Resources

Niche Marketing, Explanation and Strategies

Niche Marketing is actually specializing in one small segment in a business. Say, if you deal in silver, you could be dealing in silver jewellery and that is your niche. Now you could specialize further and go into silver ear rings and studs. This is further defining your niche. The fact is that if you focus on a niche with single mindedness, you can make a lot of money.

Niche Strategy Advantages

When we discuss niche, we are focusing on a specific area, be it in product or service. For example, Liposuction is a niche in the realm of plastic surgery.
So how do we select a niche? When we have to select a niche, we need to focus on a area or product which either has a huge volume of business so that we can make money on turnover, or a small volume of business but with huge profit margins.

One of the biggest advantages in being a niche player is that you can quickly reach a very high position in your niche. A niche normally has very few players, and so the competition is less. This can be either because of the geography of the niche, or because of the qualification required. If you are into liposuction, for instance, there are very few doctors who are qualified to be plastic surgeons. Among them there are a lesser number that are involved in liposuction. This means if you have the expertise and the capability, you can quickly dominate the niche. Niche players quickly start getting media and news publicity since the segment is unique and is considered newsworthy.

When we talk about niche on the internet, we come to a very unique problem. You would like to focus on one small segment to the exclusion of others. This is easy to say and difficult to implement. Due to the plethora of options on the web, the temptation to deal with other products which do not belong to your desired niche is immense. Therefore you need to stop getting greedy, exercise control and once that you have decided what your niche is, you should simply stick to it.

Once that you have decided that you are going to deal with just one product and you are going to build your reputation as a dominant player in that product, you will find that the internet makes it easy for you. You can write informative articles on your niche and post them on article websites. These articles must offer information, be serious and businesslike. You can even write for the newspaper and other recognized print mediums like periodicals, weeklies etc. These are not advertisement, they could be free or, if you are good, you could even be paid for them. So you get to advertise your business and your self in a respectable way. This is a bonus of playing the niche strategy.

The internet is hungry for content. There are article directories, blogs and online newsletters that always need content. Keep submitting your articles. These will have a worldwide reach. This is the main advantage. Soon you will be known as a credible source and become an authority in your niche.
The advantage of being a niche player are many, and you should see success in no time.

How To Keep Internet Marketing Cost Low

With the economy on a downturn, the only way to be profitable is to watch costs. If you are into internet marketing, it is not wise right now to make a huge splash in the market place. There are many cost saving options to advertise, get noticed and increase your sale. You do not really need to pay expensive consultants thousands of dollars just to secure your position in the marketplace.
Given below are some marketing ideas that can really help you :

Press Releases.
This is often a neglected area for internet marketers. Draft killer press releases which are newsworthy, and get them published in newspapers, or get them aired on television and on the radio. If even one media, be it a magazine or a popular TV channel airs it, you have gained access to millions of prospective customers. Design your headline to be catchy, use present tense, get to the point quickly and it will attract customers. Ensure that you have your website url displayed prominently.

Free online publicity
Article directories, search engines, online classified sites allow free posting of ads. Choose a site that has high page rank, develop your content which is optimized for search engines, and post it.
In case you are not a good writer or do not have the time, outsource it. Use freelance sites where people from other countries offer low cost service in this regard.

Use Trade Shows.
Even though renting space may not be cheap, it is the best and oldest way to build business. Keep flyers and catalogues ready, displaying your website url. Get fresh leads and pursue them. This is the best way of building business and you will recover your cost in no time.

Hold Contests
Surprisingly contests on internet do not cost much and give you immense amount of publicity. You may have to pay an expensive prize, but you will have more than made up your costs even before the contest is over. You could play smart and hold the contest on your website and get an established company to sponsor the prize. This way you save on the prize money too.
Online contests attract a huge number of participants from all around the world. One does not really have to elaborate on the benefit you get by way of traffic and publicity.

Trade Banners
Some established businesses are willing to trade banners with you. You place their banner on your site for a certain period of time and in return you display theirs. If you can work this out with an established business, you will have gained a lot of publicity and back links.

Use Yellow Pages
People have got accustomed to flyers, so much so, that most flyers and sales letters end up as wrappers or go into the dustbin. Advertisements often do not register in the mind. A cost effective way to advertise your land based and web based business is to use the Yellow Pages.
Follow these steps and you will have an effective marketing campaign going for your website.

PROTECT YOUR WEBSITE RANKING

SEO has helped your website achieve an enviable ranking. This has helped your overall marketing campaign and you are happy. But this is not the time to be complacent. The internet is full of scamsters. There are many webmasters who use unethical methods to cheat search engines to think their website is popular.

Search engines have figured this out. Now special software is used to detect such sites and then these sites are either given lower rankings or banned altogether. However this system is far from perfect. Some good and legitimate sites have also been banned by search engines mistakenly. You must take measures so that your website is not caught mistakenly as unethical.

First of all, check your back links. Your back links should come from pages that are not unethical. They must not be coming from Link Farms and other such sources. Quality Links from sources that are relevant to your site and business are preferable and offer you protection from penalties. Your links should, in short, come from respectable sources so that you do not fall under the bad neighbourhood criteria of Google.

The easiest way to check this is to download the Google toolbar. Check your backlinks against the Pagerank feature. Greyed out pages are penalized. Ones that show green are safe, even if it is a tiny little bit of green. These pages are relatively new, and who knows, they may grown in value slowly.

You should continue to monitor your links regularly.

Cloaking is another dangerous practise indulged in by unethical webmasters. This means inserting keywords in pages that cannot be read by human eye. Using white text on white background is a common way of cloaking. This means that visitors do not read the text which is kept for the benefit of search engines. However, if search engines get to know this, the web site page ranking does not get a boost. It plummets down or the website gets banned.

But the search engine bots are not human. If you love grey fonts and use them liberally and have a greyish kind of web page, the bot might mistakenly assume you are being unethical and ban your website. Do not, ever, use same background color and font, even though you think it looks lovely and artistic. Play safe.

May be you have researched and found the perfect key words for your site. You love them. It is easy to go overboard and sprinkle them a bit too generously in your text. This is quite understandable. But understand that search engines have a set formula or ratio for keyword density. If your key word ratio is high, you may be penalized for key word stuffing.

Ensure that your content contains key words, but the flow is natural. Using 3% of keyword density in a page is enough.

Another way of cloaking is when human visitors are directed to one page and the search engine bot to another page that is unintelligent to human eye. Here the bot is fed with key words, links and other things the webmaster deems necessary for high page ranking. This can get you banned permanently.

If you are serious about your reputation and standing as an internet marketer, you will ensure that such practises are not employed in your website. Do not resort to trickery and deception to artificially boost your ranking.

One way link building for SEO

The fastest way to get search engines to consider your website reputable and index is by applying one way link building strategies. This is also called creating backlinks for your website. This is the main way for major search engines to recognize your website and help get your indexed.
The most effective way to build one way links is as follows:

Article Marketing
Article marketing is a tried and tested way to get one way links and increase traffic to your website. Of course this is not instantaneous. But if you continue to do this over a time, you can build a reputation as an authority in your business field, and also earn money. Here is how you do it.
Write informative articles on subjects related to your product. If you are unsure about your writing skills get an SEO expert to write them for you. Ensure that you have a well written author’s bio which is bound to get attention. This author’s bio is placed in a space called the resource box. Include your key words (anchor text) in the author’s bio. This gives you a double advantage. Your link and your anchor text both get validated by the viewers and the article directory site. You also develop, as explained earlier, a reputation as an expert.
Of course you need to research your key words and key phrases prior to writing your articles so that you can use them effectively.

Buying Links
This is another accepted way to get one way links. You can buy links from pages that have high ranking with search engines. You can trade links with them. However, if you do not have the money, you can try certain methods that are free but not less powerful
Use Groups and Forums

Form groups on Google and Yahoo that are relevant to your niche, or join groups that are already operating related to your niche. Also join similar forums. Interact with others. Both these options allow you to leave your link along with your name, and this gives you plenty of back links. Of course check the rules before you join. Some forums and groups do not allow links.
Give guidance, well thought out and drafted replies to queries and freely leave links to your website. You make friends with your target audience and get business too.

Blogging
Blogs are another way to interact with your target audience. You can comment on other blogs related to your niche and build your own group and circle. Regularly update your blog, visit others in your niche and leave links to your website along with the comments.

Use Content-Sharing Sites
Use Squidoo.com, Hubpages.com and other such sites. Post your content and link them to your website.
Social Bookmarking

Social bookmarking works!
The truth is that it is excellent. However, that being said, you need to tread carefully. Most of them ban marketing activity. You need to be subtle and smart. The good way to succeed is by following a pattern. Post on other sites regularly. Keep a ratio of 5:1, commenting 5 times on other sites and then once on yours. Join groups, be active on other people’s bookmarks and this will get others to visit yours.
Digg.com, Mixx.com, Fark.com etc are some of them.

Video Sharing Sites
Video sharing sites also allow you to place one way links. YouTube is one such site.
While links are effective all these methods help you to get a reputation in your field and helps convert your traffic into sales.

How to avoid being penalized for duplicate content

The major search engines filter search results routinely and filter out duplicate content. This is known as "duplicate content penalty".

Duplicate content actually means that content is copied from one site and placed on another in verbatim. Copy+paste is a common method of doing this. So how does a search engine think that one website is a legitimate source and another is a duplicate one?
Well, search engines retain the content listing from a more popular website, deeming it as authentic and penalizing the other for plagiarism. To enable them to arrive at decisions, they analyse the websites in terms of the number of incoming links the website has, age of the domain, other original content, ranking etc. Sometimes, the actual source may be deemed to be the duplicate content and get penalized unjustly.

Search engines have sent a clear message to webmasters. They want original content. So if webmasters want to avoid penalties, they need to follow these guidelines.

1. Use legitimate Redirects

In case you are shifting your domain, use permanent 301 redirects. These are legitimate and approved by search engines for routing web traffic.

2. Page Uniqueness

If your website has multiple pages, each one must be unique. Even if it has the same theme and design, the content has to be unique and original.

3. Employ Multiple Languages

Mind you this only works if you have visitors who know these languages. If you have a bilingual clientele, you can consider multiple domains for different languages. Then you can employ a translator and get your content put up in different languages. This is not considered duplicate content – as each version is unique in its own language as per search engines.

4. Unique Meta Tags

Each page must be given its own different meta tag..

5. Use Robots.txt to direct search engines away

Put up a robot txt file on your site to steer the search bot away from your pages if they contain duplicate content. These txt files are useful for keeping search engines away from any content that you consider private.

6. Affiliate Websites or Identical Content

If you are using an affiliate program that comes with its own built up website and content, you will need to change and personalize the content so that it does not suffer the duplicate content penalty. This is also the method to be employed if you have put up identical content for some reason.

7. Copyright your web content

This is important. Put up a copyright notice, informing visitors and search engines of your commitment to originality. Copyscape is performing a good service for this.

8. Enforce your copyright

Use copysentry to enforce your copyright, if you discover that you have been plagiarized. If the plagiarist does not take you seriously, take action. Inform Google and the web host of the offending website of the violation.

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