in, right? What have they all bought recently? What big launches are going on in your niche? What have you personally paid for? There's no point in getting into a niche unless people are willing to spend a bare minimum of $100 on you.
I have bought products showing me how to make a software outline, how to write faster, how to create video, how to make audio products, and they have all accelerated my path towards getting things done.
The final part of your research now that you know what people are talking about and what people are buying is finding out what your competitors are doing. Go to Google and search for the niche you're in.
If you are thinking about creating a course on how to sell on eBay, search the forum you're on for the word "ebay." Search Google for "eBay eBook," "eBay guide," "eBay course," "eBay video." Go on amazon.com and look for books in that niche and DVDs in that niche as well. This is good because not only does it show you what areas to target but also what your price point should be.
You should match your price point fairly well to your competitors but price slightly higher, that way you will have a higher perceived value.
Stage 2: Solve It
Now that you've done your research, you should know how to adjust your idea to deliver the best solution by answering people's questions on forums, figuring out what they're paying for and duplicating or doing the job better than your competitors. Now, it's time to create the product.
I have never spent more than a few days making a simple lead generation product, and by lead generation, I need a product that's $100 or cheaper. Your product will be a lot better if you write it without distractions and write it as fast as possible. You can always go back and make version 2.0 later.
What's more important than spending or wasting a lot of time on creating a product is to add your own "how to" information. I can go online right now and find lots of tips and advice about placing an eBay ad.
I can find lots of videos on YouTube showing me the mechanics of placing an eBay ad, but I want you to show me what makes an eBay ad profitable. I want you to tell me exactly what steps I should take from start to finish from having something to sell on eBay to actually placing the ad and making the sale and what to do after that.
Also think about what simple problem can you solve for them. For some people, an eBay problem might be that they cannot get people to read their ad.
The sooner you make your info-product not just "how to" but also problem and solution-based, the more people are going to benefit from your book, the better reviews it's going to get and you'll have an easier time making a sale. And finally, what success stories can you gather from the people who use your product?
Here's something to think about. If someone has not yet bought your eBook or home study course, all they have to go on is your pitch page or sales letter.
That's why you need to make your sales letter as best as it can possibly be and the way I like to make a sales letter better is to gather testimonials or proof and show that on the sales letter – so, people who have not yet bought can see that others have benefited from this training.
And that's how you're going to create the perfect info-product and make money doing it. First, researching it in forums by what's making money, what your competitors are doing, and then create that product by offering your own unique how to, solving a problem, and gathering success stories from those people whose problems you have solved and place it back on the sales letter.
Did this help you make your next info-product? Where have you been lacking?
In the research stage or in the creation stage? And how will you get better? Leave me a blog comment below right now while it's still fresh on your mind.
Don’t Tell People Everything You Know
I am going to tell you something right now that I hope will get you over that hump of making your next information product. It should also change your minds about what your customers are actually paying for and what information you should be giving away.
My mentor for many years was a guy called John Calder. He was really arrogant (which is a good thing!) and the best piece of advice he ever shared with me was, "Don't tell people everything you know."
But what does that mean?
Leave Room For A Sequel!
Here is something to think about: How come every movie you watch does not end with all the characters dying? Because there is a chance that the movie will get a sequel and that some or all of the characters can be in movie number two.
The same is true with your report creation. Do you try to put everything you know about a certain subject in one report? Sure! Can you put EVERYTHING there is to say in that report? Of course not!
A great example is my "Time Management on Crack" report. This is something that started off with me just explaining how I get things done, how I'm so productive. Then, I later added in formulas for writing, for blogging, for video creation and so on.
In fact, it has now tripled the size and got ten times' as much information - and I am still adding to it! But is that my only product about time management? Of course not!
Lance Tamashiro and I have a Membership site all about time management called, "IM Productivity Secrets." I also have a report called "100 Time Savers" that lists 100 quick and easy things you can use to save a minute a day.
Even though "Time Management on Crack" is the best report anyone could ever get about time management, I do have a prequel to "Time Management on Crack," called "100 Time Savers" that is at a lower price point and gets people ready for the main course, and I have a sequel to "Time Management on Crack" called "IM Productivity Secrets" which is a monthly membership site that contains ongoing training. And none of these products have any overlap.
You don't have to give away every single thing you know, because you might have a Volume II of your product.
Keep It Simple!
Here is the next thing to think about: Do you know how your cable internet gets from your computer out into the world? Probably not. I don't know either. But I still can USE my internet.
Do you know how your power company pumps electricity into your home? I don't either. But I still know how to turn on a light switch.
I can teach subjects, such as time management, without knowing exactly how psychology works, or how everything in my brain works. People don't have to know all the details.
My copywriting report, "Fast Food Copywriting," doesn't explain every single facet about copywriting, because I don't KNOW everything about copywriting. What I do know is how to accomplish a task. And that is all you really should be explaining in your paid materials, is how you accomplish a task and how other people can do the same thing you do.
I have many home study courses teaching people various things about PHP and WordPress. All I do is show how to use a certain script or WordPress plugin, and how to tweak it. That's it! Do I explain in every single report exactly what a function or a variable is? Not necessarily. I just show how to put those things into action.
And that leads me to my final point about not telling people everything you know: You deserve to get paid for your expertise.
Here is a really easy formula to decide what information you should charge for, and what to give away. If the information you are teaching about your subject is a step-by-step "How to" process, people should pay for that. But if all you are sharing is a simple tip, that is free article content or blog post content.
Inside "Fast Food Copywriting," I explain my step-by-step process for copywriting. But I also have hundreds of articles about copywriting that explain simple ideas like a headline or bullet points.
In "Time Management on Crack," there are five productivity levels you can master. There are also over 28 formulas when it comes to article writing, report writing, copywriting, and more.
I share my general time management advice in articles and in my blog posts. But the "How to", the Step-by-Step, people have to pay for that.
I hope you are now ready to knock out that next article or report - because guess what? You don't have to tell people everything you know!
Did this blog post help you? Tell me in what way... that comment form won't bite.
How To Break Into Any Niche Part 4: Don’t Burn Up Your Blog Too Fast
In the past we've talked about creating an autoresponder sequence to automate relationship building with your prospects or even your existing customers.
If you had 10 autoresponder messages, you wouldn't set them up to use them up in 10 days. You'd space them out to give subscribers a chance to take in the information.
Remember, you aren't only concerned with readers. The bottom line is how much money does your blog make... if it makes nothing then what's the point?
I'm not saying it has to make money directly with ad space or AdSense. If your blog gets you some regular traffic, which leads to more autoresponder signups, which eventually makes you more sales, then your blog is a source of income.
- You want to keep your readers' interest, but at some point get them a little bit bored so they'll check out one of your other products that sells something.
- You want to give other blogs and sites a chance to mention a recent article of yours before it's taken off the front page.
- Don't forget that search engines penalize sites that toss up too many pages too quickly and don't grow at an average rate.
Like I said when I started this blog, I wrote 50 blog entries before I made the blog public. I could post one entry a day and burn it all up in two months, then be left with nothing else to write. Or I could post one entry per week and last a year. I could post 2 entries a week and last 6 months before I had to come up with any new content.
Here are my tips about not burning up a blog too fast, based on my experience with running membership sites and watching other peoples' blogs start out well but eventually fail miserably:
- Have a reserve of emergency articles -- at least 6 months to a year's worth -- to continue populating your blog at a regular pace. This doesn't have to be a lot. If you intend on posting a minimum of one article per month, all you need are 6 to 12 articles.
- Don't post more than twice a week. Daily is too much even for active subscribers to keep up with.
- If your articles are 1000 words in length or longer, break them up into manageable 250-500 word pieces. You can perform a word count using Microsoft Word or any decent text editor.
- Post replies to comments for two reasons: to let your readers know that you are reading what they say and encourage them to keep commenting, and keep your entries fresh, even if they are a few days or weeks old.
Comment below and tell me if you have a reserve of emergency articles for your blog or if you just wing it... and if so do you post on a regular basis or whenever you feel like it?
How to Break Into Any Niche Part 3: Virginal Markets
If you have spent even 3 weeks or less learning about Internet marketing, I'm sure you have heard about blogging, videos, squeeze pages, pop-ups, and autoresponders.
Everyone in internet marketing uses them. There's one problem with that: EVERYONE IN INTERNET MARKETING USES THEM. When you are in the internet marketing niche and use autoresponders, you are Superman and you are still stuck on the planet Krypton -- you're just like everyone else.
If you take all the internet marketing techniques you know into other niches, you become a guy who can fly around in the air while everyone else is stuck walking from place to place.
Say you are in the fly fishing niche. Everyone else is being non-imaginative and tossing up poorly made web pages with hundreds of articles and no call to action. Or placing AdSense on pages and not trying to make the site sticky with an autoresponder newsletter or with backend products or paid memberships
No one is making YouTube videos, displaying one time offers, or split testing. You will be the guy setting up joint ventures while everyone else is still trying webrings and link exchanges.
If you take what you know about internet marketing and apply it to a sleepy, underdeveloped niche, you will become Superman. You will kick ass.
Never sell to the "how to make money" niche. It is full of people with no money lying about how they made money, or people with no money wanting to make money.
If you have to do internet marketing, narrow it down. Internet marketing is too broad of a niche. That's like having "computers" or "computer programming" as your niche... it's too damn non-specific. Instead of internet marketing, focus on search engine optimization, or article marketing, or Web 2.0 promotion (Squidoo, StumbleUpon, MySpace) ... don't be the same as everyone else.
Don't be the same as ANYONE else, in fact.
Don't try to sell your niche stuff to internet marketers. If you are breaking into a new niche you have to start from scratch. The exception to this is if you want a jumpstart, create something that's NOT just an e-book -- a DVD or CD -- and sell resale rights to the internet marketers.
NEVER offer private label rights. In doing this you are creating more competition for yourself but you are getting your name out there.
Don't brag about or mention your extra-cirricular efforts to other internet marketers. If word gets around that your niche is lucrative and an easy target you could get some fellow Supermen trying to take away some of your action.
This is why some hardcore niche marketers will use a fake name, register a totally new business name and host their sites on a separate server with WHOIS protection to keep their real identity secret.
I don't do the fake name stuff with my PHP niche because I am just outside of the internet marketing niche. My niche is where PHP and internet marketing overlap. I teach site builders how to write PHP scripts. So I am not teaching something as advanced as the techie people who want to learn programming as a career, but slightly more advanced than people watching WordPress videos or learning Flash and HTML.
My competition consists either of rockstar programmers who know a lot but can't or won't teach it to dummies, and have more fun talking about XML processing or RAID arrays instead of the easy stuff I teach. I also have competition who are internet marketers but not rockstar programmers, who pass along little tips but don't understand PHP enough to write their own code. They only know how to pass along other peoples' stuff.
To sum breaking into virginal markets using your existing IM skills:
- Be unique.
- Get into a niche that you know like the back of your hand.
- Stay away from the how to make money niche.
- Use your internet marketing skills to outperform everyone else in non-IM niches.
- Don't talk about your efforts with internet marketers.
- Know exactly what kind of people you are selling to.
- Know exactly who your competition is and what kinds products and web sites they have.
Once you've got that site setup, use:
- The 5 Minute Article method to get an infoproduct developed quickly in a couple of hours.
- Fast Food Copywriting to put together sales letters quickly.
- PaySensor to handle PayPal payments and deliver products to customers via email.
- Action PopUp to gather leads and stick them into a mailing list like ListMail or Aweber.
- JV Plus along with a system like Clickbank to turn competitors into your affiliates.
- Sales Page Tactics to increase your conversion rates even more.
My question to you is:
What is your best tip to establish yourself in a new niche?
How To Break Into Any Niche Part 2: Relationship Building
Once you get in the habit of setting up a list for every product you create, the way to get people to remember you is by showing your personality.
I build relationships through forum marketing.
- You could post special offers every now and then by giving visitors of a certain forum a huge discount compared to the general public. I do this with WSOs.
- You could add video responses to posts every now and then and send traffic there so people see your face instead of the words you type. I did this with a YouTube video but I'm not sure if I'm going to post to YouTube on a regular basis because I felt like I was talking about myself too much.
- You could do a low tech link exchange. If someone posts a comment on your blog with their URL, visit their blog and leave a thoughtful comment with your URL.
Use your real name. Any time you join a forum, use your real first and last name. If you plan on pumping out lots of small products you are going to have lots of small web sites and almost never one big web site. The exception could be if you register YourName.com and stick a blog on there with a link to all your products.
Find a forum in your niche that ranks high on the search engines, and make that the only forum you visit for a month. I don't care if there is some forum you are addicted to and have to check every 5 minutes. Take a vacation from that forum and build a reputation on that forum.
I want you to make 50 posts over time on this new forum. They need to be real quality replies that use your expertise on the subject. They need to be answers that could only have come from you.
Never make a "me too" post. Never mention your web site in any reply. Don't start any new topics, just reply to existing ones. Many forums have a link to find posts with no responses... you can reply to these but stay away from any more than a month old.
Once you have these 50 posts, edit your forum profile and add a signature with a link to your web site. Many message boards will require a certain number of posts before you can add a signature anyway.
Only put one link there. Make the text on the link a headline, not just the name of your site. Don't make the text any fancy size or colors, just center if it possible.
Then leave the forum and forget about it. Search engines like Google will pick it up. Now if someone is looking for the solution to one of those specific problems you solved on the forum, they'll find that thread and if you were helpful, might click your signature link and end up on your site. This is in addition to all the members of the forum who visit it on a regular basis.
I have done this with nearly a dozen message boards in my niche. What got me started doing this was checking my referrer logs. Your referrer logs in your control panel will tell you what sites send traffic your way. So someone might ask for help in getting a freebie script of mine customized, or ask if a product I offer is really legit. I register on the forum using my real name, answer the question, then poke around a little while after.
I have even signed up to a $60/month private forum to build relationships based on my referrer logs... but that's just because I'm crazy.
I consider using referrer logs to decide which forums to hit a better indicator than Google search results, because you're already certain traffic is going to flow in your direction.
How To Break Into Any Niche Part 1: Funnel Everything Into A List
Any time you offer anything, you need to create a sublist for it. If you have a paid product, create a sublist to put customers into.
If you offer a freebie report, create a sublist for it and require your visitors to opt-in so you can send the download link via e-mail. Don't ask for an e-mail address after they get the product, this works about as poorly as if you sold someone a book and then asked them to pay for it after they're done reading it.
These all need to go to the SAME autoresponder (so you can broadcast a product launch to everyone) but have segmented sublists so you can deliver updates only to some existing buyers, or offer special deals to certain lists.
Do you want to know everything I know about list building?
- Turning existing customers into subscribers gathers the most responsive subscribers.
- Requiring an opt-in in exchange for a free product gathers much less responsive subscribers.
- Trading free information (a newsletter) for an e-mail address gathers even less responsive subscribers.
- Getting subscribers from pay-per-click traffic, co-ops and traffic exchanges gathers subscribers not worth marketing to.
Here is how I broke into the PHP niche: I created a newsletter and offered a free 30-page PDF report in exchange for signing up. This is my "main" sublist. I found some old articles of mine and filled up an autoresponder series with 6 months of follow-ups (1 or 2 messages per week). Most of the time -- especially at the beginning -- I would offer lots of free advice and information. A few weeks into the seriesI mention some of my freebie products to get them on more of my lists. Then I mention some more of my paid products.
Notice how I say "mention." I don't say I switch from articles to promoting my products. I talk about something and then say, "Here is how you solve that problem: (my URL)" or, "If you are interested in that topic, here is more information about it: (my URL)."
Blend content with sales. Too many people try to sell too early or try a hard sell after piling on lots of free info.
About filling up an autoresponder, I tend to do one per week for six months for the main newsletter. For the product sublists, I will space out messages at about one per month.
- First I would ask what they thought of the product, and sent them to a feedback form so I could actually get their response.
- In the next message I would offer a surprise bonus for being a loyal subscriber.
- At some point I would send them to a feedback form again asking for a testimonial and telling them to make sure to include their name and web site URL so they could get some free promotion from my site. (It's always about what's in it for them.)
You don't need to fill up every sublist with an autoresponder sequence because you're going to be pushing your product launches to all sublists every now and then. You also need to remember that many people will be subscribed to more than one of your sublists -- and who wants 5 e-mails a day from the same person? Not me.
You do need people to remember who you are and that's what we'll deal with next: relationship building.
