A lot of small businesses make the mistake of thinking that their product or service is good for just about anyone. The logic is “why should I limit my market to a smaller segment of the whole and sacrifice a sale.” The problem with that logic is that for most products and services you simply cannot expect consumers of vastly different segments to view you as valuable. Teens have a different lifestyle than single moms. Single moms have different needs than country club executives. Country Club executives have different likes and dislikes than bikers.

Targeting your sales to a smaller niche is a much better way to go. As a matter of fact, as counterintuitive as it may sound, the smaller the niche the better your sales.

Who do you suppose are your ideal clients? Answer that by asking yourself who would want your product or service? Where do they live? How old are they? What do they do? What else do they consume? Understand everything you can about them. This will help you to construct partners who are also trying to reach the same people. It will help you focus on exactly where and how to advertise. It will help you stop wasting time and effort trying to get people outside of your ideal client profile to buy your product or service. Most of them never will anyway.

If you spend your time talking only to people who are most likely to buy fom you, your sales will increase as a result.

Mike Shannon is the owner of Shamrock Business Coaching, a coaching practice that helps business owners increase profits. You can visit Shamrock Business Coaching on the web at: www.ShamrockCoaching.com

Many of us learn from the Gurus that we should identify a niche and dominate it, so we can make money online. They give us brief glimpses about what is to be done, like identifying a niche market by browsing magazines and hanging around in forums and discussion groups to see if we can be hit by an idea brainwave.

Oh how I wish it was that easy. My first attempts at finding a niche made me feel like I’ve gone deeper into quicksand, and the niche with a great demand had an awful lot of competition. Not one to be outdone, I went and bought software and books to learn what mistakes I made and try to recover from the mistakes. I learnt all about demand, and how “wordtracker” is the best service to use to assess demand for keywords and how to assess and estimate supply from “Google” manually. I saw lots of products offering to teach me how I should target the market, research the keywords, analyse the KEI (Keyword Efficiency Index, which tells you the relative profitability of the keyword you select based on demand,supply and competition), and signed up for a lot of courses to learn more about niche marketing.

To cut the process short, this is what I learned:

a. You must have a niche (this is easy, you don’t want to try to compete with the biggies)

b. You must assess the demand - i.e. find buyers in this market with money to spend.

c. You must see who you are pitted against - your supply estimate to see the competition.

d. Having found the demand and supply, and with a fair idea of the competition, you must find the profitability of your niche business idea.

e. Once you feel it is profitable, get into product development around this niche.

f. Promote the product and pocket the cash …

What you end up learning the hard way is that all these people who write about earning money with google adwords ads don’t tell you how much they spent on the ads, and if it is really that profitable..see, it is a numbers game, as I will show you below:

Assume you will have a decent 1% conversion rate for your product. That means for every 100 clicks you will make a sale. At a minimum bid of 5 cents, you will surely turn a profit for every $5 spend you do. But then, real life is not that easy. You have people competing against you, and your 5 cent bid doesnt attract clicks, leave alone buyers. So you either lose this small amount every day, or hike your bid to get some good clicks. Say you hike your bid to $0.25. At this rate, you would spend $25 to make a sale… get the trend of my thinking?

Unless you are lucky and able to find cheap keywords with high demand to bid on, the google adwords will remain a losing proposition. Or else you have to find the words people use when they look to buy something on the internet, and bid high on those keywords, to increase your conversion rate. This was the situation I found myself in..until I found a good software which did everything the sales page said it would do.

With this software, I was able to assess demand, supply and profitability scores on my idea, and come with lots of keywords with these demand/supply/competition data plus the top 3 PPC bids. I knew clearly what I needed to spend, before I went into product creation or promotion. How I wish I found this software before I sunk in money in internet marketing! But then, as they say, better late than never.

Well, now you know the rub… find a good software which does a great job. It takes the guesswork out of niche marketing.

Swaminathan Viramani
http://www.bestebooks.org

Reciprocal links are an important step in your overall plan to get site visitors.

What are they? Reciprocal links are mutual links you and some other web site owner agree to post on your respective sites.

Why are they so important? It goes back to the basic nature of the Internet. The Internet exists as an information medium. When you go to a search engine, you are looking for links to the information you need. The better information sources have already been found by others, many of whom thought so much of those sources that they placed links to them on their web site. So the number of other web sites linking to a particular source of information, the better the chance it is a good source of information. All the major search engines take link popularity into account when they determine how to rank the results of any search. The end result is that to get a good ranking in the major search engines, an important step is to make sure there are lots of other sites that link back to yours. And, since the links are reciprocal, you will need to put a link to each site that links to you. You can’t expect someone to link to you unless you link to them.

All right, you say, I will get all my friends to put links to my site on their sites. Not so fast! The number of links isn’t all that matters! In addition to looking at the number of links that point to your site, the search engines also examine the quality of those links. Links from sites that are relevant to yours rank highest. If you sell dog food, for example, some good sites to link to yours would be pet toys, dog training, dog grooming, etc. Acquiring a lot of links that don’t relate to your site not only doesn’t help your search engine ranking, it will hurt it, because the search engines will assume you are trying to fool them into thinking your site is popular with a lot of “junk” links. Don’t worry, there are lots and lots of relevant sites to do reciprocal linking with.

The number one ranking for any search term isn’t entirely determined by the number of links to a site, but it is an important factor. And, as you know, having a ranking in the top ten for a search term will guarantee more visitors to your site. But in addition to improving your chances of being found through search engines, having links to your site on lots of other sites means you will get exposure to many site visitors who look at the links page or links section of a site for other related sites to visit. And, the more places your name and site name pop up, the more you are likely to be recognized as an authority on the topic of your site.

So how do you go about building reciprocal links on your site?

First of all you need to realize that reciprocal link building is an ongoing process, not a one shot deal. It needs to be something you continue to work on, although some of it can be automated. You will want to build a links page on your site, where you will place links to other sites which are also linking to you. Since you expect your links page to grow, you should establish separate link categories, all relating to the theme of your site. You can get an inexpensive script for creating and managing a link directory at Linking101.com, not to mention a lot of good, general information about linking.

On your links page, be sure to include simple instructions for anyone who wants to link with you. Many sites include a short piece of HTML code including all your link information, ready to be placed on the reciprocal sites links page. Be sure to place an easily-found link to your links page on the main page of your site as well.

Now you are ready to go looking for relevant link partners, sites that are complementary to yours, but not competitors. You can do it the manual way, by doing searches on your site’s favorite keywords. When you find a site, evaluate it for content relevant to your own, evaluate its quality and note its search engine rank. If you have to choose between a site that is ranked #2 and one that is #20, always choose the higher ranked site. Look for the links page, where you should find instructions on initiating links between your sites. If you don’t find one, it usually isn’t worth your time to contact the webmaster to inquire about links; go to the next one.

One method to speed up the process is to use a free service from http://linkpopularity.com/. From this site you can check the link popularity of your site. But, you can also check which sites are linked to your competitors - particularly your competitors with the high search engine ranking. With that information, you can go to each of these sites and most likely get a reciprocal link. A similar product, Link Survey, is available at http://www.antssoft.com/linksurvey/index.htm.

Another system for speeding up the process is http://links4trade.com/. Although not free, it also helps to manage the headache of link page maintenance.

Link exchange services which claim to completely automate the link exchange process can be found at http://www.powerlinks.com/ and http://www.softbizscripts.com/link-exchange-script-features.php.

A quite amazing tool you might look at is called Zeus, at http://www.cyber-robotics.com/index.htm. Zeus is an intelligent robot that builds a link directory and creates reciprocal links for your web site. A free version is available. You can also find a group of Zeus users ready to swap links at http://www.zeuscollective.com/.

Regardless of how you do it, continue to pursue reciprocal links and make it a part of your overall marketing strategy; you are sure to find it rewarding!

About the Author

Darryl DeLong is a successful Internet Marketer and Ezine Publisher. Learn how to build up your opt-in list, site visitors and sales with my brand new ebook entitled “Viral Internet Marketing Strategies” get a free copy here: http://www.viral-internet-marketing.com