About the Author
Jerry Wilson
Jerry Wilson has spent the majority of his life building up and managing successful small businesses such as
CJ Gift Baskets and
CJ Picnic Baskets.
Niche market websites are small, yet powerful marketing tools that can dominate the competition. Properly optimized and filled with relevant content, a niche market website will obtain higher search engine rankings and more pre-qualified traffic than competitive mega sites. If you want to get rich, find yourself a niche.
Niche market websites are your way to dominate and sell more than mega sites that are trying to be everything to everyone. In a previous article entitled "Create a Niche Market Website" I go into detail describing what a niche market website is. Use your favorite search engine to look up this article to learn more about what a niche market website is.
In this previous article I used a fly fishing website as an example of a niche market website. Let's continue this path to further examine how you can dominate the mega sites and earn the income you desire.
Build a Dominate Niche Market Website
In order to build a dominate website you need to become the expert on your site's subject.
Start with a website address that has your niche in the name. In our example of a fly fishing website you should purchase a URL with "fly fishing" in the name. The problem that you are going to find is that most names are already taken. You are going to have to be creative in order to purchase a URL with your niche name in the URL and keep it easy for your users to remember.
Next, you will need a reliable host for your niche website. Don't think you have to pick a local source for your web host. You are about to enter the World Wide Web. Think global with your web host as well as your available market for your niche product. Virtual servers are easy to find. Pick a web host that has reliable up-time for its servers, 24-hours live support and the bandwidth to handle the visitors and downloads your site will need.
No idea where to go? We host our sites with GoDaddy. We buy our URLs from there as well as host our sites on their virtual servers. The hosting plan we have with them allows us up to 25 sites and 25 databases for a single annual fee.
Through our GoDaddy account we also have access to a huge library of software to help create or enhance our sites. To create your niche market website you will need a shopping cart software. GoDaddy has a couple to pick from that are free yet very feature rich.
Templates and optional modules make customizing your website easy. While knowing html and php programming is a plus, it is not necessary to create a very attractive website.
You will need a way to process credit cards. Compare rates. That is the best advice that I can give. PayPal and Authorize.net are 2 of the bigger processors. There are differences in credit card processors and you should select carefully.
Add your items and make sure that your shopping cart is working properly. Your credit card processor may have test card numbers or a test mode. Run some transactions in order to verify that your shopping cart can process orders properly.
Optimize your Niche Market Website
Now make your site THE place to go for news, information and stories about fly fishing or whatever your niche is about. Not only is these items interesting for your visitors these are also bait for search engines.
Use article directories to help with targeted content about your niche. Articles can be a great source of keywords for your site.
You should also include a blog on your website for your visitors to post their own comments. A blog on your site can be a great source of fresh content and attract new visitors to your site.
You should also participate in blogs about your niche and make sure that your website address is in your signature. This will help bring pre-qualified visitors to your site. Just don't make your blog entries an advertisement for your site. Blogs don't like that and will probably block your account.
Repeat as Needed
A single niche market site may not give you the income you desire. Not a problem.
Once you have completed and optimized you niche market website you can repeat the same process over and over again. Take your design of your fly fishing site and create sister sites for bass fishing and deep sea fishing. Each site should include links to the other sites so you end up with a family of sites that funnel visitors to each other.
You can continue to expand as you have the confidence that you can handle the extra work. Your additional sites do not have to be related to each other in order to be successful. They just need to be focused, optimized and continue to be updated with fresh and relative content.
Do not be discouraged if your single site does not return huge profits. Some niche market sites never earn thousands of dollars in profits on a monthly basis. The beauty of this type of business is that you can easily duplicate your efforts.
If you want $10,000 per month and your single niche market website does not show any promise to make that kind of profit then create multiple sites. 10 niche market websites making $1,000 each a month is the same as a single site making $10,000. Same thing with 20 niche market websites making $500 each. In other words, with niche market websites are like owning a chain of convenience stores or a fast food chain. You won't necessarily retire on a single site. Real income comes through repeating your success over and over again.
Published by Jerry Wilson on January 10, 2008 06:15 AM
