There are times throughout your niche marketing work that you discover you may have set up a site in an over-saturated market.  It might have seemed like a good idea at the time – especially if there were plenty of high-paying affiliate products out there for the subject you chose.   But even if you’re making enough to break even, you could be leaving hundreds or even thousands of dollars worth of profit on the table – by choosing the wrong method of making money for your niche.

Potential Money Makers for Your Niche

Surprisingly, what you think may not work for ANY site, can be a lucrative way to earn extra cash from your niches.  For example, banner ads typically don’t convert well on sites dealing with internet marketing.  If your site was about fly-fishing and you ran banners advertising a fly fishing event or content – or new gear or methods to catch bigger fish – you can bet it would get a lot of clicks and earn you a nice chunk of change.

There are about as many unique ways to make money from niche marketing as there are different niches.  A few of the more unique include:

“ RSS Feed Sponsors – If your audience is getting updates through your blog, consider using a service like Pheedo at http://www.pheedo.com or Text-Link-Ads’ Feedvertising at http://www.text-link-ads.com/feedvertising

“ Sponsored Blog Posts – Get paid to review different products in your niche.  See Pay-Per-Post at http://www.payperpost.com or ReviewMe at http://www.reviewme.com for details.

“ Sell Your Own Ad Space – If your niche turns into a heavily-visited authority on the subject, why not sell your own ad space?  CrispAds at http://www.crispads.com and BlogAds at http://www.blogads.com let you set your own ad sizes and prices respectively.

“ Job Boards – If your niche is career-oriented, consider including a third-party job board, such as Joard at http://www.joard.com where posting a job board on your site nets you 75% of the revenue you generate.

“ Sell Your Own Products – Not just digital products, but your own physical products like books, t-shirts, coffee mugs and more.  Check out Cafepress at http://www.cafepress.com,  or Lulu at http://www.lulu.com

Try one of these unique money-making methods on your own niche site and see how your audience responds.  Don’t forget to test often with different strategies to see what works for your particular subject!

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The one time you’ll definitely want to concentrate your efforts on a single niche market, is when you want to build authority and credibility among that audience.  This type of reputation isn’t built overnight, but surely and steadily over time as your site acquires links from other relevant sites, you write great content for your blog on a frequent basis, and stay involved on forums, Twitter, Facebook and other social outlets.

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One of the points I mention in my book, Get Niche Quick, is whether or not you should consider your hobby as a profitable niche business.  Usually, the question is not so much can you turn your hobby into a business – but should you?

To see if your hobby is a labor of love or a lucrative niche – you’ll want to ask yourself these four crucial questions:

1. Do You Absolutely Love Your Hobby?  Could you work at it night and day?  Does it not even seem like work?  To start a business doing your hobby, you’ll have to absolutely enjoy every minute of it.  It doesn’t even have to be something “hands on” to profit from it.  For example, if you enjoy cooking with unique or elegant spices and making new dishes, you could easily transform your love of cooking into a blog complete with a video membership where you can “sell” new recipes and show people how to make them, step by step.

2. Are You Good at Your Hobby?  You have to be extremely good at something to show other people how to do it.  You also need to be enthusiastic about teaching it to others.  Excitement is contagious and people will flock to listen to or read content given by someone who is not only good, but loves to show their hobby to others.  You don’t have to be perfect, but you do have to know what you’re doing.

3. You’ve Got to Know a Secret or Two – In all your time of practicing your hobby or past time, you’ve probably come across a better way of doing things, a new method, the right ingredients and so forth.  It has to be something that’s not commonly known and can’t simply be “Googled”.

4. People Have to Want to Buy What You’re Selling – To make money from a hobby, you have to reach a market who wants what you’re offering.  It could be a product, a service, a training course, or a combination of things.  You need to figure out exactly who is looking to buy and what, exactly, they’ll get from doing business with you.

If your hobby can fulfill a demand, and you know enough to be able to start marketing it properly, ask your friends, family and fellow hobbyists what they think.  This is the “poor man’s” version of market research, but it often yields results that are much better than the millions of dollars corporations pay for the same thing!

Do your research and homework now.  Make a list of ideas or potential customers and then go for it!

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One of the best benefits of niche marketing is that, in just a few months time and with proper follow-up, you can create several niche websites that bring in consistent, solid income for you.  With new technology, you can even schedule blog posts, Twitter tweets and other relevant updates over the course of several weeks or months, freeing up your time considerably to focus on new areas you might want to expand into.

In the end, it’s not about the quantity of niches you choose, but how well you attract high-converting traffic over time.  That in itself, can pay you back many times over than several half-hearted attempts at profiting from small, unnoticed markets that aren’t buying.  Good luck!

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If you’ve got to have your niche trends fix immediately, there are several cool ways to spot emerging trends (and potentially hot niches) on Twitter.  The simplest way to see what everyone’s talking about is to use Twitter’s built-in search – at http://search.twitter.com.  If you’d rather see a graph of your keyword’s popularity over time you’ll like Twist – at http://twist.flaptor.com.  Using Twist, you can see a graph of a particular trend’s popularity over time, and even compare different trends to see which one is only increasing in popularity.

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And while I’m glad they’ve done their research – I hate having to tell them that there’s a reason for that, and they should probably look elsewhere.

The fact is – despite what some marketing “experts” will tell you – there is NO SUCH THING as an untapped niche market.  There are markets where very little competition exists – but don’t think you’ve hit a “goldmine”. There are lots of niches where you’ve either got a select few people that might buy, or plenty of interest, but no money being spent!

A Real Life Example of a “Fool’s Gold” Product…

One good example of the latter is a client of mine who came to me looking for some advice on how to make his product sell better.  He and his wife created fun little crafts for young children to do, compiled them into an ebook, and went to sell them to what they thought was a hungry market of moms and dads wanting something to do with the kids that wouldn’t require a lot of time – or make a lot of mess.

The problem was, they were practically the only ones out there selling information – most sites had many more crafts, separated by age group, available for free.  Was there a need for this information?  Absolutely, but when there’s so much information available at no cost, it’s going to be a tough job to convince these hard working parents that your information is worth paying for.

Healthy Competition is a Good Thing!

Having a lot of similar – but not exact – products out there competing with yours is actually a good thing.  It shows that there’s a good amount of money to be spent in the niche and that it isn’t difficult to convince people that they really do want to buy. 

Plus, another little-known aspect of competition is that you can actually use them to your advantage to help propel your product even higher in terms of sales and possibly search engine rankings.

I’ll fill you in how to do just that with tomorrow’s post!

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One of the all-time top questions I’m asked by fellow niche marketers is this – is it better to focus your efforts on one niche starting out? Or spread out to several niches that catch your interest and build them all up simultaneously!

The point to remember is this – when you’re just starting out, and things like keyword research, copywriting and affiliate marketing are terms you’ve only faintly “heard of”, it pays to follow through on one niche, and feel comfortable marketing it before setting your sights on more.  Selling to niche markets gets easier the more you do it – and soon you’ll have a workable blueprint in mind that you always follow for the same proven results – no matter how many niches you have.

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A quick and easy way to gauge how profitable your niche might be is to see who’s advertising for your same keywords.  Search in Google for your chosen keyphrase – both with quotes and without, and see which sites are advertising beyond the big corporations that have bottomless pockets to bid on every keyword imaginable.  If you aren’t finding many advertisers, it’s a quick glimpse that your chosen niche may not be searched as heavily as you’d expected.

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There’s a lot of talk in internet marketing circles about the power of article marketing.  Done right, it can help you generate a substantial amount of credibility and authority in your chosen niche.  Done wrong, it simply makes you sound like a parrot – jumping on the same bandwagon as every other affiliate out there trying to make a sale.  Here’s how to use article marketing to your advantage when dealing with different niches.

Make Your Articles Stand Out

The number one thing most people forget about when article marketing is that actual people – your target audience – will be reading these articles.  So it pays to hire a good writer, pay them well and get good, solid research done before you submit your articles.  If your niche revolves around a particular affiliate product, search on the most common article submission sites (see below) to see what – and who – you’re up against.

Popular affiliate products will generally have several “review” style articles or comparisons between the product and others in the market.  For example, let’s say there’s a hot new email marketing software program that pays you $100 per sale.  Everybody’s doing reviews on it – so how can you hope to get noticed?

Showcase Each Benefit as a Unique Article

Rather than talk about the program itself and how it compares to others, talk about the individual features and how the end user can benefit from them.  Explain how the hot new email software easily personalizes messages or lets you target promotions to your best customers.  You can even make a step-by-step video and brand it with your affiliate link to increase sales.

By focusing on one specific benefit when article marketing, you’re more likely to generate more sales as a result of people finding REAL, helpful information they’ve been looking for, and not just “another review/pitch” for the same old product.

Try focusing on an individual feature and its many benefits the next time you write a niche marketing article – you may be pleasantly surprised at the results (and the sales) you get from taking the extra time to “do the extra work!”

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If you’re interested in niche marketing, but you want something popular and interesting, finding the latest trends is as easy as visiting a website.  Google Trends at www.google.com/trends/ will show you what’s being searched the most today (although you can change the date).  The real value in Google Trends is that you can input your keywords in the search bar to see how searches have increased, decreased or spiked over time. 

For example, searching for “recession tips” obviously generates a huge spike through the last quarter of 2008 and throughout 2009.  Even now, it’s still an incredibly popular topic.  Some keywords have longer staying power, such as “saltwater aquarium” where search volume has stayed relatively the same throughout the last 3 years.

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