Is Niche Targeting Dead?

Not at all I recently found out.

In the past I’ve not attempted to target a small, specific niche area that was very profitable and yet hard to break into. Usually I just go for the big stuff and it takes years of effort to grab a piece of the pie, but it’s worth it over the long-haul. Recently I wanted to see what happens in the short-term space – and found the micro-niche realm wide open with possibilities.

Before you call me a liar…

I’m not talking about niche areas like “skin cancer” or “florida lawyer” with 50,000+ searches and only a handful of competitor’s websites you need to beat out with your own site to own the space.

I’m talking about niche-niche areas. Niche sites built around keywords with 1,000-5,000 searches per month as listed in Google’s keyword tool. I’m talking about creating a site of 10-15 pages and building links to that site over a couple of months and actually having some residual income end up in your bank account every month.

It might be enough to make your car payment. It probably wont’ be enough to make your house payment – off one site. But, if you’re in it for the long-term – which I hope I’ve convinced you of by now… targeting niche sites over the next year, two years can bring you great gains.

I’ve gotta get to work…

New Video Advertising Idea

Video viewing has exploded and is only getting bigger. My own videos at YouTube have had about 1.5 million views and are currently doing between 5-10,000 views per day on average.

I was thinking about that today and I came up with an idea for myself that might also fit your situation as well.

If you have a lot of successful videos at YouTube or even just a couple and you want to make money from them, and you can’t get into the YouTube partner program where you’ll get paid for viewers of your videos that click on the ad… this might be for you.

Well, wait a minute… even if you are part of YouTube’s partner program and you’re showing Adsense ads you might be able to do this in addition to that. I need to check that.

What I might do is…

Create a small ad on my site that says, “Want 1.5 million views of your 300×250 (or larger) ad?”

I can sell a spot on all of my videos, to a company that wants to be seen. The clicks on the video will not go anywhere – meaning, I’m not an advertiser on YouTube and so I can’t setup a link that would take people to the company’s site that is advertising with me – but, the ad can be a razor sharp image that plays after the title in my YouTube video, and just before the content starts. I can also add a couple frames into the videos if I want, to increase the number of impressions a video viewer will see.

I could even put 2-4 short(1-2 seconds) static 300×250 ads in a row – maybe with words on them that create a sentence… like first board shows: “Do you need…”

The second board might say, “to crank…”

And the third, “up your website TRAFFIC?”

Then the 4th board might show a SEO specialist’s website and contact info – if she were advertising on my site.

You get the idea…

There are videos that show over a million times on YouTube… if you had one and could promise a company a million views – what would that be worth?

What if you ran a 4 slide series like I gave as an example? What would that be worth I wonder…?

How many ads could you run on one 2 minute video? One company at the beginning and one at the end?

I wonder what the partner program’s policy is on this – I must look it up – I’ll update this post as I figure it out.

One cool thing to note is that using your videos in the YouTube partner program does not preclude you using them somewhere else. This is from YouTube’s site:

Non-Exclusive Agreement – YouTube doesn’t restrict where you can upload and distribute your videos so you can monetize it via YouTube and still use it elsewhere.

Nice… right?

If you try this – be sure to let us know, and how much you’re charging per 1,000 views.

Best of Luck!

The “Free” Business Model

You might have heard about people giving away products or services for free online and wondered how you make money from that business model.

It might go a couple of ways:

1. You could give away loads of information on your site – in the articles you write, for free. This is information you could charge money for – but, you don’t – you give it away for free.

2. You could offer some specific product or service for free that you could charge people for access to. (PDF, book, forum, video, training program, report)

Why would you want to give away something for free? Shouldn’t you always charge money for it? Not necessarily.

There are websites making a whole lot of money by giving away free information. Here’s why that is.

1. Free information is instantly available to whomever lands at your site. They don’t have to wait for it – or pay for it, it’s there and ready to consume.

2. You might be instantly cutting out your competitors that are all charging for the product/service. You may quickly become THE source everyone uses because everyone wants free instead of paying for it.

3. Free = Viral if the information is desired. People will pass free links to their online friends much more often and quicker than they would for something that will cost their friends money. Surfers love to help their friends and passing them links to a place they can get info for free – is a big help.

That’s the WHY of the Free Business Model. Now, what’s the “How”? As in, “How do I make money from it?”

Basically traffic comes first. Money comes later. If a website is able to amass traffic – a couple thousand people per day or more, then the website can make money from advertisements on the website. Their own or other companies advertisements work well when large amounts of visitors are arriving at their site.

The amount of money you can make from ads on your site depends on:

1. Numbers of people coming to your site.

2. The focus of your site. If your niche is tightly defined and there are advertisers that pay a lot per click you can do quite well off low level traffic.

Most businesses giving it all away for free are usually also selling something.

So, you can advertise on your site some products that you’ll charge money for. Or you can put Google Adsense, Textlink Ads, or charge other businesses to put their ads on your site because you have some decent traffic coming in every day – giving you a high pageview count.

One of the best things you can do when you have a free site is start an email list. You can start a list with Aweber.com – which is definitely one of the top two companies doing email lists online today.

Short and simply… You join Aweber. You create a form on their site – that you can add to your site – as a pop-up or as a small blurb that goes on your website somewhere people will see. Look at the checkbox on IncAnswsers – that’s my Aweber form section. I also have a popup that comes up sometimes – once per customer. If your IP address changes you’ll see it again.

You collect names and email addresses to go with the names. You create a newsletter or some other emails that you send out to those that join your list. If you focus on providing more free information and occasionally ask for friends on your list to buy something – some do. Over time your email list will become very important to your business.

Recently one guy I follow pretty closely, Jeremy Schoemaker, decided that instead of write a book and sell it he was going to create a 12 week course and just give all the information away for free instead. The way he’s monetizing this is that he gives away his affiliate link so I can link to his course… if you buy any of his products or services I’ll make a small commission off whatever it is. It’s a win-win-win. You win because you find his 12 week free course. I win because I get a commission. Jeremy wins because you’ve found his site and become an email list member if you decide to opt-in to the free 12 week course.

That’s what to do with a Free Business Model site to make money with it. If you have any questions, feel free to ask. Of course I can’t cover everything in one article – so, ask questions to clarify if this is something you’re considering.

- Vern

Photo credit: Flickr.com member, The Consumerist

Which Blogs Make Money Online?

If your blogging focus is making money then you must have a blog that can make money.

There are blogs that make money within a year and blogs that don’t. The difference between them is whether the audience your blog attracts is focused on some niche area that is easily monetized or not. The difference in money-making capacity between blogs from the two different lists below can be the difference between success and failure for the online business entrepreneur.

Blogs with this Focus Are NOT Easily Monetized within a Year:

• Diaries, personal accounts of blogger’s life – unless famous
• Personal Development
• Motivational blogs.
• Individual sports: bicycling, running, tennis, triathlon
• Traveling (wide focus)
• Writing
• Saving money
• Music
• Wide focus blogs. See my AimforAwesome.com site – it’s a collection of positive articles with all sorts of subjects. Tough to monetize.
• Food
• Kids, pregnancy, some health issue like cancer, hepatitus, diabetes
• Politics

Blogs with this Focus ARE More Easily Monetized within a Year:

• Making money – teaching others to do it
• Blogging – teaching others to blog successfully
• Technology – a narrow focus like iPhones, or product group, like “netbook computers”. Photography, video, mobile phones of all sorts.
• Online games. You may not play them, but there are millions that do.
• Addiction, overcoming bad habits, self help
• Blog themes (WordPress, MySpace), mobile themes – anything to do with customization – personalization of some popular online activity. If Facebook ever opens up to custom backgrounds… wow.
• Applications. iPhone applications are selling like crazy right now – and if you can tell people how to get into that space you’ll make a lot of $ right now. Any Mac app, Windows app, Nokia s60 app blog will do well.
• Team sports – National and college teams. Sports that are on tv and attract a lot of viewers.

I chose to focus these lists on realistic topics that someone could become successful with in a short time with a lot of effort. It doesn’t take really high traffic numbers to make a decent amount of money with the topics I chose as easily monetizable. Bloggers on the second list can choose from many products to offer to customers and have a much better chance of selling to their visitors than do bloggers on the first list.

Now, there are some blogs in the first list that might make a lot of money depending on how many people arrive at the site. Huge traffic can still bring you a lot of cash from Google  Adsense if you get thousands of people each day to your site. Big traffic usually takes a few years of effort and if you’re in it for the long-haul – like you should be, you can pick a topic like politics – and really be cranking in 2-3 years.

One of the top blogs on the planet is StevePavlina.com. His is a personal development blog that he started about 4 years ago that is filled with over 600 articles – many of them very interesting and thought provoking. You can do that too – but you’re looking at the very long-term for success with such a blog. If that’s where your interest is – go for it!

The thing is… you can probably make money with any blog that gets huge amounts of traffic. That’s a given. Big traffic takes time – couple years as a minimum.

In the short term you cannot make decent money online with blogs that aren’t focused on an area that’s easily monetizable.

So, ask yourself – are you in it for the long-haul online or do you want to be making money as fast as possible online?

There’s something to be said for both options…