You see, you’ve probably created a niche product that’s somewhat similar to the existing products out there (and that’s not a bad thing!)  – it’s like the old saying, “there is nothing new under the sun”.  But you’ve probably added something extra, or a different method, unique tips or strategies to make your own product more complete, more timely, etc.

Now here’s what you do – you find competitors in your niche by searching Google for your chosen keywords.  What you may find, as I show in my book, is that there’s a good deal of “competition” out there that isn’t really competing with you.  Many of them are shopping sites that happen to have a small category dealing with your particular niche.  Sites like these are easy to out-rank for your best keywords.

Planning Your Joint Venture Strategy

Once you find your REAL competition, you’ll want to talk to them about working together with a possible joint venture strategy.  Joint ventures, or JV’s as they’re known in the marketing world, are a great way to get added exposure for your products while promoting something worthwhile to your audience as well. 

How to Request a Joint Venture

But how, exactly should you approach someone about doing a joint venture?  Yaro Starak of Entrepreneurs-Journey.com (a blog which you really should add to your favorites and read often!) has a great primer on how NOT to go about asking for a joint venture.   And he should know – because he’s a pretty popular guy in the marketing world and gets hundreds of JV requests constantly.

Yaro’s advice on doing joint ventures is spot-on both in what to avoid and how to open up even for a future JV. 

And if you’re at all uneasy about promoting someone else’s product to your email list or customer base – look at it this way.  If all people are hearing about from you is how great your product is, they’re going to start wondering if everything is true – and searching the web to compare your product and see what else is out there.  You might as well beat them to it and promote something equally useful or unique that they might enjoy.

This way, it’s a win-win for you, your audience and your JV partner!  Try it – it works INCREDIBLY well.

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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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Obviously, you’ll want to find out if the people in your niche have money to spend.  That’s one of the major reasons why niche products fail.  You may (correctly) assume that people who have an URGENT NEED to solve a problem will be willing to spend money – for example, someone with constant, recurring heartburn is going to want to check out alternatives to prescription medicines.

However – that’s just one piece of the puzzle.

The second part – and the most critical – is that the person must be eagerly willing to part with that money.  They shouldn’t have to stop and second-guess themselves if your product is what they really want…or if they should just wait and look around first.  Contrary to what the “gurus” say, people are not throwing massive fistfuls of cash at ANYONE’s order page.  They are looking for reasons why they should NOT buy.

Of course, there are a lot of ways to counteract this – putting a contact email address or form in case they have questions, adding a guarantee, promoting testimonials from other users (especially audio and video as they’re more authentic), and so on… but if the person isn’t absolutely willing to part with their money at a moment’s notice – you may have a hard time convincing them to do it!

Who’s Buying?

Generally, the more passionate people are about their hobby – the more likely they are to want to spend money on it.  Case in point – over the last year, my father has become an avid collector of certain kinds of Zippo lighters as well as older lift-arm lighters. 

He prowls eBay like a hunter, looking for rare and unique lighters at all hours of the day and night.  He’s bought zippo guides, display cases, and keeps every single original box.  That’s a kind of passion that collectors, hobbyists and enthusiasts have – and it’s worth tapping into when you create a product. 

By following where there’s a lasting passion and excitement for a product (and not just a short-lived fad), you’ll be able to deliver a product that continually rakes in the cash, year after year – even when competing products have come and gone.

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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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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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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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So what’s the solution?

You can have the search engines come to you. 

This is made possible by the links pointing to your site from other sites.  These are called inbound links.  Before you go out and tell everyone you know to link to you – you should know that it’s not enough just to have thousands of sites linking to yours. 

The quality of your links (often determined by Google PageRank among many other things) also plays a part in getting your site recognized by the search engines.

Smart website owners with a high ranking know this, and you’ll find they’ve usually taken steps to keep their top rank near and dear to themselves. Just asking for a link from a high profile link partner will usually not get a reply. 

You can use the link partner template I’ve included in Get Niche Quick to help you swap links with smaller, less “famous” sites – which will still bring you a good deal of traffic if they offer products related to – but not competing with – your niche.  Oftentimes these sites are already listed in the search engines, which can help get you listed as well.

Other methods of getting high quality inbound links include:
• Posting regularly on niche-related forums
• Getting listed in web directories such as DMOZ and Yahoo (this is different than the Yahoo search engine).
• Submitting a press release (webwire.com is a recommended resource)
• Offer something amazing for free on your website that people will want to link to and share — could be a free report, chart, software program or something very useful.
• Post on relevant niche blogs – although many blog owners, in taking steps to fight junk comments, ensure that even though the blog asks for your URL, the link doesn’t help your ranking.  Still, if you post insightful comments, other readers may want to click and see what your site is all about.

Try out these methods for your new niche website – and be patient!  Before long, you’ll not only be listed in the search engines, but you’ll help build recognition of your website with your target audience.  As long as you continue to post good, helpful content – the traffic that follows will build gradually and naturally.

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“What is niche marketing?”
“How do I find a good niche?”
“Should I follow my passions or follow the money?”

And many more!  These first two chapters will show you how to research and profit from untapped niche markets quickly and easily.  Each step is fully illustrated – so you never have to worry about being overwhelmed with technical details or frustrating explanations.

[Edit: We’re currently upgrading the form – if you’d like to receive a free copy of Get Niche Quick’s first two chapters – simply email sherice (at) ielectrify (dot com).

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