If you’ve spent a lot of money on ebooks, software, and other things hoping to make money on the Internet but haven’t, then this tutorial is for you.

Introduction

There are plenty of ebooks and courses out there that supposedly teach you how to conquer Google and make millions on autopilot. These courses are great for the customers that do manage to make money from them, but what about the customers that don’t? Are they just poor thinkers, slackers, and technofobes? Did they fail to implement some “crucial secret technique”, and that’s why they haven’t made anything?

If you’re one of those people who has tried all of the latest courses and still doesn’t make much (or anything) online, and is also tired of being sold hype – then you’ll find this tutorial useful.

If you’re living comfortably from your online marketing endevours and are quite content with your knowledge, then this tutorial isn’t for you, as you’ll already know everything that’s contained within it.

There is one crowd this tutorial was specifically written for, and that’s those of you who have a site ranked “on the first page of Google” and think that you’re a top SEO expert because of it, but are still puzzled as to why you’re not getting any sales. Perhaps it’s because you haven’t done a Keyword Search to see how many actual searches your term gets a month. If you don’t get many, and no one has ever taught you that ranking on the first page of Google under obscure terms is a waste of time, then I’m afraid you’ve bought into the hype of charlatans, and a lot you’ve learned about Internet marketing is most likely untrue. If you feel this could be you, then this tutorial was written for you especially.

I’m going to be blunt, and to the point about why you’re failing in Internet marketing. I’m not going to tell you that you’re doing well, nor am I going to hype things up and tell you that you’re going to make a lot of money by the end of this tutorial. What you will gain here is one, simple thing – a basic understanding of the psychology behind an Internet marketer. This psychology will be your framework to your future learning and success.

Believe it or not, but the vast majority of people fail at Internet marketing. They buy into hype, it doesn’t work, and then they quit. A simple process, but it goes on all the time, and makes real Internet marketers a lot of money from the hype they sell.

Now don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of marketers that sell hyped products that are also backed up with good, solid information, that will teach you how to make money if you apply the principles they teach. In fact, hype and a good product should go hand in hand in any form of marketing. The problem is, is that most people who buy these products have no experience in marketing, and therefore fail to grasp why they’re doing what they’re doing, as opposed to just the “how”. Not understanding why you’re doing something is the number one reason you’ll probably fail.

Internet marketing isn’t an easy game when you first start it. It requires time and study, just like any other field of expertise. The word “marketing” in “Internet marketing” actually means that there’s marketing principles involved. Believe it or not, but many “Internet marketers” have no knowledge of marketing fundamentals, and it’s for this reason they lack the ability to recognize untapped niches, how to innovate a new product within the niche, and how to profit from it.

It’s by learning the core basics of Internet marketing that you’ll be able to build up your knowledge and eventually run a successful online business. Until you understand these basics, it’s less likely you’ll become rich from this field.

You’ll find lots of products being sold at various places on the Internet offering training and techniques in order to acquire “first page Google rankings”. The examples the product creators give are of keywords certainly on the first page of Google, however they more often than not (though not always) receive 0 (yes 0) searches a month when checked with the external Google keyword tool. Oddly enough however, people seem to buy these products in the belief that they’re going to be dominating competitive keyword terms that will make them thousands, when even the product creators themselves seem to lack an understanding of what SEO actually is. Never mind not knowing how to find a niche – not knowing how to do a search with the Google Keyword Tool would seem a much more pressing matter.

This isn’t an attack on anyone, or me proclaiming to be better than these product creators, it’s rather just a statement of observable fact which you too can see for yourself.

There are plenty of products that do give examples of genuinely competitive keywords, and these sorts of products are usually created by people who know what they’re talking about, however there are plenty of more products that give examples of ranking under the “first page on Google” for keyword terms that should make people laugh, but for whatever reason make people buy their product instead.

People buying into this sort of hype led me to realise that there’s a massive market of would-be Internet marketers who are being unethically misled, and given the perception that Internet marketing must be no more than a scam. Many newcomers to the field will believe almost anything they’re told when it comes to marketing, and will almost trust anyone as well. If you think you’re one of them – don’t worry, all of us were – when the big red font and testimonials of any sales page would almost force us to just get out our credit card “one more time” for the next latest and greatest fad. Sooner or later however, one realises that the key to making money online doesn’t lie in any secret remedy.

But perhaps you don’t even want to make Internet marketing a full time job, and you have more modest goals to only earn a bit of part time cash? Regardless of your ambitions, understanding a few key principles is crucial to succeeding on the Internet.

The Five Pitfalls

During my time in online marketing, I’ve seen and met a number of people who have wanted to get into the field after hearing all the success stories on the news about marketers running their own online businesses and making millions. Some of these people end up making a sale or two, but ultimately give up their efforts because they can’t make enough money to leave their job. It just “wasn’t what they expected”.

From my personal experience when I was starting out in Internet marketing years ago (and failed multiple times), and my observations of others who fail in this field, it seems there are five crucial pitfalls that will almost guarantee failure. All you need to do is fall victim to one of these five pitfalls and your entire Internet marketing endevours could eventually come to a crashing, permanent halt.

You may not even realise that one or more of the following five pitfalls may apply to you, but read over this section carefully, and honestly, as it’s by consciously looking out for and avoiding these common pitfalls that you’ll have the mindset needed to succeed.

1. Lacking an understanding of basic marketing principles and how they apply online

Most people who get into Internet marketing acquire their knowledge from courses, or free Internet forums, where practical “to the point” strategies of how to make money are taught. People will soon learn about SEO, PPC, setting up a squeeze page, building a mailing list, becoming an affiliate, and even how to sell their own products. After making a few sales, the new marketer will typically think “they’ve finally worked it out” and will simply just replicate what they’ve done, to make more and more sales. Some of these people will go on to do quite well for themselves, however most of them will, inevitably, not succeed in the long run, making at the most a few sales a week.

The reason for this is because these people aren’t marketing, or at least, not consciously. They’re simply repeating a set money making formula that will eventually become obsolete. They will remain incapable of improvising, recognizing untapped, profitable niches, and knowing how to target them correctly. For them, they’ll always be “hanging on” for the next great marketing fad that will generate them a little bit more pocket change, be it site flipping, CPA, or whatever it is.

Understanding the basic principles of marketing, and how these same principles apply to the online world, is absolutely fundamental to your success. Instead of being on the Internet marketing bandwagon full of people using other peoples ideas, you’ll be able to innovate, devise your own marketing strategies, and target niches that haven’t been fully exploited.

Later on in this book under the chapter titled ‘Fundamental Online Marketing Knowledge’ – I will be discussing the basic principles of online marketing that you should be familiar with. By understanding the content in that chapter, you’ll be able to avoid this common pitfall. For now, it’s just important to know that this pitfall exists, and that understanding the core fundamentals of marketing is extremely important if you want to run your own online business.

2. Believing everything you hear 

We are a social species. We’ve evolved over hundreds and thousands of years due to our ability to cooperate with one another and work together. Our advanced communication through language is what set is apart from all the other animals and allowed us to ultimately reach the level we’re at today. In order for humans to cooperate and help one another, we need to trust each other. This form of “trust” is instinctual to us, and given the philosophy that it’s best to give people “the benefit of the doubt”, it’s quite obvious that we’d rather trust someone than not trust them, even strangers. This is a marvellous thing, however it does have one negative side effect – we’re born gullible.

It’s not until later on in life that we realise that not everyone can be trusted, and we condition ourselves to stop trusting certain types of people that we may have trusted before. We still nevertheless continue to look to others for advice, even complete strangers, and often take their words to heart. Charlatans, frauds and confidence tricksters play upon this innate will of ours to trust strangers.

So what does a modern charlatan look like? Are they flamboyant, charismatic folk who play their harps in order to lure passers by to purchase wares from their street stall, with their various trinkets and snake oil remedies? Well, believe it or not but some charlatans are still like that, however most have evolved with the times and operate much more subtley. In fact, most charlatans today aren’t even aware that they’re charlatans at all. It’s not even a conscious career decision.

You may be surprised to know that charlatanism isn’t specific to alternative medicine and the field of new age psychic readings. It exists in just about every field of business, including online marketing. You’ve tried those courses which promise to make you tens of thousands over night. You’ve seen those acai berry products supposedly endorsed by non existent experts, with fake testimonials. You’ve heard of those marketers who have made millions from selling useless weight loss tablets who managed to avoid the FTC. Would any of them consider themselves charlatans? Quite the contrary, they’d consider themselves good Internet marketers.

The shocking truth is, is that many successful Internet marketers are only after your money. I’m not here to guru bash, as most gurus are respectable, however this statement shouldn’t come as any real surprise. I know – the loving, positive atmosphere that you’ll find when you hand over your money for the next greatest product is quite therepeutic, however that’s often all it is.

“But I’m an Internet marketer too, surely they’d be honest with their own kind?” – most marketers are honest, just like any other person, however this is the business of making money after all, and increasing one’s brand recognition and reputation leads to more sales. This is a marketer’s main motivation, and many lie, or give advice in areas they know nothing about, in order to maintain their reputation. Teaching you how to really make millions isn’t a motivation for them.

So what does a marketer have to gain by telling you lies as opposed to just being honest? The answer is, is that they often don’t know enough about a certain field in order to be honest. In fact, they most probably don’t even know that they’re even lieing. Perhaps ‘misinformation’ is a better word, as a lie normally involves deception.

Some marketers will often parrot what they’ve heard elsewhere in order to do something as simple as create content for a blog. They probably don’t have any intention of misleading you, it’s rather just a side effect.

Let’s look at some of the common, widely accepted facts in SEO that… well, aren’t really facts -

Supposed Fact: Building backlinks too quickly to your website will result in a penalization.
The Truth: Penalization is a big word, the worst case scenario is often simply link devaluation, not penalization.

Supposed Fact: All new sites in competitive niches can’t be ranked for at least 6 months.
The Truth: New sites in competitive niches often fail to rank quickly due to the niche being competitive, and Google requiring extra trust for new sites that target competitive niches. This is counteracted by building site authority.

Supposed Fact: The Google ‘Sandbox’ definitely exists.
The Truth: The notion of whether a ‘sandbox’ actually exists or not is under debate, and it most likely doesn’t exist. The sandbox is a convenient way to explain to the masses much more advanced Google algorithms.

Supposed Fact: Backlinks from spammy sites will get your site deindexed/penalized
The Truth: The most that will happen is that these links will be ignored, nothing more.

So, if the “Supposed Facts” are mainstream knowledge, what does that have to say about the vast majority of Internet marketers? Obviously, that they’re misinformed.

I’ve created a list below to look at how, and why, people would spread misinformation such as this. It’s divided into two columns “Avenue” and “Benefit”. “Avenue” lists the way the misinformation spreads, and “Benefit” lists how the person spreading the misinformation benefits.

These are just some of the many avenues that misinformation spreads, and some of the benefits for the people that spread it. Once again, it’s important to realise that misinformation doesn’t necessarily spread because of any malicious intent, rather it’s more like a virus of incorrect advice (most likely originating from a blog post creating link bait) that continues to spread from one newcomer to the next due to ignorance.

So in short, to avoid this pitfall, quite simply: don’t believe everything you hear.

3. Failing to test things

This pitfall is an extension from the previous one of “believing everything you hear”. It’s all well and good to now be cautious about what people say, however how do you know who’s telling the truth, and who isn’t? Welcome to the wonderful world of science.

The scientific method is a process whereby you can test things for yourself to acquire new knowledge, or confirm (or show evidence against) existing knowledge. Finding out the truth about things is the goal of science, and we’re going to be using these same principles in Internet marketing to find out what works, and what doesn’t.

First of all, science relies on the forming of a hypothesis. A hypothesis is quite simply a proposed explanation for some phenomenon. It isn’t necessarily true, and it isn’t necessarily false either, it’s just a possible explanation.

An example of a phenomenon may be your site suddenly dropping from its first place ranking in Google after two years. This phenomenon no doubt has an explanation, and you may recall that you built a large amount of inbound links to your site over the last week. Thus, you may form a hypothesis that your ranking drop was due to you building too many backlinks in a short period of time. And thus, the hypothesis would be that building too many links too quickly will harm your rankings.

Where most people now go wrong is they would accept such a hypothesis as factual, simply because it’s a possibility. Furthermore they’ll seek confirmation bias by finding other Internet marketers that agree this is the reason they lost their rankings. This represents a gross misunderstanding of logic and reason, and is what leads to hypotheses such as this becoming widespread in the Internet marketing industry.

In order for a hypothesis to have any validity, it needs empirical evidence to back it up. The keyword here is empirical. By only demonstrating that you had a site which had a number 1 ranking for two years, which suddenly dropped once you started building links to it, you’re not presenting any form of empirical evidence.

You see, there could be a whole range of possible explanations as to why your site’s ranking dropped. First of all, consider the possibility that eventually any site will have its ranking drop at some point in time. Whether it’s one month, ten years, or fifty years. The first thing you must consider is whether or not there’s a possibility that your backlink building coinciding with your site dropping in rank was merely a coincidence. If it is a possibility, then you cannot say for certain that building too many links too quickly will harm your ranking, as you haven’t yet ruled out coincidence.

The next thing you must ask yourself is how often you checked your rankings over this two year period? Was it every day? If not every day, then do you have a chart showing the exact position your site ranked every single week over this two year period? If not, then is it a possibility that your sites ranking has dropped & fluctuated many times previously, however you just never checked? If all of your traffic comes from SEO, then perhaps you could check your traffic history over a two year period to see whether or not there were any other large dips in traffic, which could possibly signify previous ranking drops. If such dips in traffic suggest that you may have lost ranking before without you being aware of it, then your hypothesis that “building too many links too quickly will harm your rankings” starts to lose credibility.

Perhaps at the time you lost your rankings you also did some other things to your site, besides link building. After all, if you suddenly decided to pay so much attention to your website by building links to it, surely you must have done some on-site optimization as well? Perhaps you edited the site content, the title tags, created some new pages, linked to another site, restructed it, changed the theme, did something to it? If you did, then editing some part of your site would be another hypothesis for your ranking drop.

If you consider that Google will often reevaluate a sites ranking when parts of it have changed, then your on-site optimization could be a far more likely explanation for your ranking drop than your off-site link building.

But what if you didn’t make any changes to your site, you only built backlinks to it, and nothing else whatsoever could have led to the ranking drop? Well, there’s still coincidence, and in order to confirm that it was definitely the link building that made it drop, you need to replicate the same result, many times, and be able to rule out all other possible explanations.

Furthermore, Google  changes its ranking algorithms on a near daily basis, making pinpointing an exact action that caused a ranking fluctuation difficult.

Let’s say you had another site that was also 2 years old, in a similar niche, and you decided to build the exact same types of backlinks to that site. If that sites ranking suddenly dropped as well, then that is some evidence to support your hypothesis. It makes coincidence less likely.

The problem however, is that very, very rarely, does the typical Internet marketer test hypotheses. Instead, they’ll jump to a conclusion based off a one off encounter, or based on the research of another person before attempting to replicate the results themselves. Remember the previous pitfall titled – “believing everything you hear”. Don’t believe that just because some SEO expert says something such as “if you don’t vary your anchor text 50% of the time you will be penalized” that it’s necessarily true. It could be true, but how do you know? Test it and confirm it for yourself. Definitely use the information from their studies, but certainly try to replicate the results for yourself before you take their word as gospel.

The reason I’ve emphasized this point so much is because I’ve seen plenty of so called “SEO experiments” that fail to rule out other possible explanations. When I’ve gone ahead and conducted the same experiments myself, I’ve arrived at entirely different, unexpected results. If I had never gone ahead and tested what I read, or what people said, I’d be superstitious about duplicate content, about building links too fast, about the Google sandbox, and about a whole range of other things. I used to be years ago, however this changes once you do independent testing to arrive at your own conclusions as to what works and what doesn’t. I can read and discuss other people’s conclusions, and listen to what they have to say, but I will always test what anyone says and verify that it’s true before I believe it. This is what you must do as well if you ever hope to acquire a good understanding of SEO, or any other field in Internet marketing.

This pitfall is one of the main things that seems to hold marketers back from achieving good SEO rankings. There are many posts on forums from people saying how they’re “always cautious not to build links too quickly” but that they’re “still not achieving good rankings”. The thing they don’t understand, is that their cautiousness is precisely the reason that they’re not achieving good rankings. The problem is that they’ve never tried building a massive amount of links just to even so much as test whether or not Google does apply a penalty for mass link building. Even if they are penalized on a test site, at least they’ve confirmed the results for themselves.

You should conduct the same testing for yourself. Sacrifice one website of yours as a “guinea pig” and build as many good quality links to it as you possibly can, and just see if there’s any penalty. Confirm for yourself whether or not “building too many links too quickly will result in a penalty” is nothing more than a widespread SEO myth.

You should do this same thing for other things such as duplicate content. Try submitting a duplicate article to the same article directories instead of rewriting it, and check whether or not the incoming links are still being indexed or not.

It doesn’t end there, test everything that you hear. I cannot emphasize the importance of this enough. Even if your site does end up getting banned, or deindexed for something you’ve done, then surely the education that you’ve acquired is well worth the penalty. I’d much rather sacrifice one site and use it for testing, and build up twenty other websites by the fastest possible means based upon what works, rather than be slow, cautious, and superstitious with 21 websites, not taking any risks in fear of having them all banned.

Testing Doesn’t Have To Only Revolve Around What Others Say

You don’t just have to test things that other people have said. You can come up with your own SEO theories and test them as well. It’s good to innovate and try new things, it’s part of marketing and is what will separate you from the masses who only play SEO by the standards set by others.

Take for example one commonly held belief that acquiring too many links from blog posts or forums will result in them being filtered (devalued). At first this would seem a very real possibility, since it is possible that external links are devalued or filtered (don’t confuse this with penalization).

I tested this and found out that the reason these sorts of links became devalued was because the authority of the websites the links were placed on was very low. It wasn’t due to the links being posted on a blog, or a forum, but rather due to the site the link was placed in being full of other spam, having little authority, and therefore passing little value. When Google did check the neighbourhoods that these links were coming from, they of course found them to be spammy, and would therefore naturally devalue all the outgoing links.

Over a period of one year, I started finding high PR forums and high PR blog posts from trusted authority sites and began placing my links on them. These links were never filtered or devalued, and my rankings soared in some rather competitive niches. I was waiting, and waiting for the links to be devalued, but they never were, and I made a nice income from it.

Had I gone off one commonly held belief that lots of incoming links from forums are bad, then I would never have discovered for myself just how incredibly effective they actually are when they come from high authority sites.

I’m not saying that forum links alone will rank you in competitive niches, but rather they can help complement a broader SEO strategy. Keep in mind that the algorithms are always changing in SEO, and what may have worked last month won’t necessarily work tomorrow.

To summarize this pitfall, I know people mean well when they give bad advice, but sometimes it’s advice that can indirectly end your business. So, to avoid this pitfall, it’s important that you test everything you hear, and that you also devise new online marketing strategies, and test whether they work. If they don’t work, you have nothing to lose, if they do, you have lots to potentially gain.

4. Looking for the easy way out

It’s human nature to find the easiest way to do things. Whether it be making money, completing a task, or even seducing someone we’re attracted to, we’ll typically put in the minimal effort required in order to reap the greatest rewards. There’s nothing wrong with this in itself, as doing more work than is necessary is pointless, however there comes a time when our short sightedness can hinder our long term goals, particularly in Internet marketing.

A common thing that millions of people fall for each year are pyramid schemes. The potential of making a lot of money from other people, with hardly any effort required, appeals to our most basic of instincts. It’s for this reason that pyramid schemes continue to flourish, despite them being shown to be of no profit to anyone but those based at the top of the pyramid. Pyramid schemes have grown to a level where governments have been forced to regulate against them and make most of these types of schemes illegal.

It should be obvious to anyone that you can’t have something for nothing, however every day people continue to waste their time and money on endevours that even they though know are cons. There seems to be a part of our psychology that is drawn to the prospect of instant reward for no effort, and no matter how much we try and reason that this sort of thing isn’t possible, we still fall victim to it.

If people weren’t constantly trying to find ways to make a lot of money without putting in any effort, then Nigerian scams, pyramid schemes, confidence tricksters, and even the gambling industry itself wouldn’t be in business. The fact that these sorts of industries are as big as they are shows that mankind isn’t as smart as we’d like to think.

I believe that this pitfall – “looking for the easy way out” is the one that effects prospective Internet marketers the most. Many people are lured into the industry with promises of making overnight fortunes. If faced between a choice of purchasing a course that genuinely teaches online marketing, and another that promises ten thousand dollars a day with only a month’s work, then people will unfortunately choose the ten thousand dollar a day course more often than not.

The fact people buy into this hype shapes the Internet marketing industry, and encourages charlatanism. Why would anyone go out of their way to spend months creating a genuine product that will teach you how to setup an online business, when someone can just sell a small guide titled “how to make a million dollars overnight” and make more sales? There’s little incentive for honesty when consumers drive the market by encouraging dishonesty.

So the reason I’m telling you all this is because, quite simply, there is no quick fix to make a full time living online. You don’t need a special course, or a special ebook, in order to learn how to setup and run a successful online marketing business. You need to desensitize yourself to hype, and realise that hype is what you should be generating as the marketer with your products.

There are of course some great Internet marketing products out there, and some may save you a lot of time in finding out information that would normally have taken you a lot longer to learn by yourself, however as a general rule, the thing which will bring you success isn’t reading blog posts, or any ebook, but taking action. In short, there’s no quick fix to making millions, and any product promising an easy path to do is is most likely a con, or won’t work.

5. Not taking any risk

Risk is a necessary part of any business, and minimising risk whilst still creating the greatest potential outcome is a part of risk management. In online marketing, our desired outcome is profit, and recurring profit at that.

Without taking any risk with your business, you wouldn’t be making any profit. Even the most conservative online marketers still take risk, even if it’s small risk. Take for example registering a domain name and paying for hosting. There’s a risk that the site won’t generate any profit at all, and the money you paid for the domain name and the hosting, will go to waste. Nevertheless, you’re willing to take the risk, because you believe that you have a plan to make more money from the website than what you’re paying in hosting fees (at least I hope so).

Risk extends beyond this, in many ways that aren’t apparently obvious. Companies can risk their brand name by conducting less desirable practices, such as spamming. They can also risk penalties if what they’re doing goes against regulations. If you created a website filled with cloaked text, there’s a risk that Google will deindex the site, costing you money from the domain registration fee and the time you spent working on it. Everyone is susceptible to risk, and everyone must take risk, whatever business endevour they may conduct.

Part of conducting successful business is to be aware of all your risks, and have appropriate plans to minimize those risks. You must also be willing to take risks if the potential benefits of the risk are great, and the penalties are minimal.

One pitfall that many new Internet marketers fall into is that they’ll do everything by the book. By the “book”, I’m referring to a set of so called online marketing principles set forth by random ebooks, myths, and of course, some truth. Not building too many links to your site too quickly in fear of harming it may be considered “playing by the book”, yet as we found out in the section on “Failing To Test Things”, this fear is mostly based on myth.

The thing is, is that there is no set, proper way to do things in Internet marketing. Obviously complying with the law is a necessity, and adhering to all the conditions of any website you visit is another necessity. But outside of that, it’s pretty much innovation that evolves our field, and no innovation would ever take place without risk.

Here is a typical scenario that new Internet marketers experience, from the persona of “James”.

James has read all the ebooks about setting up an online marketing business selling digital products as an affiliate, and is keen to get started.

He’s found a good long-tail keyword to target, so he sets up a review site, conducts good on-site optimization with his keyword, writes articles pointing back to his website, submits his site to the social bookmarking sites, and then waits.

James ranks for his long-tail keyword and ends up making one sale every month, giving him about $300 profit a year. At first he’s ecstatic by this, and can’t believe that he’s actually making sales. James repeats what he’s done with lots of other sites, thinking that he’ll be able to duplicate his success.

Sure enough, he can, and after almost a year’s worth of work, James creates 10 sites that also end up generating the same profit, giving him a total of $3000 a year. James then realises that he’d need to make another 100 sites generating the same profit to break just $30,000 a year. He’s been in Internet marketing for a year at this stage and only created 10 sites, and feels he could have made more money with just a regular job given the hours he’s put into creating his sites. James decides to move to more competitive keywords with a greater search volume, a very smart move.

In doing so, of course, James doesn’t rank under these more competitive keywords using the SEO strategies he used to rank under the less competitive ones , so he seeks advice from other marketers on how to rank his website. He’s told “lots of original, unique content is the key, and make the site human friendly, so that people will want to link to it naturally, and good on-site optimization is also very important”. James follows this advice but still isn’t ranking under his competitive keywords, nor is anyone linking to his site naturally. After reading a whole range of horror stories of sites being deindexed due to shady SEO tactics, James doesn’t take any risk with aggressive link building, and instead settles for his $30,000 a year on his less competitive keywords.

The thing is, is that James will never make much money in Internet marketing. He’ll make a little, enough to support his hosting costs and make some pocket change, but because he’s too afraid to even experiment (this was covered in the third section) or take any risk, he’s not going to ever gain anything substantial.

Out of the small percentage of Internet marketers that do end up making money, most of them won’t make anything much at all, probably less than $30,000 a year. One of the main reasons for this is due to a lack of willingness to take risk. Failing to take risk is not exactly a pitfall to failure, but it’s not a road to great financial success either.

Without realising it, many people will avoid risk, even if the risk is low and has potentially great gains, with very little loss if things go wrong. Being able to recognize when risk and potential loss is low, and potential gains are high, is one of the key aspects to managing risk. Failing to do so is like having money you could have made falling into a bottomless well instead of your bank account.

For example, if there was a gambling game that guaranteed an average return on investment of 150%, would you play it? If such a game existed, then the sensible thing would be to play it, no matter what your views of gambling were, even if the short term variance worked against you. If you kept to a strict bankroll, played smartly, and didn’t vary your stakes, then over time you would profit, it’s simple probability.

Unfortunately a gambling game with such odds doesn’t exist, as if it did it would send casinos bankrupt, however what we can do is look for this type of smart gambling in business scenarios by identifying risk where our return on investment is more likely than not to pay off. This is what I like to call “smart risk”.

Risk

There are three aspects of risk that we will now cover – Assessing Risk, Reducing Risk, and Accepting Losses. Understanding each of these concepts is important.

Assessing Risk

You must be able to identify a risk and make an appropriate assessment of it before you can decide how to handle it.

There are three main things that we want to determine in risk assessment – the likelihood of the risk occuring, the potential gain from taking the risk, and the potential loss from taking the risk.

An ideal situation would be one where the likelihood of risk occuring was low, the gains from taking the risk were great, and the potential loss from taking the risk was non existent. Of course, this ideal scenario isn’t common, but the closer your assessment of a risk is to this scenario, the more willing you should be to take the risk.

Let’s say that you want to setup and create your own digital product in a new niche you’ve discovered – “how to make a baby acquire perfect pitch in music”.

You’re enthusiastic as there doesn’t seem to be too much competition through the advertising medium you wish to use (let’s say SEO). You decide to do a risk assessment on creating such an ebook and marketing it.

Your risk assessment should consist of answering questions such as the following -

1, How much time and money would it take to create an ebook teaching parents how to give their baby perfect pitch?

2. How detrimental would it be to my business if my idea doesn’t work? Can I afford for the ebook to not be successful?

3. Are there any competing products also targeting my niche? If so, how successful are they, and what are my chances of breaking into their share of the market?

4. What are my chances of ranking under converting keywords related to this niche? What will happen if I fail to rank under these keywords? How much money should I expect to make in sales if I do rank under these keywords?

These are just a few examples of questions you should be asking yourself before creating any product, or breaking into any niche, and identifying and assessing its risks.

If you work out that you’ll need to invest $500 in outsourcing the creation of the ebook, or invest 2 months in writing it, then this can be thought of as a ‘cost’. There’s a risk that you’ll have to cover this cost without making any profit.

What’s the worst identifiable outcome?

That you’ll lose $500, the cost of the domain name, hosting fees, and any other expenses, along with the time and effort that you put into targeting the niche that you could have spent elsewhere. This is the “worst identifiable outcome”, or, the potential loss involved in taking the risk of breaking into the niche with your own product.

Now, what about the best identifiable outcome? What do you have to gain from taking the risk? If you’ve done your keyword & market research correctly (all of which is explained throughout this website) then you should have a rough estimate of what you should be expecting to make in sales if everything goes well. Let’s say you work out that ranking #1 under a specific keyword term should generate you at least 10 sales a week, giving you $400 in sales a week if the ebook sells for $40.

After identifying the worst possible outcome, and the best possible outcome, what are the respective probabilities of each occurring?

To answer this question you’ll need to analyze your competition, your modes of advertising, the likelihood of your sales letter converting, and anything else that’s part of the sales process.

If you’re relying on your sales to come from organic Google rankings, then you’ll need to be confident that you can outrank competing sites for your desired keywords.

Let’s say you believe there’s a high chance that you’ll outrank the top sites under the keyword terms you’re hoping to target. You know this because you have some experience with SEO and ranking under keywords of similar competition. The risk assessment would then look as follows -

Potential to be gained from taking risk: $400 a week

Potential loss from taking risk: Waste of $500 investment and 200 hours of effort.

Probability of risk: Low, since you’re confident you will rank under the keyword terms that will make the $400 a week in sales.

Based on your risk assessment, the smart decision would be to take the risk, and go ahead and create the product. This is of course considering that your risk assessment is accurate, and you’d have to be pretty confident with SEO to be able to predict how well you’ll do in the future.

I’d be writing an entire book if I ventured into risk theory too much. All that’s important that you know about risk assessment at this stage is identifying those three things – potential from gain, potential from loss, and the possibility of the risk occurring.

Reducing Risk

Now that you’ve identified the probability of a risk, how would you go about reducing it, to make its occurence less likely?

The easiest way to avoid any financial loss is to avoid risk entirely. The only problem with this, as explained earlier, is that you won’t make any money either.

There’s a risk when you drive that you’ll be involved in a car accident, a risk that you weigh up, and one you’re probably willing to take before getting into your vehicle and decide to turn on the engine. Why are you willing to take this risk? Well, if you didn’t drive, you wouldn’t be able to get to work in more rural locations, you wouldn’t be able to travel as much, and you’d have to rely on public transport which still would carry risks in itself (buses, trains, aeroplanes, and ferries are also involved in accidents).

What the best thing to do of course , is reduce the likelihood of risk occuring. Using the example given previously of ranking under keywords related to a niche I made up such as teaching a baby how to acquire perfect music pitch.

Surely avoiding risk entirely wouldn’t be practical, or even possible.

Accepting Losses

If you conduct business in constant fear that even the slightest loss would be a major blow to not just your time and budget, but your self esteem, then odds are you won’t get very far. Failure, in one form or another, is common in just about every form of life, and it’s something that you should expect to come across during your adventures in business.

Accepting losses is another important part of Internet marketing that you will need to deal with. Provided you made the right choices, you should have no regrets of the decisions you’ve made, even if they didn’t turn in your favour. If however you took risks where the potential gain was low, and the risk and loss high (which you will undoubtedly do too at times) then these are experiences you can learn from.

Conclusion

This tutorial was designed to take you from the mindset of someone who finally achieved a first page Google ranking, however was curious why they weren’t making any money as a result. Throughout it we’ve covered a multitude of reasons that people new to Internet marketing fail, and what you can do to overcome these failures. You were also introduced to risk and its necessity in the right conditions.

Hopefully now you should be ready to strive forward and educate yourself on real Internet marketing principles that can make money, as well as innovate your own new and unique ideas to bring forth to the industry. It’s now recommended you head on over to the Heron Academy Forum to test, hear, and share these ideas.

Whilst referencing will always be the most important part of SEO, there are other factors which heavily influence a websites ranking, such as the way the website is setup. Good use of title tags, heading tags, and a well set up internal linking structure are widely known as being crucial ranking factors. All this is pretty much bread & butter that every SEO is aware of however. But what about some of the more recent factors that influence a websites rankings?

In this article we’re going to cover some of the latest SEO techniques that are used by Google when determining the ranking of a website.

Page Speed

The speed with which a page loads is one of the latest contributing factors that is used in determining whether a website should be displayed higher in the SERPs. The main motivation for this new algorithmic implementation it seems (according to Matt Cutts) is to create a better user experience. Users shouldn’t spend a long time waiting for a page to load before they view it.

One common backlash within the webmaster community with this new ranking factor is that sites that contain a lot of information will naturally take a longer time to load than sites with a short snippet of information. It therefore doesn’t make sense to penalize websites with more information versus those with less. This issue isn’t as great as it may sound however. Google states that less than 1% of search queries are influenced by a page’s speed. It’s common knowledge within the SEO industry that a page with more information will typically hold more authority than a page with less. Therefore, it would seem that the ranking benefits gained from providing more information to users would offset any small penalty that may arise from the page taking longer to load.

It nevertheless seems that the way forward will be in providing users with quick answers to their questions. One crucial way of determining whether a page can answer a user’s question quickly is the speed with which the page loads. Therefore, reducing page load times will no doubt evolve and become an important SEO technique among webmasters. Google Webmster Tools contains some useful statistics on the loading speed of your website, however a good stand-alone open source tool to use is Page Speed. This tool will monitor the speed of individual pages so that you can find out how Google will be perceiving the speed with which they load.

Social Media Exposure

It may seem like a strange suggestion that a social media website which uses nofollow tags on external links could indirectly enhance your rankings, however as the Internet expands and more users are running websites and blogs, the importance of having exposure on social media networks is increasing dramatically. We all know that a front page story on Digg won’t do much for SEO purposes. However, as more webmasters utilize services such as Twitter, LinkedIn and social bookmarking sites, gaining front page exposure can create a large influx of natural inbound links from webmasters linking to your content.

For this reason, setting up a social media presence is becoming more effective than ever before. Sure, social media traffic doesn’t convert like search engine traffic, however social media shouldn’t be used for conversions to begin with – it should be used for exposing your content to other webmasters.

Setting up a generic, spammy social media account to obtain backlinks from the social media sites themselves is very much an old 2007 SEO technique. We all know social media sites themselves aren’t worth much as references. Modern SEO techniques rely on setting up legitimate accounts on all of the major social networks, establishing a trusted community presence, and leveraging that presence for backlinks from other webmasters. For SEO purposes, it’s crucial to understand that social media sites are to be used to penetrate the webmaster presence within the community.

Legitimate Looking Backlinks

Manual reviews are becoming more common for websites competing in competitive niches. As Google is constantly increasing the number of employees who manually review websites, the odds are that when you start to receive any large quantity of meaningful, monetizable traffic, you will hit a manual review.

Some SEOs think that manual reviews are becoming rarer since the quantity of websites on the Internet is increasing in greater proportion than the number of Google reviewers. However, don’t let this simple deception fool you. If Google were to monitor only the top 10 results under a set range of keywords, then the number of websites in their index would not in any way hamper their ability to maintain this form of monitoring. The moment you would break into the top 10, you may be flagged for review, regardless of how many other websites were in the niche. This isn’t necessarily what happens, it’s just an example.

Therefore, as you can see, the more employees Google has that conduct manual reviews, the greater the keyword terms and niches that they can target. Incoming links from external websites are one key factor that may be utilized in a review. Whilst external links themselves can’t penalize your website, if you have a wide range of high PR incoming links that look illegitimate (ie: spammed links or paid links), you risk having the high algorithmic value that those links pass devalued.

All forms of external link building are worthwhile strategies, however what’s important is that you conduct the link building in a manner that is less likely to raise signals from a manual review.

Other SEO Techniques

Google states that they use over 200 factors when ranking websites. There’s no reason not to believe them. Any factor that you can think of that may influence your rankings probably does in some way. It’s been found that the age of a page compared to the recency of links that appear on it is taken into account when determining how much authority to pass to external links on the page. This could be used as a means of filtering the value of blog comments and forum post replies. The thing to understand however is that the core concepts of SEO haven’t changed since Google’s inception. References from authority websites still pass the greatest form of linking value. What you can do is use some of the latest SEO techniques covered in this article and add them to your overall link building strategy.

Since the start of the 21st century, working at home has become such a standard practice that those who aren’t familiar with how to do it are thought as being “left behind” in a pre-Internet age. Indeed, the Internet has greatly accelerated the development of the world as we know it, and given everyone the opportunity to earn an income without ever having to move an inch.

In this article I want to discuss the most common ways that people earn a living working from home, so that you too can start doing so immediately. One thing that should be noted from the beginning of this article however is that working from home for an employer is not the same as running your own Internet based business from home. If you want to be an entrepreneur and set up and manage an Internet based business then you should venture into the field known as Internet marketing. If however entrepreneurship does not interest you, and you’re only interested in staying at home and working for someone else without having to make any form of risk or investment, then this article will guide you in the right direction so that you can get started.

Work From Home Jobs

There are a number of jobs on the Internet that you can complete for a monetary payment. The difference between Internet based jobs and land based jobs is that employers on the Internet rarely offer a fixed salary, but rather pay based on services rendered. For example, if an employer needs someone to write an article, or to reply to some e-mails, then they will usually pay based on the number of articles written, or the number of e-mails replied to, as opposed to a fixed hourly wage. Many people prefer this performance based model as it gives them the opportunity to find additional work once their current work is completed, instead of sitting around all day doing nothing (as is commonly the case with a traditional office job).

It is possible to find some employers providing fixed hourly based salaries for Internet based work, however it’s rarer than finding employers who offer performance based work. Performance based work is usually preferred by employers too as it allows them to ensure that their virtual employees aren’t wasting time at their expense. This form of payment essentially provides a win-win situation for both parties.

So, you may be wondering, where do you find these legitimate work from home jobs? There are a number of websites that act as intermediaries (third parties) by connecting virtual employees and employers together. The most popular of these are oDesk and Freelancer for people with specific skills, and the Amazon owned mTurk service for people with more generic skills looking for quick, easy work. It doesn’t cost anything to sign-up with these sites and you can start finding specific jobs immediately (it’s free for the employee, whilst the employer pays the sites a fee to list their jobs) .

The demographics of people who utilize each employment based service are outlined below -

oDesk.com – Employees are mostly comprised of those between 25-34 years of age, and that have some form of tertiary education such as a computing related degree. Use this site if you have technical expertise to offer.

Freelancer.com – This site is mostly frequented by those known as freelancers, who commonly work for businesses who outsource their services to third world countries. Whilst Freelancer.com does offer some good home based money making opportunities, it’s primarily used by those who can live with a lower income.

Mturk.com – This is the favorite “work from home” based site for single moms, or moms with a large family (mums for our British speaking visitors). It’s also used by those who don’t have any specific skill to offer, but need work regardless. Average hourly wages for hard working individuals can turn out to be anywhere from $4.00 to $20.00 an hour, depending upon the jobs selected and the speed with which they’re completed. This is a great site to get started in finding free work from home opportunities.

In addition to the above mentioned services, it is of course always possible to find an employer offering direct, full-time employment for prospective employees looking to work from home. Finding an opportunity such as this however is usually rarer, and requires finding job opportunities with specifically targeted companies.

Data Entry Work

The most common form of data entry employment is a typing job known as a “data entry clerk”. The job of a data entry clerk is straightforward and does not require any specific training. It usually involves inputting some form of generic, real world based data into a computer. Examples could include recording data from health insurance claims or the tracking numbers of sent/received mail.

Because data entry work does not require any specific skills, there is a high demand for jobs within this field, which in turn has unfortunately given rise to a large amount of data entry employment scams. Various people and shell companies claim to offer home based data entry work in exchange for a small fee, when in reality they do not offer such jobs. This form of scamming has become increasingly common throughout the Internet, and one should be careful about handing over any money before being employed in any Internet based data entry job.

Despite the scamming that prevails within the industry, there are still plenty of legitimate home based data entry jobs available through the Internet. Indeed, in third world countries, millions of people are employed as home based data entry clerks. The main problem for people living in more developed countries however is that the pay is often too low in order to compensate for living expenses. It is not uncommon for entry level online based data entry jobs to pay as low as $1/2 per hour. For this reason, people often pursue alternative skill based online jobs where the pay is higher.

Other Opportunities To Work From Home

Without a doubt, the most lucrative and profitable way to work at home is by setting up and running your own Internet business. The problem with this however is that running your own Internet business requires capital, investment, and risk. Working from home for another company does not require any form of financial commitment, and therefore the risk is almost non-existent (apart from your time). As an individual, you need to make a decision whether you want to take some risk and potentially make a lot of money, or take no risk and work for someone else.

Not all forms of online based entrepreneurship require risk however. There are ways to set up an online business and work from home without investment. Some of these strategies are outlined in our tutorial – Promoting Your Product With Free Methods. The difference between running your own business and working for someone else from home is primarily discipline. If you run your own business, you have to become disciplined. The paychecks won’t be coming in automatically each week, and there may be times where you put in a large amount of work without receiving any monetary reward. If you look through history however, you will see that all of the great entrepreneurs from Andrew Carnegie to Bill Gates had repeated failures until they succeeded.

If your goal is to simply work from home for someone else so that you can generate a guaranteed income, then home based employment is what may interest you the most. If however you’re willing to take a little risk, then becoming an Internet based entrepreneur who works from home on their own business (not someone else’s) may end up being the most rewarding thing you ever do in your life. Establish your priorities and your goals, and then make a decision on what it is you want to do to earn money from home.

How To Work From Home
What Are The Latest SEO Techniques?

When someone who is oblivious to the field of Internet marketing thinks of ways they can make money online, the first things that they will often think of include completing online surveys, sending e-mails for a company, or working for a company through the Internet. They will also typically have a large degree of skepticism about the online money making field in general.

These people are prone to what I like to call the “Internet vulchers” and common Internet scam artists. Typically, people will sign up for some product that has a lot of hype but that delivers little substance or educational value.  The most extreme of these products will promise the person that they will be making millions of dollars a year whilst only working a few hours a week. The more subtle ones will promise just a thousand dollars a week with only a few hours work. The two common traits that all of these products have in common are this: 1) They don’t work, and 2) They’re targeted towards innocent people interested in making money online, but who are unaware as to the best means about doing so.

In this article I want to raise some essential tips that you can use to become an online entrepreneur, and at the same time avoid falling into some of the traps set up by the less than ethical online businesses out there.

First of all, we need to examine why people purchase products which promise to make them lots of money without doing much work.

We, as humans, are naturally inclined towards laziness. People may have a great work ethic, be great studiers and have fantastic motivation, but at the end of the day they’re always looking for ways to simplify things. It’s the reason computers were invented, along with television, radio, aeroplanes, cars, tractors, and every other technology that enables us to do things easier and more efficiently, with less work. It should come as no surprise that a product offering to make people more money with less effort is more appealing than one which promises less money with more work.

If you haven’t heard of what a “target audience” is (a common marketing term you should be familiar with), then you now have. Wherever there is a large target audience, there is almost certainly a business or product to accommodate them. People who want to make lots of money without putting in much work fall into a large target audience. In fact, everyone could be said to fall into this group. After all, who doesn’t want lots of money with little effort? It there should therefore come as no surprise, due to the presence of this large target audience, that there are businesses marketing products and services designed specifically for them. The problem however is that it’s not possible for everyone to make lots of money with little effort. If it were possible, capitalism itself would be undermined. So essentially what you have, are businesses promoting fake products to a target audience who is eager to buy them. This is not exclusive to making money through the Internet either.

There are many examples of people who want something that doesn’t exist, where businesses are willing provide the product regardless. For example, astrology is a huge business, with people eager to check their future based on their star signs. The fact that astrology has no scientific evidence to back up its claims is irrelevant to businesses. If people demand a product enough, it will be created, or at least, an illusion of it.

This bring us back to our previous example. People want easy ways to make money, but there are no easy ways. This doesn’t stop businesses from creating products promising people easy ways to make money. But, who is to really blame here? Is it the people who aren’t willing to put in the effort, or the businesses simply giving these people a false sense of comfort? It’s easy to point the finger, but one fundamental thing you should understand is that hard work is almost always an essential ingredient to success. In short, you should avoid almost all products promising to make you easy money through the Internet, and instead look at realistic ways of being a successful online entrepreneur.

So then, how do you go about making money online? The answer is through setting up your own online business and marketing it using strategies within a field known as “Internet marketing”. This may involve things such as creating your own product, or marketing someone else’s product and receiving a commission, selling the product to a hungry target audience, and making a profit. But hang on a minute, isn’t that difficult? Don’t you need a marketing strategy? Don’t you need to find customers? Doesn’t this involve doing difficult and complex things? The answer to all these questions is yes. But, if you think that you’re going to make serious money through the Internet by doing anything less, than you’re prone to being scammed by the sorts of “fake money making products” I mentioned previously. The reality is that to make money online, you need a product to sell (it doesn’t have to be your own), and you need to find customers who are willing to purchase the product.

One of the most popular fields that new online entrepreneurs get into is affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing essentially involves marketing the product of another business and receiving a commission for any sales you make. This is a popular way to get started in Internet marketing as it doesn’t require that you have your own product or service. You can start selling a product immediately. The best thing of all, is that you’re the one who decides how to market and advertise the product. If you’re new to Internet marketing, the number of marketing avenues available to you may of course seem overwhelming, and oftentimes outright daunting. To give you an example, you can market a product through e-mail, through your own website, and even through offline means (such as letterbox drops). Don’t let this distract you however. The huge number of opportunities available in Internet marketing gives you an opportunity to pick and choose a strategy that best fits the way you want to conduct your online business.

So how do you get started? It’s recommended you read our free tutorial series on Journey Into Internet Marketing. This will cover all the basics of setting up your own online business, finding products, and making money.

One thing I recommend is that you avoid doing any online “jobs” and the like. There are a number of services out there that will let you make money from home by doing small jobs for other businesses (such as Amazaon’s MTurk), and there is nothing wrong with doing this if your intent is just to generate a small amount of money every month to help pay a bill or two, however if you’re interested in making serious money and becoming a successful entrepreneur, you will need to create your own business, and market it effectively. This will require innovation, hard work, discipline, and a keen desire to succeed (the entrepreneurial spirit).

I hope through this article I’ve given you some decent tips on making money online, tips that you weren’t aware of before reading it. If you want to make money online, then ultimately, Internet marketing is the field that you will need to get into if you’re to generate the sort of income required to enjoy a financially free lifestyle. It often takes years of hard work and many failures before people succeed in this field, but remember this ultimate tip: there are no shortcuts to making money online. Work hard, think hard. Learn from your failures and successes, and you will be on your journey to being a successful online entrepreneur.

Overview

If you have not done so, it is recommended you read over Part 2 – Finding Your Niche first.

In this third and final module in the niche research tutorial series, we are going to consider a few more online resources which you can use to find potentially profitable niche ideas.

Whereas in the previous tutorial we focused on commercial sites, sites from which you can see what people are spending their money on, in this tutorial we will look at sites where you can see what kind of information people are searching for.

This is an important ‘variation’ on what you have done so far because if you know what people want or need, you put yourself in a better position to provide it. Remember that the primary objective here is to add as many possible niche ideas to your list as you can find…

Research Exploration

Yahoo! Answers

As the name might suggest, Yahoo! Answers is a knowledge-base system that is owned by Yahoo!, a site where any member can log in, ask questions and have other Yahoo! Members answer them. According to the latest statistics, there are 21 million unique users of the site in the USA alone and perhaps 90 million worldwide, so there are an awful lot or people who have questions that need answering.

The beauty of using Yahoo! Answers and other similar sites like Wiki Answers is that it enables you to dig into your niche ideas in a little bit more detail and depth.

This is because site users come to these sites to ask questions which show you the kind of information that they need or want.

Hence, if you have some kind of niche market idea, you can use these sites to validate your idea and secondly as a way of establishing the kind of information that people really need. If this is the information that you provide through your business, you have a perfect match between what your potential customers want and what you can give them.

From the search box at the top of the Yahoo! Answers homepage, you can find all of the ‘question and answer’ sessions related to any particular niche topic which you are investigating. For example, to continue with the idea of German Shepherd training from the first module of this series, you would search like this:

Now you see a list of all the questions that Yahoo! members have asked about the various different aspects of dog training.

By scrolling to the bottom of the answers page, I can see that there are in excess of 2440 questions posted about training German Shepherds. Hence, there is plenty of information about the kind of questions that German Shepherd owners need an answer to:

This again suggest that there is plenty of interest in this particular market niche and it also supplies you with lots of pointers to the kind of information people really need about German Shepherds.

This enables you to position your business to answer these questions which will help to establish your reputation in your niche as an authority figure, an expert whose suggestions and recommendations can be trusted.

Incidentally, one aspect of Yahoo! Answers that many niche marketers ignore is the fact that the site has the capacity to drive some great free targeted traffic to your site.

This is one of the reasons why although your primary objective is niche research, you should become a member of the site and attempt to answer whatever questions you can.

When you click the ‘Answer Question’ button at the bottom of the page (it is blue by default but goes green when you run the mouse over it):

The next page where you post your answer allows you to add a ‘source’. If you include details of your website here and make sure that the answers you add offer quality and value, this will drive targeted visitors to your site.

Do not however include site information within your answer as this is generally frowned upon.

MyGoals.com

As suggested earlier, when looking at using Amazon as a research tool, one very smart niche marketing tactic is to focus on people who want to learn ‘how to’ do something or other.

A great site for finding lots of ideas of things that people want to learn how to do or things they need to achieve is MyGoals.com, a site for individuals who want to set and manage personal goals.

Some of the personal goals that feature on the site are very much as you would expect them to be – to lose 20lbs of weight and the like – but many others are far less obvious.

If therefore you’re looking for some really cool examples of the ‘how to’ information that people are looking for, MyGoals its a great research resource.

To get started, click on any of the categories listed under ‘Set a New Goal’ on the home page:

Every one of these categories has dozens of sub-divisions (these are from ‘Recreation & Leisure’):

By clicking on any of these links, you will see plenty of suggestions about the ‘how to’ information people might be searching for in each individual subsection of the main topic:

For instance, in this ‘Kayaking & Rafting’ example, there are five ideas on the left-hand side of the page all of which can be turned into ‘how to’ questions (i.e. ‘how to learn to kayak?’ etc).

On the right-hand side of the page, there are standard ‘goalplans’ which can again be used to come up with some additional niche ideas.

43Things.com

This is another site that is a little like MyGoals in that people detail the things that they want to achieve on the site.

In fact, 43Things claims to be ‘the world’s largest goal-setting community’ and there are certainly plenty of excellent ‘how to’ niche ideas on the homepage in the display of all the things that the members want to achieve:

Click on any of the tags to see all of the people who are hoping to achieve the objective tagged here. The more prominent tags are the ones which have been added by most site members, so they are the most popular.

On the page, you therefore have people who want to ‘get another tattoo’, ‘make more friends’, ‘meditate’ and ‘ride it in a hot-air balloon’.

With a little bit of creative thinking, all of these could be turned into ‘how to’ businesses as for example you could start a ‘how to meditate tips and hints site’ from where you sell a meditation product (physical equipment or products or a Clickbank information product).

MySpace Groups

Although MySpace is no longer the social networking behemoth it was a few years ago – that position has been usurped by Facebook – it is still a massively popular site with in excess of 100 million site users every month across the world.

One of the most attractive features of being a member of MySpace for many people is the ability to start new groups and join those that already exist.

The fact that so many groups exist means that MySpace is a great site for finding the kind of things that people want to do when they are on the net.

We have already established that once you identify what people want from the Internet, starting a successful niche based business becomes as straightforward as giving them what they want.

This information from MySpace is therefore extremely useful.

Open up the MySpace Groups homepage to see a listing of all of the group categories on the site:

Now, you can of course spend as much time as you want going through the groups listed on this page but in my experience, doing so often seems to eat up an inordinate amount of time with very little reward.

What you should focus on are the groups where there is money being made and spent, groups of people where there is at least a possibility of selling a product or service.

For this reason, I would tend to ignore groups like ‘Religion & Belief’, ‘Non-Profit & Philanthropic’, ‘Professional Organizations’ and the like. Instead, I would focus on categories where money is spent such as ‘Computers & Internet’, ‘Health, Wellness, Fitness’ and ‘Money & Investing’.

Using the health and fitness category as the example, click the link on the home page and when the next page opens, you will see that there are not far short of 4000 groups in this category:

The groups are listed in order of popularity, so the BodyBuilding.com group at the top of page is the most popular with over 157,000 members.

A little further down, you can see that there are a couple of ‘natural’ groups, ones which focuses on healing herbs, alternative medicines etc, which might be a niche that you have not yet investigated or thought of.

However, the real gold in these pages will be found if you scroll through the database of groups because as you dig ever deeper, you will come across an increasingly eclectic collection of groups, many of which you would perhaps not have thought of:

As you can see, these groups are not anywhere near as big as the ones we were looking at earlier. Nevertheless, as a source of niche market ideas, browsing through the groups at MySpace is a good way of getting a handle on the kind of things that people are interested in.

Yahoo! Directory and DMOZ

As you probably know, directory sites are places where Webmasters and site owners can list information about their sites and business. Once again, you can use these resources to establish what kind of sites are popular on a couple of the largest and most widely used directory sites on the Internet.

To begin with the Yahoo! Directory, the first thing that you will notice upon visiting the site is that the homepage features a ‘story of the day’, whilst on the left-hand side of the page, there is a category listing for all of the sites listed in the Yahoo! directory:

Each of the main category headings has several sub-categories listed underneath it, so as an example, I will click the ‘Nutrition’ link under the ‘Health’ category:

What we are looking for with directories is not the individual sites that are featured – there are actually quite surprisingly few considering that these two directory sites are probably the most popular and widely used (although you do pay for a Yahoo! listing which probably explains it).

However, before you get to the individual sites, you have a list of all of the sub-categories that the individual sites which have submitted their information to the directories have chosen to be listed under. These headings provide additional niche ideas:

And of course, you can investigate in greater detail by clicking the links here to see each of the individual sites listed and the information they carry.

It’s a similar thing over at DMOZ, the ‘open directory project’ site that is one of the most widely trusted authority sites on the net, a site which even Google trusts as a reliable source of information.

As with the Yahoo directory, you click the sub-category of any of the main categories on the homepage (in this case, we’ll go with ‘Business’ and ‘Investing’ to see what other suggestions you can pick up):

On the next page, there are many individual sub-divisions of the investment sub-category, all of which would provide niche ideas in the investment market:

Anything that you find interesting, click the link to see individual sites listed under the sub-division so that you get a clearer idea of what is on offer from sites that might be your competitors if you decide to enter this niche.

In fact, it is often a truly valuable exercise to investigate individual websites with these two directories because especially in more businesslike categories, the majority of the sites listed are often ‘big name’ players.

They are in other words the site owners who are spending a lot of time, effort and money on promoting their business which usually tells you that what they are doing on their site is effective.

In other words, they are providing an online promotional template that you can mimic in your own niche marketing activities, and of course, you’re picking up this information completely free.

Beware Of Analysis Paralysis

Armed with the information in the previous tutorial and this one, you now have a large collection of niche marketing research resources (with one more to come) with which you should be able to find dozens or perhaps even hundreds of niche ideas which you can analyze as suggested in the first tutorial.

However, even though you have all of these weapons in your armory, it is important to understand that you do not need to use every niche research tool every time you want to launch a new site or business operation.

Instead, it is crucial that you waste as little time as possible and get started without any unnecessary tinkering about or delay.

This is a very important point to take on board because one of the biggest mistakes that many online marketers make is to try to over-think or over-analyze what they are doing.

It’s a condition sometimes known as ‘analysis paralysis’ referring to the fact that some marketers become so obsessed about making sure that they have got everything absolutely 100% perfectly correct that they never get around to taking action because they haven’t quite got it as perfect as they want.

The problem is, they never will get things absolutely perfect because in the real world, nothing is ever 100% perfect. It is therefore quite likely that they will sit on the fence procrastinating forever.

For instance, based on the strategies in this tutorial and the previous one, you could build a list of several hundred potential niches and then analyze every one as thoroughly as recommended in the first tutorial.

And yet, you might still get it wrong (and inevitably will do from time to time). This is because marketing on the Internet is not a perfect science. Interet users are human beings who don’t always do what logic dictates that they should or will do.

Furthermore, things change very rapidly in online marketing and so your business model could seem perfect on paper today only to be useless in practice tomorrow because your product or service has been usurped by something more effective and efficient.

Imagine how you’d have felt when the first bicycle shop opened up as the proud owner of the town’s leading unicycle store. Do this and you have some idea of what I’m talking about here.

There is therefore little or no point in overanalyzing what you are doing. Instead, what you need to do is find a niche market where everything points to it being profitable and start taking action.

The longer you delay, the more chance there is that the world (or at least your potential market) will pass you by, so don’t delay any longer than necessary.

Understand from the beginning that no matter how much work you put into finding a perfect niche, you never will. Furthermore, until you have a lot of experience, the niches that you expect to do well are almost always the ones that disappoint whereas the ones of which you have very few expectations are generally the ones that make the most money.

The most important thing is to get over it and get on with it.

Article Directories

All of the niche market research tools that we have reviewed in the previous tutorial and in this one are extremely effective.

Indeed, over the years I have used every one of the niche market research tactics of which you have read and I would definitely recommend that you try them because every one has something to offer when it comes to really understanding your niche before diving in.

However, over the past couple of years, there has been one niche research tactic that I have used more than any other simply because as a research tactic, it presents all of the information quickly, simply and accurately.

Given the importance of getting things moving as quickly possible, this is definitely a niche research topic that works very efficiently and very quickly as well.

Visit one of the major article directory sites like EzineArticles. You can use any article directory you want but I tend to use this particular directory simply because it’s the biggest and one of the easiest to navigate your way around.

There’s a search box at the top of the EzineArticles homepage. Type in a generic question like ‘how to’, ‘how can I’, ‘how do I’, ‘ways to’ ‘tips’ or something of this nature.

I have already highlighted that this is the kind of information that most people who are willing to spend money on the Internet need or want:

This is therefore an extremely effective tactic for finding thousands of different ideas about niches and the best part is that in every one of these niches, other marketers (the article authors) have already done all of the market research for you:

As you can see in the screenshot, there are 2.2 million ‘how to’ questions, so it’s pretty unlikely that you are ever going to run out of different niche ideas using this tactic.

But it gets better because once you’ve found an article that seems to have something to offer, you can be pretty certain that in the majority of cases, the marketer who has written the article has also linked it to a product or service they are promoting.

Hence, if you follow the links beneath the article to visit their site, you will probably find information about a product you can start promoting immediately.

But that’s not quite all. Let’s imagine that this is the article that is focused on the niche that you are interested in getting into:

This article is in the #3 slot of the 2.2 million results that EzineArticles returned in response to my ‘how to’ search.

The writer is obviously doing something right and although the age of the article (it appears to be around three years old) is a big plus point in its favor, it must also have a decent set of keyword terms as well.

If you are using Firefox, click the ‘View’ link at the top left hand corner of the screen and then ‘Page Source’:

In Internet Explorer, it’s ‘View’ and then ‘Source’:

In both cases, you can now see the underlying code of the page so you can see what the keyword terms being used by the article in which you are interested are:

You therefore have a niche, a product and some keyword terms to get started with all within approximately 5 minutes of starting your research.

Now, there are a couple of cautionary notes here.

Do not be lazy and use only this method because whilst it is very quick and easy, it is not foolproof.

For this reason, you should learn how to use other niche research strategies through sites like Amazon, eBay, MyGoals and Yahoo! Answers because those sites are all great sources of tremendously valuable information.

Similarly, just because an article writer has managed to get their article to the top of the EzineArticles ‘tree’ does not necessarily mean that the marketing campaign for which this article was used was a resounding success.

For example, you may find that a very successful article points a link at a product page where the product itself is frankly poor or boring. You cannot therefore assume that every result you find using this simple method is a surefire winner.

Nevertheless, as a way of finding niche market ideas quickly and easily, this is a system that I find to be very effective, especially if you have other niche research tactics (such as those highlighted previously) with which you are comfortable.

My experience of researching niches using some of the other sites highlighted in this tutorial and the previous one is that after a time, you do start to get a feeling about whether a niche is good or bad and this is certainly a valuable skill to have when using this quickfire method.

Conclusion

Over the course of the three niche research tutorials, I have shown you how to analyze individual niche markets to see whether a particular idea exhibits all of the necessary characteristics of a profitable, successful niche.

I have also giving you plenty of highly effective niche research resources that you can use to build your own potential niche list at no cost.

However, do not forget the dangers of ‘analysis paralysis’. Do not over-think things or try for perfection because it’s a waste of time.

Instead, armed with the information you now have about about niche research, start taking action now.

Overview

In the first module of this niche research tutorial series – Introduction To Niche Research, we considered why finding niches is important and how you go about researching a potential niche that you think you have discovered.

In this tutorial and the next, we’re going to look at various different ways of finding initial niche market ideas because most experienced online marketers will tell you that of all the questions beginners ask, perhaps the most common is about how they come up with possible niche ideas.

Use Your Loaf

One thing that constantly amazes me about online marketers is that the vast majority ignore the most powerful niche research tool of them all, one that is completely free and accessible to every single would-be infopreneur.

It’s called your brain…

If you are sitting in front of your monitor reading this on-screen, take a moment to look up to glance around the room.

Almost every single thing you see could be the source of fresh new niche ideas if you will only take a moment to think about what you are looking at (which you don’t because it is all too familiar).

As an example, just looking up from my own monitor, I can see a clock, family pictures and dozens of books.

There are thousands of people every day searching for information about clocks, watches and other timepieces on the Internet whilst according to the Google statistics, ‘photography’ is searched for more than 1 million times every day:

The room is full of furniture and fittings, there are carpets or rugs on the floor, and if you stare out the window, the garden is full of garden furniture.

Every single one of these things could be a source of niche ideas, something which you can establish in exactly the same way as you saw in the first tutorial using the AdWords keyword research tool.

Perhaps you’re reading this after printing it out, somewhere away from your desk and office? If so, good, a change of perspective should help you come up with a ton of additional market or niche ideas which you can research further.

For instance, if you’re reading this in the park, what about using the surrounding plants, trees and bushes as inspiration? Gardens, gardening and all aspects of growing plants are also incredibly popular according to the Google statistics:

What about the wildlife (‘birdwatching’ or ‘keeping birds’) and the people you see? There’s not many parks where there’s no cyclists or kids playing sports so how about using those as starting points for your research?

You see, no matter where you are or what you’re doing, there are hundreds of potential niche market ideas surrounding you. It’s just that up to now, you haven’t seen them this way.

Well, now you need to start doing so.

Another thing you can do without resorting to any kind of external research tools is to think about your own interests, hobbies, experiences and major life events.

Go back over every job you have ever had, every hobby you have ever indulged in, the books you’ve read, the music you’ve loved and (basically) the history of your life. Do this and once again, you’ll most probably find that there are dozens of ideas from which you might be to pull profitable niche markets which you can focus your online marketing efforts on.

This is particularly effective because whilst it is not necessary to build sites or to participate in a market where you already have a pre-existing interest, it is often far more effective if you do so.

This happens because if you already have an interest in or a passion for a particular niche subject or topic, it is far easier to keep your enthusiasm levels up than it is if you have no interest in your niche at all.

As long as there are enough people elsewhere who share your enthusiasm (which is something that you must check), this is often the best way of marketing online because enthusiasm for and excitement about your niche almost always translates into doing a better job.

For example, in sales, it is common knowledge that the best salespeople are always those who have the greatest enthusiasm for and belief in the products or services they are selling. It will be the same with you – if you really believe in and love your market niche, you will do a far better job than you would if it were something in which you had no interest.

As well as your own interests, hobbies and passions, look at those of close family members and friends as well. You may not find their interests quite as enthralling as your own but as long as you are looking for valid niche ideas, you should ignore nothing.

Always Keep A Record

No matter how you come up with niche market ideas, it is absolutely critical that as you come up with more and more potential topics, every one of them has to be written down.

To this end, keep a small notebook and pencil handy (in your pocket at all times if possible) so that you can note ideas down as they occur to you. Add this to a notebook at home or a spreadsheet (but remember to keep a backup copy) so you will gradually build a database of potential niche ideas.

The first reason that you should keep a record of all of your ideas is that you should only ever work on one niche market at a time.

For example, continuing the example from the first tutorial, if you decide to build a site and a business around ‘German Shepherd dog training’, then this must be the only site that you work on until it is self-supporting.

In other words, you must avoid falling into the trap of trying to develop too many website businesses at the same time. Instead, focus on one, develop and work on it until it is making good money and only then consider moving on.

If you don’t have a record of all the ideas, many of them will be gone by the time you come back to start on your next project.

Over time, this record of potential niche ideas will become an invaluable business development tool because after the early days, you will never be short of good niche ideas again.

Maximizing Cross-Promotional Opportunities

Furthermore, keeping a detailed list of every one of your niche market ideas enables you to build networks of sites where you can cross promote from one group of customers to another.

For example, if you build one business based on ‘German shepherd dog training’ and another around ‘dog aggression training’, you could easily promote products and/or services from one customer list to the other.

They are not the same group of customers but they have similar interests so there is plenty of scope for profitable cross promotion.

As most experienced marketers already know, the secret to maximizing online profits is to have the ability to promote products and services to prospects and customers that are laser targeted to their interests.

If you build several site-based businesses that are all fairly closely tied together, you have a natural network of prospects and customers to whom you can promote already.

Next, if you have lots of completely different niche ideas, it gives you the choice of whether you want to diversify into various different markets or focus on only one.

Both approaches have their plus and minus points.

If on the one hand you focus all of your marketing efforts on one centralized market with lots of sites within the same market, you vastly increase the possibility of promoting from one group to another.

For example, you might focus on the investment market, with some sites focused on real estate investment, another site group focused on Forex, yet another focused on stocks and shares and so on.

Whilst the members of each of these site networks would have their own specific investment ideas and philosophies, there would be many opportunities for cross promotion in a system such as this.

The advantage of this is that the easiest and most cost-effective people to promote to are your existing customers.

Whereas pulling in new prospects in an attempt to turn them into new customers is a time-consuming and sometimes expensive operation, selling to existing customers is exactly the opposite.

With your customers, all you need to do is send them e-mail information about additional products or services that will be of interest to them and you will make sales without the degree of persuasion that is necessary to convince a new prospect to become a customer.

On the other hand, if you limit yourself to just one market, your potential marketing reach and range of opportunities is also by definition limited.

Whether this is a serious disadvantage would depend on the size of your market (e.g. you could come up with dozens of ‘investment site’ ideas) but it is a potential disadvantage of limiting yourself to only one market.

Online Niche Research

There are literally dozens of tools that you can use to research niche markets on the Internet and whilst there are some very good tools that you need to pay for, there are also dozens that are completely free.

Perhaps not surprisingly, I would recommend that you focus most of your efforts on using free tools to come up with niche ideas which you can then analyze using the strategies and ideas from the first tutorial in this series.

The first tools that you should be using are all tools that enable you to establish beyond any doubt the kind of things that people are buying on the Internet.

As suggested previously, whether you are promoting digital information products or physical products, you need to know that people are interested in buying what you have to offer before starting to build your site and business.

Using the sites that you will be introduced to here will help you to discover exactly what people want (or need) and are willing to pay for online.

Amazon.com

Amazon.com is one of the best online resources for establishing how many products and/or services are available in the market niche in which you have an interest. The importance of this lies in the fact that the more products there are already available, the more indicative it is of a healthy market.

In particular, I would recommend using the books section of Amazon because the one thing you can be certain of about printed book publishers is that every one of the major publishing houses spends hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on market research.

Publishers do not sink a large amount of money into a book launch if their market research does not tell them that doing so will make a very significant profit for them.

In effect therefore, they have done all of the market research work for you already, so why duplicate their efforts to arrive at exactly the same conclusion?

As I’ve suggested many times in this Internet marketing tutorial series, there is no point in reinventing the wheel, so use what those book publishers have already spent to your advantage.

To get the information you need from Amazon, click the ‘Books’ link at the top left-hand corner of the home page before clicking ‘Books’ in the drop-down menu that you see here:

Now, search the site using your keyword term to see how many results your search produces and what sort of price people are willing to pay for information in your market.

For example, these are the results for books related to Forex trading (both printed books and e-books are included by default):

Amazon has 478 books listed that are related to the Forex market which gives you a clear indication that this is a popular topic. Furthermore, you can see from the prices that people are willing to pay quite a decent amount of money for a Forex product which is obviously a good thing for you.

Many of the books allow you a sneak peek at the contents if you click the ‘Excerpt’ link at the bottom of the listing as indicated here:

Take a look at the book contents because this will help you crystallize your ideas about the kind of information people in your market need. Do not copy the contents exactly but take note of them as this is information that you can use on your niche targeted site later:

One strategy that works very well with Amazon is to find books in your market that focus on a ‘how to’ angle because this is exactly the kind of information Internet users want when they are surfing the Internet.

Magazines.com

As the name would suggest, magazines.com is a site through which you can subscribe to hundreds of different magazines. As magazine revenue is almost all generated from advertising, any market where there are plenty of magazines published is a market in which there is money to be made and being spent.

In this case, you may need to search a little more generically than you would do with Amazon. So for example, I would search for ‘investing’ magazines rather than ‘Forex’ as there are not many magazines that I’m aware of that focus on only one section of the investment market.

There are 15 investment magazines available indicating that there is plenty of money being spent by advertisers in this market and a decent amount of consumer interest as well.

eBay

There are a couple of different ways you can use eBay to further your online niche research, with both strategies being something you can use to further your research into how people spend their money on the Internet.

The first option is to logon to the eBay Pulse page which is a page that shows you several ongoing developments on the main eBay site including ‘Popular Searches’, ‘Popular Stores’, ‘Most Watched Items’ etc.

The default ‘Popular Searches’ shows the top 10 most popular searches over the previous 24 hour period and whilst this information is interesting, you can learn far more by clicking the drop-down ‘All Categories’ menu at the top of the page.

This allows you to look at each individual category to see what is popular, again giving you an indication of what people are willing to spend their money on with the most popular online auction site in the world:

As an example, say that I am thinking of promoting cameras or photographic equipment. I would click the link as highlighted in the previous screenshot to see what is most popular in this particular category:

The most regularly searched term is ‘Pentax 67 300mm’ which (as a non-photographer) I’m guessing is a lens. By clicking the link, I get to the individual product page which is where the second element of eBay niche research comes into play.

I want to see how much people are willing to pay, so I click the link for ‘Completed listings’ in the column on the left hand side of the page:

This pulls up a list of all completed listings for this product showing how many sold and at what price:

This gives you another indication about how popular this particular product is in the market and how much people are willing to pay for it.

PayPal

You’d probably find it a little strange to hear someone claim that PayPal is an under-the-radar niche research resource but it’s absolutely true!

Bear with me and you’ll see exactly why.

If you have a PayPal account, you may know that there is a ‘Store’ section on the site through which many major retailers sell their goods and services. If you weren’t aware of this, the links are at the bottom of the PayPal login page under ‘Personal Products & Services’:

This is the screen that you will see if you hit the ‘Store Directory’ link highlighted in the previous screenshot:

Obviously, there are some very well-known brands here so if you want information from leading stores, these are exactly what you need.

However, there is a real ‘hidden gem’ that is almost impossible to find if you don’t know it’s there , a niche research tool that almost no-one knows about.

Firstly, to find your way to this tool, you have to be on the US version of PayPal. If you use any other PayPal site, you probably won’t see the search box at the top of the screen as you see here:

Once you are on the US site and can see the search box, type in ‘PayPal shops’ or use this link to open the shops page:

https://www.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_shop-ext#

Now you’ll have a page that looks similar to the following screenshot. On the left hand side, scroll to the bottom of the ‘Shops Categories’ column so that you can click the ‘View All’ link to open the category menu out:

What this section of the PayPal site does is feature all small and medium sized merchants who are selling their own goods and services using the PayPal system. These are merchants who are selling online and doing so through PayPal, but here’s the real beauty of this little gem.

After opening up the category menu, click any category you might be interested in.

Let’s say for the sake of argument that it’s the ‘Health’ category:

On the page that opens out, you see all of the smaller merchants who are selling health related products but note that at the top of the page, PayPal highlight that these merchants are listed according to volume (highlighted with the red border).

The volume figure is however different to the figure to the right of the business name that indicates how many verified PayPal members have bought from this merchant:

In other words, the merchant selling Premium Wu-Long Slimming Tea at the top of the page has processed over 53,300 orders (highlighted in green) to verified PayPal members.

If you are looking for a niche where you know people are willing to spend money, it’s hard to imagine that you can have better information than this because you can actually see how many people are buying from each shop site shown!

And as you browse each of the PayPal shops categories, you’ll find lots of niches that you would never have thought of before and have an instant picture of how well businesses in every one of these markets are doing.

This is excellent niche research information but it’s also stuff that very few other marketers are using because they don’t know it’s there and PayPal do not seem to make a big effort to let anyone in on the secret either.

From your point of view, long may it stay that way!

Conclusion

In this tutorial, you have been introduced to many online merchants whose sites offer excellent niche research tools in one way or another. Of course, the most important thing that you can take from all of the sites is the ability to see with far greater clarity what is selling best.

This is a factor to which we will return in the third and final tutorial in this series – More Niche Research Techniques.

Overview

Welcome to the first module in the niche research tutorial series. In this three part series, you are going to learn everything you need to know about how to find market niches and how to establish that there is money to be made before diving in.

Given that most online marketers seem to find the ‘art’ of discovering profitable niches one of the most difficult to master, the information in this tutorial series will certainly come in useful.

It’s All About Market Research

The basic concept of doing business online is a very simple one, one that is no different to doing business in the ‘real world’ of business in your local high street or shopping mall.

You find a group of people who have a problem that needs solving or a question that needs answering. Next, you find or create a product or service that will provide these individuals with the solutions or answers they are looking for. Finally, and most importantly, you must forge a connection with these individuals so that you can put the answer you have in front of them.

In an ideal world, everyone who uses the Internet would have exactly the same problems or difficulties and therefore your product would be attractive to every Internet user. Of course, this scenario is a million miles from reality as quite obviously, Internet users are not all the same.

Every day, there are millions of people logging onto the Internet to find information but every one of them is looking for something that is slightly different.

Nevertheless, you would find that all of these information seekers could be grouped together on several levels.

At the highest or widest level, people will be looking for information in a market. For instance, they might be looking for information about weight loss or how to look after a dog.

Okay, so if you have a weight loss product, you could in theory attempt to connect with every Internet user who is looking for information about losing weight or in the latter example provide appropriate information to those who want to know how to take care of the family pet.

The problem with both of these scenarios is that the weight loss and dog care are both incredibly competitive and packed with marketers try to push their products and services, every one of whom has the ‘best’ solution or answer.

Marketing at this level is therefore strictly for the big players, the businesses and companies who can afford to spend thousands of dollars every day on advertising or those who employ marketing teams that are several hundred strong.

For most marketers who are not in either of these two positions, it is simply unrealistic to attempt to compete at this level.

What you must therefore do is narrow down your target market so that you face less competition. By doing so, you give yourself more chance of putting your message in front of genuine potential prospects in a situation where the competition is not so intense.

For instance, instead of ‘dogs’ at the most generic level, you might target ‘dog behavior training’ which is a narrower market but still one where there are plenty of dog owners looking for information.

In effect, you have narrowed down your dog care target to one sector or niche within the overall marketplace. This is exactly what you need to do if you are to have any realistic chance of putting your sales message in front of potential customers.

In fact, even at this level, there might still be too much competition (we will consider how you analyze the competition and the market later) so you might want to move one level further down to what some marketers call a ‘micro-niche’.

This will be something even more specialized and narrow such as ‘German Shepherd dog training’.

At this level, you are obviously going to find far less people looking for information every day, but the competition will be far less daunting as well.

Moreover, as you narrow your market down, the information people are looking for becomes increasingly specific. If therefore you can create or find a suitable product or service for this market, the match between what you have to offer and what the prospect is looking for is even more clearly defined.

What Are They Looking For?

As suggested in the previous section, the narrower your target market becomes (as you move down from ‘market’ level to ‘niche’ and then ‘micro-niches’), the easier it becomes to match what you have to offer with potential customers for your product or service.

There is however another important aspect to this, one that again has a direct relationship to your ability to earn money with your product or service.

If someone is searching the market for details about weight loss or information about how to look after the family dog, you really have very little idea of exactly what they’re doing or what they’re looking for.

For example, someone looking for dog training information could be looking for what ‘dog training’ means (they just arrived from the planet Zorb with an amazing natural ability to use the Internet and read English instantly) or they could be looking for dog training tips, specific ways of exercising their dog and so on.

The bottom line is, the more generically a user searches for information, the less idea you have about exactly what they want or need.

Consequently, even if you could connect with this individual, you have no way of knowing whether the product or service you are recommending has any relevance to them at all.

If however your market niche (or maybe micro-niche) is ‘German Shepherd dog training’, you know exactly what they want or need.

Anyone using a search term like this is obviously looking for information about the best way of training their dog and they are keen to know if there is anything that is breed-specific.

In online parlance, this is a buying term. Anyone who narrows their search down this far obviously wants information specific to training a German Shepherd and the chances are that they are probably keen enough to get what they need to pay for it.

In other words, if you put your ‘German Shepherd dog training’ information in front of people who are looking for exactly this kind of thing, you can be fairly certain that a significant proportion of these individuals will be very interested in what you have to offer. Consequently, as long as the offer is a good one, you will make sales.

The need to establish the degree of commercial intent when you are looking for niche markets is absolutely critical. Fortunately, as you will discover in this tutorial series, finding niches and establishing that the market is not too congested is actually not as difficult as it might first appear.

However, if your niche is full of surfers instead of potential prospects or customers who are both willing and able to spend money on the Internet, then all of your marketing efforts will still put little or no cash in your bank account.

This of course assumes that you have a product or service to sell, and as you may know, there are other ways of making money online like featuring advertising on a website for which you get paid.

In this case, because the site visitor is not expected to spend money, the need to establish that they are willing to spend money is less urgent.

Nevertheless, it still pays to find market niches where Internet users are used to spending money because you ultimately make a lot more when site visitors are willing and able to spend money.

Analyzing Your Niche

In tutorials two and three in this series, we will investigate many different ways that you can find potential niches.

However, before doing so, we are going to look at how you recognize a potentially profitable niche before diving in.

Many marketers make the mistake of coming up with what appears to be a good niche marketing idea and start to build a site without fully analyzing whether it is a good idea or not. This is not a mistake you want to make as it can obviously be frustrating and a waste of both your time and your money.

Once you have a niche idea which you are thinking of pushing ahead with, these are the questions that you must have positive answers for before doing so:

• What level of competition is there and is it realistically beatable?
• Are there Internet users searching for the kind of information that you are thinking of offering? If so, are they doing so using at least 5 – 6 different keyword phrases that can be tied in to your main subject matter?
• Do people spend money in the market niche that you are thinking of entering?
• Assuming that you are not thinking of creating your own product, are there products (or services) available which you can promote to make a decent profit? Alternatively, are there enough advertisers to justify building a site that is monetized with AdSense if selling a product or service is not your objective?

Let’s consider each of these individual steps one by one.

What level of competition is there?

Continuing with the theme of creating a site that focuses on taking care of the family dog, the first thing to do is confirm what commonsense probably already told you, that ‘dog training’ is more of a market than a niche and therefore way too competitive.

To do this, run a standard Google search for the keyword term that you are looking for, enclosing it into inverted commas (“.”) so that what you find are competitors that represent exact matches.

These are websites, blogs and other content materials that Google has already indexed which are using exactly this keyword phrase, effectively the competition if you decide to pitch in with the same keyword term.

As you can see from this screenshot, there are in excess of 5 million exact matches for ‘dog training’ which is way too many competitors:

When you are marketing online, there are effectively two different ways that you can put your marketing message in front of potential customers for your product or service.

Looking at the previous screenshot, the results on the right-hand side of the page are paid advertising materials placed their through the Google AdWords advertising program.

This is the first option for putting your marketing message in front of potential customers who are looking for dog training materials. As long as you are willing to pay however much it costs to advertise near the top of the page, it is a viable option as well.

At the same time however, most marketers target the natural or organic searches on the left-hand side of the page as these do not cost money.

To have your site featured here on the first results page means that you have to get your site into the top 10 most popular sites that are built around the keyword phrase which you are targeting.

If there are in excess of 5 million competitors, the chances of being able to do this without a lot of experience, and a massive budget, are almost zero. This therefore confirms what we believed in the first place, that ‘dog training’ is not a niche description on which to base your marketing efforts.

You therefore need to find a search term that people use when looking for dog training information which is less competitive but still searched for a reasonable number of times every day or month.

What are Internet users searching for?

Continuing with the dog training scheme, you need to find a more narrowly defined section of the market. To help you to do this, open the free Google AdWords keyword research tool to see how many people are searching for ‘dog training’ related information:

To get the ball rolling, type in your keyword phrase, the ‘captcha’ code and then hit the ‘Get keyword ideas’ button at the bottom of the AdWords tool screen.

This will produce a list of all of the search terms that people have been using when searching Google to find dog training related information over the past year.

The results will be produced in alphabetical order by default, but to make sure that you see the most popular keyword terms, the terms that are most commonly used by searchers, click the ‘Global Monthly Search Volume’ column header as indicated (on the right of the screenshot) to bring the most popular search terms to the top:

This shows that the average number of people who are searching for ‘dog training’ information over the past year has been 2.24 million per month.

As we have already established that there were in excess of 5 million competitors for this phrase, it means that there are two websites for every one search which would not be a good ratio if you were thinking of using this term in your marketing efforts.

Now, this does not mean that they actually searched for ‘dog training’ specifically but that they used a search term which included dog training. For this reason, whatever generic, broad term you use to search within the AdWords tool, it will almost always appear at the very top of the chart.

However, on almost every AdWords keyword results page, there are ‘hidden gems’, search terms where there are a reasonable number of people looking for information where there are not so many sites or content materials.

All you need to do is find them. This is a matter of trial and error.

For example, there is an average of more than 8000 people searching Google for information about ‘German Shepherd dog training’ every month over the past year:

By running an exact match Google search for this keyword term, we can quickly establish that there are only 12,200 competitors for this particular term which is very good:

With a search of this nature, what you are ideally looking for is an exact match search that returns less than 30,000 competing results.

In this case, getting your website onto the first results page (i.e. in the top 10) is going to be something that you can achieve in a matter of days rather than weeks or months.

As you can see, only 12,200 competing results is excellent. What is more, the number one result is an article on a directory site, and user created content of this nature is never too difficult to beat.

Okay, so you have one very good keyword phrase. This is not enough to confirm that a niche where there is money to be made exists. What you would now do is find at least another five or six similar terms using the AdWords keyword tool, although the more keywords terms you can come up with, the better it is.

For example, ‘dog toilet training’ is a term that is searched for 6600 times a month according to the Google statistics which shows 13,500 competitors on an exact match basis:

It is beginning to look like ‘German Shepherd dog training’ is a niche where you can move forward. You therefore need to establish whether there is money being spent in this market and if there is, how likely is it that anyone using this particular term will be willing to spend?

Is there money to be made?

The first and quickest way of establishing whether there is any money being spent in this market is to look at your search results page once again.

If you have plenty of advertisers on the page, it demonstrates that there is money being spent in this niche:

Not only does this suggest that there are advertisers willing to spend money in this market, it also indicates that if you are thinking of building an AdSense ‘German Shepherd dog training’ site, there are enough advertisers to justify doing so.

However, assuming that you are thinking of selling a product or service, the final step in the analysis is to check whether there are products or services available.

What products or services are there?

Assuming that you are not going to create your own product, you need to find something that you can promote as an affiliate marketer. To make this as quick and simple as possible, most online marketers will turn to a digital information product network site like Clickbank to see what is available.

Type your search term into the box on the ‘Marketplace’ page to establish whether there are suitable products available through Clickbank:

This search reveals that there are three information products specifically targeting German Shepherd owners:

What is more, the first product shown on the page is an almost perfect match for exactly what you’re looking for and it also happens to be the product that pays the highest level of commission per sale.

With products that specifically target German shepherd owners, you have the final piece of the jigsaw in place.

This is therefore a niche where there is everything in place to make money.

Conclusion

After completing this tutorial, you should now be fully cognizant with why niche research is so important in terms of your online marketing success. You have also seen how you work through this research process step-by-step.

In this tutorial, we have however assumed that you have some niche ideas already lined up. In the next two, we’ll consider what you can do if you don’t have niche ideas of your own as of yet.

And trust me, it’s a lot easier than you might think.

It is now recommended you proceed on to Part 2 – Finding Your Niche.

Overview

If you have not done so, it is recommended you read over the previous tutorial, Part 2 – Delivering What Your Prospects Want first.

As mentioned at the end of the second PPC tutorial series module, this third module will introduce and expand several more advanced PPC concepts.

Once again, the primary focus will be on AdWords but I will also mention some of the less well-known PPC advertising programs towards the end of this module.

Before then however, there is a lot to get through, so let’s get started…

Giving Google What They Want

As suggested on several occasions already, Google really want you to provide every prospect that they send to your site from AdWords with what they consider to be a top quality experience. The content on the page should be what they expected as highlighted in the previous module.

Over and above this requirement however, Google have further ‘rules’ about the content and structure of the page on your site to which their AdWords ads send a prospect.

For example, even if you use a landing page (a page that is specifically designed to capture e-mail contact information from a visitor), there has to be a reasonable amount of written content on the page as well.

This content has to be ‘on topic’ (about ‘LA weight loss’ if the ad is about this subject) and there has to be enough of it to ensure that the visitor gets value from their visit whether they choose to subscribe to your list or not.

Now, some marketers object to the idea of featuring content on a landing page on the (understandable) basis that content on a landing page distracts the visitor from the primary objective which is to encourage them to subscribe to the mailing list.

Consequently, it is not unknown for marketers to try to pull ‘tricks’ with their content by doing things like using script that becomes invisible as it is the same color as the background.

Do not be tempted. Google have seen every trick you could ever think of (and probably many more besides) and they have systems in place to pick up chicanery or nonsense of this ilk.

The content on the landing page has to be visible, readable and ‘on-topic’ and exactly the same rules apply to sales pages as well.

In addition to the page to which the advert is linked carrying a reasonable degree of content, there must also be links that allow a visitor to navigate around your site.

In particular, there must be links to your ‘Earnings Disclaimer’, your ‘Terms of Service’, your ‘Site map’, ‘Contact’ details and your ‘Privacy Policy’ page.

Now, the fact that you must feature these links on your sales and landing pages to keep Google happy is a real nuisance from a marketing point of view, as every one of these links is a possible ‘leak’ that could take a visitor away from the page on which you want them to stay.

They are necessary but most marketers feature them right at the bottom of the page in the least obtrusive way possible. For example, you might add these links in very small type in a shade that is a bit lighter than the other text on the page (but not matching the background completely).

They have to be there, but you do not have to make them any more obvious than absolutely necessary, in other words.

This is because of something called the AdWords ‘Quality Score’ which is system that Google use to ‘rate’ your advertising system in its entirety. In turn, the ‘Quality Score’ is important because it is a major factor in determining how much you pay per click on your adverts.

In simple terms, if Google like what you are doing overall, they will accord your system a good Quality Score in which case your cost per click will be low.

If on the other hand you are doing something they don’t like, they will push the ‘Quality Score’ down in which case you will pay more than you need to for every individual click on your adverts. Alternatively, they may keep your cost per click at the same level but push your site down the results page to a less prominent position to discourage people from visiting it.

For this reason, I have been in a situation where I was in the #2 slot for a keyword term with every click costing $.60 whilst the owner of the site in the #5 spot was paying $1 per click on his ads.

Ignoring the ‘Quality Score’ system is a very quick way of wasting hundreds of dollars on AdWords advertising that did not need to be spent if you smarten up your advertising system. It is therefore not a system you can afford to ignore.

One final aspect of keeping in the Google ‘good-books’ to note is that wherever possible, Google likes sales or landing pages to be attached to a high-quality ‘authority’ site.

Whilst there is no set or fixed definition of an authority site, it would generally be a site with plenty of content-rich pages (10+) which feature quality content all or most of which are unique to your site.

And remember that because (at the moment) the search spiders or robots don’t recognize or can’t read the content of video materials or images, the content on your authority site pages has to be written as well.

Finally, your written content has to be appropriate to the general theme of the site as does the purpose of the sales or landing page and the content on it.

The bottom line is, although Google thoroughly understand that you need to advertise your business (and they are more than happy to provide you with the resources to do so at a price), they also recognize that if Internet users are happy with their AdWords experience, they will come back for more.

What they therefore want you to provide is a website that offers every visitor what they consider to be a ‘normal’ quality site experience. All you need to do is comply with their wishes…

Using Keywords The Right Way

When you create PPC advertising, one of the most effective strategies for maximizing your profits is by minimizing the number of poorly targeted clicks that your adverts attract.

To do this, it is absolutely essential to make sure that the keywords that you allocate to each advert are absolutely spot-on-target as far as the content of that advert is concerned.

The relevance of your keywords is incidentally another factor that Google take into account when assessing the quality of the experience you offer to AdWords visitors that they send to your site.

The key to success here is to make sure that every advert is attached to a small, mega-tightly and accurately targeted group of keyword terms.

For example, say your ad is linked to a landing page for an information product that gives advice and tips about training German Shepherds.

In this scenario, your adverts would obviously focus on German Shepherds but you would not bunch all your German Shepherd-related keyword terms together under the same adverts.

For example, you might have an ad with a headline that contains ‘German Shepherd Sale’, in which case your keyword phrases would be ‘German Shepherd sale’, ‘German Shepherd for sale’ and ‘German Shepherd dogs for sale’.

You would not however include keywords related to German Shepherd puppies in this group (even if it is a ‘for sale’ keyword term) because someone who is using this is clearly looking for a puppy whereas the first group of keyword terms could refer to a more mature dog.

For your puppies, you would therefore need a completely different advert with a different set of puppy related keyword phrases.

This notion of grouping your keywords together as tightly as possible is extremely important because the more tightly your keywords are grouped together, the more accurately you will pull targeted visitors to your site.

It should also make it easier for you to ensure that the ‘audit trail’ that Google are so keen on seeing is easier to create in a far more precise and accurate way.

For example, your puppy keywords call up Germany Shepherd puppy ads which points at a landing page where most of the content is focused on German Shepherd puppies, and training them.

However, the ‘dogs for sale’ keywords call up ‘dogs for sale’ that might point at the same landing page as long as there is content about training German Shepherds that are for sale. In fact, it might even make more sense to create two completely different landing pages but this is something that you would have to test to see whether it makes any difference to your conversions and your costs.

All this could of course entail a significant amount of work but if you are serious about making as much money as possible from your PPC advertising efforts, it is work that needs to be done.

This is a workload that could be further exacerbated if you use all three different forms of each of your keywords to ensure that you match searchers looking for exactly your kind of information irrespective of how they use their search phrase as highlighted in this example:

As this is something that you should do (you don’t want to miss any laser- targeted visitors because you fail to take this basic step), there is work to be done.

There are however a couple of resources that you can use to make the work easier or to shortcut the process of matching all of the most appropriate keywords without compromising the quality or accuracy of your advertising copy.

Firstly, download the free AdWords Editor tool which is a desktop application in which you can create your adverts before uploading them en masse to the AdWords program.

Because the tool includes several handy shortcuts, it will save you time and effort in your ad creation activities, especially in the future when you need to update adverts in bulk.

The second utility to use is a resource that is known as dynamic keyword insertion, a resource that is offered (in one form or another) by most PPC programs.

In simple terms, the way dynamic keyword insertion works is that you insert a snippet of code into your advert where a term that you want to vary would otherwise appear.

For example, if you were thinking of creating a series of adverts to target ‘German Shepherd training’, ‘boxer dog training’, ‘corgi training’ and ‘golden retriever training’ as keyword terms, the adverts could be identical apart from the change of keyword.

Hence, by inserting the dynamic keyword insertion code into your advert body, you enable Google to call up the most appropriate keyword term from this list based on the information that the searcher is looking for.

For example, if they were looking for ‘German Shepherd training’ information, then the ad that they are shown would include this particular phrase whereas a boxer owner would see an ad that features ‘boxer dog training’ where the dynamic code is inserted.

Alternatively, you might use the keyword insertion if you want to target the same kind of customers in many different cities or countries because you have offices in different locations.

As suggested earlier, having the ability to ‘localize’ your voice in this way can be a very powerful sales technique and using dynamic keyword insertion makes it relatively easy to do.

Small Changes Are All That Are Needed

In the process of making your PPC advertising efforts as profitable as possible, there are three distinct elements to focus on.

Firstly, you have your advertising materials and the click-through rates they attain. Next, you have your sales or landing page and the conversion rate associated with those pages. Finally, you shouldn’t forget the lifetime value of that customer or subscriber to your business either.

It is important to understand that there are three distinct elements because in each of these three areas, a small improvement will make a big difference to the bottom-line profitability of your business.

For instance, if you improve your Quality Score by tweaking your ads, making the keywords more relevant and finessing your landing pages, you might be able to push your ad up the search results page without spending any more money on advertising.

This is extremely significant because as statistics collected by Accuracast.com based on in excess of 1.2 million clicks clearly demonstrate, the difference in click-through rates increases significantly as you get closer to the top of the search results ad block.

Their research showed these click-through rates in relation to the position on the search results page:

From 5^th place to 4^th, the click-through rate doubles according to the stats and so a move of just that one place could make a major difference to your business.

Say that when these people land on your site, your conversion rates don’t change. Hey presto, your sales have just doubled and you haven’t paid an extra cent in traffic costs.

Now imagine what would happen if your conversion rates also doubled as well as your click-throughs.

Can you see how every little improvement is multiplied exponentially so that the total effect on your bottom line profits is going to be substantial?

Then you have the residual or lifetime value of each customer or subscriber to your business. Of course, once they are on your list or have bought from you already, you can mail them two or three times every week with product recommendations and suggestions.

As the level of trust, understanding and respect grows, so will your ability to generate ‘back end’ sales whenever you want, hence their lifetime value to your business also increases exponentially.

The important thing to understand here is that once you have got your PPC advertising ‘career’ off the ground, keep looking for constant, small improvements and be willing to invest in your business because doing so is the easiest way of improving your overall profitability in the long run.

Other PPC Programs To Consider

As suggested earlier in this tutorial course, although AdWords is the overwhelmingly dominant player in the PPC advertising business, they are not the only one. In fact, there are dozens (maybe even hundreds) of smaller competitors that you might like to consider including in your marketing mix.

To begin with, both of the other major search engines Yahoo! and MSN/Bing have their own advertising programs and whilst neither has anything like the traction of Google, they can both send you a ton of targeted traffic.

What is perhaps even more important is that some advertisers find that using alternatives to AdWords like Yahoo! or Bing actually works better for their business than using AdWords.

This happens because the user demographics of other search engines are not exactly the same as those of Google.

In effect, different Internet users prefer different search engines and it just might be that Yahoo! or Bing enthusiasts happen to be a better match for your product or service than those who use Google.

It is therefore quite possible that using an alternative online advertiser like Yahoo! or any of the others listed here might put more money in your pocket than advertising with AdWords will.

These ‘AdWords alternatives’ offer other potential advantages as well.

For example, although Yahoo! have a form of ‘quality score’ system, it is not as strict as the AdWords version and (as far as I am aware), Yahoo! have never yet ‘slapped’ any of their advertisers.

At the moment however, I do not think that Bing have a similar ‘assessment’ system whilst I am sure that none of the other smaller PPC systems do.

The majority of the less commonly used PPC advertising programs tend to be more transparent than AdWords as well, although it has to be admitted that Google have become increasingly transparent with their advertising program requirements over the past year or two.

What is however perhaps even more important is that you are likely to pay less per click with Yahoo! and other advertisers than you would with AdWords as well because there is less competition.

Consequently, although you may not see as much traffic as you would with AdWords, every successful sale will generate more profit because the cost of driving traffic to your site is lower (assuming that everything else remains equal).

Of course, the main disadvantage of using alternative PPC programs is that by doing so, you accept that you will see less traffic from your PPC campaigns.

Beyond this however, using less popular PPC programs has many advantages and as with all aspects of promoting your business in this way, you will never know how effective it is going to be until you test it by trying.

Other PPC programs that you should take a look at include:

http://www.adbrite.com/

http://www.bidvertiser.com/

http://www.findwhat.com/ (Miva)

http://www.abcsearch.com/

http://7search.com/

http://www.adengage.com/

http://www.clicksor.com/

http://www.marchex.com/

This is not in any way meant to be a comprehensive list of alternative PPC programs. Nevertheless, there are enough here to allow you to try some alternatives to AdWords to see how they perform for you.

However, as a note of caution, many PPC experts suggest that once you move beyond the big three PPC programs, you should be extremely careful about the possibility of click fraud.

You must therefore focus on tracking your statistics because as soon as you spot any apparent incongruities or discrepancies, you need to get onto the advertising agency immediately to stop the campaign so that they can investigate the problem further.

Conclusion

In this third and final installment of the PPC advertising tutorial series, I have focused on developing your knowledge and understanding of PPC advertising further.

This is important because whilst there are many PPC training courses and systems available which focus on the best way of creating adverts and the like, there are far less that concentrate on the thinking behind achieving PPC success.

Thinking about PPC in the right way is in my experience the best way of taking your PPC success to the next level.

For instance, whilst the mechanics of creating successful adverts change regularly, if you master the right approach to marketing your business with PPC, you will never go far wrong.