I had a chance to talk with Super Affiliate Zac Johnson’s and pick his brain on his strategy in developing niche sites.
Some of the points we touched on:
- How he got his start in internet marketing
- How he developed a niche site which received 180,000 visitors per day and was hosted on 16 Dell servers
- How he researches and develops new niche sites
- His viral marketing strategies
- Tips for new affiliates developing their websites
Tune in for another episode of the Friday Podcast
And visit: ZacJohnson.com
Whether you’re a merchant/product owner or an affiliate, you’ll inevitably break into a new niche at some point.
So one of the questions you’ll need to answer in order to succeed is: “How can niche sites tackle the challenge of content creation, especially if they are in a new area? More importantly, how do they monetize effectively?”
We tackle this quesiton in the Friday Podcast.
Here’re the notes:
Tackling fear of the unknown.
Understanding the problems (also known as opportunities) in any new market is key.
-Cost/performance – fees are based on amount of weight lost. program to lose 10lbs might cost a thousand dollars. that’s $100 per lb. lucrative?
-Weight management sites are the one of the best examples of membership sites. friend Rachel Rofe has a great site and has been profiled by magazines.
-Long term effects
-Mood swings, depression – biochemical balance
Visit forums, blogs and content sites in your chosen area and figure out the burning questions people are facing. Compile a list of the top 50 problems/questions and answer them – that will form the basis of your search engine AND human friendly content.
-Document the process
-Buy weight loss for dummies or atkins diet for dummies, visit wiki, head to google news.
As internet marketer, information is your most significant weapon.
Use it to your advantage.
Here’s an intriguing query from Sarah:
“I’m a ebay powerseller and getting into the niche marketing vibe.
Judging by the number of high dollar earnings screenshots I’m seeing, I’m planning to go into the internet marketing niche.
I worked hard to build my ebay business and am sure I can replicate the same in internet marketing.
Can you give me any suggestions?”
—
My answer:
That’s the great thing about Internet Marketing, the ability to continually expand your focus and the ebay stats screenshots you sent me were pretty impressive too.
You might like to check out Super Affiliate Amit Mehta’s post “Selecting a niche is everything in affiliate marketing”
As an affiliate or a product creator, the biggest constraint you will face is time.
Like it or not, even outsourcing the bulk of your projects, you’ll need to (more…)
Dear Fellow Niche Marketer,
Like me, you probably have heard of the buzz surrounding Britney Spears’ performance on the MTV Video Music Awards.
You would have heard the critics’ criticism that she looked like she had piled on a couple of pounds, and her outfit looked something reminiscent of what a working lady might wear walking the streets.
Additionally, you might also have read about how she was huffing and puffing (more…)
Super Affiliate Kieron Donoghue has an innovative strategy to get one of his sites ranked within the top results on Google for the highly competitive term “Bingo” and affiliate marketers can take a lesson or two or three from Keiron’s case study.
In “Easy method of gaining quality backlinks and building a database of users” Keiron has bypassed the traditional strategy of asking webmasters for backlinks or a link exchange, in favor of a premium giveaway.
The pens costing 20 pence (or about $0.41) each are a viral and guerilla method to gain a backlink.
He’s also engaged in using press releases to distribute his message/content and some viral marketing on forums has occured.
As the marketing is done partially offline (through the delivery of the pens), you’ll get the link love from a backlink, compared to a 2-way link.
At this point, some readers might be thinking “why didn’t I think of that?”
A key reason is many Internet Marketers are overly focused on:
- Technology: Trying to signup for some automated bookmarking/viral software that’s just been released.
- Following the advice of a guru who’s had a successful campaign (Note: once something has been done successfully once, it’s difficult to repeat it verbatim with the same level of success. Those familiar with Economics will know it as the law of diminishing utility).
Likewise, “value creation” is a buzzword in corporate circles, but to get more out of it requires people to do more than sit in a circle on Friday afternoons, chomping on doughnuts, sipping cappucinos, talking about improving work processes, but never doing anything about it.
I used to conduct entrepreneurship training focused on business building skills in the Singapore schools. It was particularly frustrating to sit in on meetings where it’d take 2 weeks to figure out who’d be a project manager and who’d form the team.
Then they’d be offer to conduct “research” for a couple of weeks and finally decided that there were too many obstacles, so they needed to find some other project (or niche in Internet Marketing speak).
They’d then bang into some other challenges in the midst of their “research” and give that up too.
Which kind of reminds me of what many new Internet Marketers do.
They start out with AdSense publishing, then maybe make a switch to eBay auctions. Then they decide it doesn’t work, and before you know it, they’d made a full circle of adsense publishing, affiliate marketing, product creation, online auctions, PPC arbitrage, CPA marketing, and somehow come to the conclusion that “nothing works”.
Is it due to the “Honeymoon effect“?
Maybe.
And it feels like old ground is being covered, like (more…)
Most PPC Marketers would probably send traffic direct to the Affiliate Marketing/CPA (cost per acquistion/action) offers landing page. But here’s an idea, build a niche community, like the folks at newly launched Boomj.com are doing.
You might’ve received a notification about the site targeting Baby Boomers and “Generation Joneses” last week.
It appears to be a fairly “mass” campaign, rather than a targeted one because I’m clearly a “Gen Xer” (born between 1965-79).
Although guys like Shoemoney, PepperJam’s Kris Jones, Gauher Chaudhry and Amit Mehta do really well with PPC traffic to CPA offers, I’m thinking that building a dedicated niche community helps you get better leverage out of your lead generation efforts.
With Gauher’s background in information marketing, I’m sure he’s one of the frontrunners in putting this process into action.
This requires a paradigm shift, from going beyond just a product-based focus to (more…)
