The most critical parts of my online business are as follows

Hosting Account – To host my websites/blogs

Autoresponder Account – This is how I send emails to subscribers

Blog – Take this blog for example, it is just over a year old, it is my main vehicle for sharing valuable marketing information which in turn benefits others and hopefully gives me some credibility and influence in the field of online marketing.

So all in all, the above the above 3 things are the basic pillars of an online business, without these, unless you rely purely on blogging which many professional bloggers do, the mix of producing content and email marketing are the key attributes that make the whole thing work.

So if I was to lose all this tomorrow and wanted to start over, what would I do?

1. Build A New Blog

When I built this blog I made a meal of it as I had never heard of Wordpress so back then it was a big deal to me. Anyone who comes to me now with WordPress questions, don’t worry I have been there, 14 months ago if fact.

Basically I paid someone else to do it for me – now I know that there is functionality within the Hostgator Cpanel to build a blog in seconds as long as you have the domain name registered – I tried it the other day, pressed a couple of buttons and it was running in a few minutes.

Why The Emphasis On Having A Blog?

A blog is the best and easiest means by which you can create conversations, share information, get to know other marketers, provide easy social proof to others and attract visitors given the SEO friendly nature of WordPress.

This is effectively the easiest and most effective way that you can create a hub or shop window for your online activities.

I have had many comments on this Blog from people who read my emails and their links take me back to single web pages with something for sale.

A piece of advice here – I strongly urge you to build a Blog and append it to your website – by creating articles in your chosen niche and regularly commenting on other sites not to mention the advertising potential will dramatically increase your exposure given what I have just said about Blogs and Search Engines.

2. Social Media Integration

Given the explosion in recent years of Social Media – this is something I confess I do not use enough of, I would integrate my new blog with the main players in the Social Media world, notably Twitter and Facebook. There are plenty of Wordpress plugins that will allow you to do this quite easily. There are share plugins, other Bookmarking Plugins, the list is endless.

In addition to this I would create accounts on a load of micro blog sites, such as WordPress, Blogger, Hub Pages, Squidoo and create a small version of every article you post on your main blog with links to the post.

This is time consuming but a certain amount of this can be automated with article spinning software.

This will achieve 2 things, link juice for your SEO and the extra traffic to your Blog.

3. An email Subscriber List

The email subscriber list is the single most valuable asset any online marketer can have.

By having a loyal and responsive list of people who read your emails you have the ability to direct them to anywhere you want.

Many online business rely wholy on organic and Pay Per Click traffic.

Organic traffic isn’t safe as search engines can change their ranking metrics at any time possibly removing your traffic overnight and Pay Per Click can be extremely expensive.

Little wonder there are so many marketers out there giving away and selling list building products that claim to show you how to build a list and make loads of money from that list.

Building a list is quite easy in the Internet Marketing Niche in my experience, however building a list and retaining loyalty and influence in the eyes of your subscribers is the difficult part – as without this all you will potentially end up with is a load of email addresses of people that do not open your emails.

Here is something written by Stephanie Mulac that many Marketers would do well to download and read: Care And Feed

So How Does One Start To Build Their List?

The first component of building a list is by creating a free offering, this can something your have created yourself like an ebook, a recording of an Interview with someone of influence or a video series.

If this is something beyond your level of knowledge or time then there are tonnes of PLR Reseller sites out there whereby you could purchase a package of information products with rights to amend book covers and claim as your own.

There are many variations of these out there, some of good quality, some not so good so you must be careful here.

I won’t try to influence you on this and this is not something I have ever done, but a PLR ebook is an effective way by which one could re write something in their own words – re writing is a lot quicker and easier than starting from scratch – knowing human nature however people do tend to take the easy route – get an ebook, change their cover and put their name of it.

The next component is your squeeze page and download page – I would purchase or obtain a PLR web page ready built to save costs and time, enter the text for the benefits and a copy of the ebook cover.

So all that remains is the Autoresponder by which you would need to enter your code onto the squeeze page and of course the front page of your blog.

You can optimize and improve you offer by adding other things to the download page later but the important thing is to ensure that your offering is up and running.

Focus On Building The List!

The next focus has to be to start building a subscriber list and create a relationship with them at the same time.

As I said before, building a list of subscribers is one thing but improving your own influence in their eyes is a lot more difficult.

Now you have a blog that is generating organic traffic you should have an optin form on your blog.

Secondly if you are starting from ground zero if you are in the Internet Marketing Niche in particular a good way to build a list is by joining every giveaway event that comes up.

This is a method by which you submit a gift to an event with many other marketers but for your gift to be ranked you need to promote the event to other people.

Theres quite a bit of work involved here but this is a great way of getting off the ground.

It is something I haven’t participated much in this year due to my own time limitations but is something I am determined I wish to do more of it future – the exposure that can be obtained and even the sales one can generate make these events well worth participating in.

Another good way of building a list is to do paid mailings, other marketers with lists will send mailings for you for an agreed sum but I would suggest that you have good offers bolted on to try to recoup your costs of the mailings.

The most common method people use these days is Ad Swaps whereby marketers agree to send each others offers to each others list.

It is possible to build huge lists this way and make money on the back of each mailing with One Time Offers however many marketers use this method far too much in my opinion.

Overdone this damages your credibility in the eyes of your subscribers and distracts their attention span as they then potentially find themselves having to read too many emails.

This one is probably my favourite – If I was starting out now and this is something I intend to do in any case is to produce a low cost offer, say $7 – produce an MP3 recording of an interview with a house hold name and upload the offer to a reseller site.

That way, other marketers will sell this for you to make money and you receive new optins for no more effort on your part.

4. Conclusion

So there you have it. Whatever Niche you reside in, the principles of online marketing are the same

The Communication Platform

The Blog

Social Media

The Offer

and The Subscriber List

Its As Simple As That.

There is no magic bullet, a sound work ethic, a laser sharp focus and being a major action taker are what I believe to be the main required attributes.

I won’t say what many marketers may lead you to believe that this is all you need to do is create a mailing list but there is much more to it if you want to get past the crowd.

How well you do will have a direct correlation to the amount of effort you put in – some of the main factors are below:

• The quality of content on your blog – are you making headway in being seen as an authority figure in your Niche?
• How easy your Blog Posts are to read – Do you block your paragraphs into 3 or 4 lines before a space and do you use a light background with dark text?
• How well you present yourself to your list – Do you treat your subscribers like humans or cattle? Do you send them good content and information or do you just send swap offers from other Marketers?
• How well do you understand and implement SEO and List Building Strategies for your mini sites if you have them?

I hope you enjoyed this post and I also hope that it gave you an insight as to where your efforts should be concentrated.

If you liked this post feel free to leave an appropriate comment below and give your own website some good SEO Link Juice or even click the share on Facebook Twitter button to show this blog post to your friends.

You can also join Networked Blogs on Facebook which I have just set up by clicking in the box on the right of this Blog Post and following it if you have a Facebook account, will you be my Facebook Friend?

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We know they can make us money if only we get them right.

What am I referring to? Profitable niches of course -

The Holy Grail of the Internet Marketer

It’s little wonder that newbies and old hands alike struggle over which niches to focus on.

After all we want to make sure that they are profitable and that we can make money from them.

Internet marketing is just too time consuming to waste all your efforts in a sector where people are just not going to buy.

So what indicators are out there which can tell you whether you have found a profitable niche?

Hopefully the following points will provide you with some of the things that can put you on the right track right now.

It is said that the core principle in carrying out such research is to remember that the broad areas of health, wealth and love are probably the main things that fit with peoples needs so its obvious to say that this is where people are willing to spend money.

Whatever country, culture and environment people will always want to be healthier, wealthier and will be looking for ways to better their love lives.

This is a very broad idea and people do spend money on the oddest things, so if you want to move beyond this you could also look at a site like Amazon and look up what people are buying by accessing the top one hundred sellers.

Its important to remember this

If it’s selling on Amazon there is a market for it.

Another pointer is to see whether there are forums on the topic.

Taking it one step further are there magazines on this topic?

And is there a “guide for dummies”?

Anything that solves a problem by removing pain at any level will mean you have the potential to make money.

So What About Tools?

When Marketing online Keyword Tools are a must so you can see who is looking for the product you are selling.

I would go for the Google keyword tool where you can access the number of searches something is getting every month. I like to use the exact match or phrase match to look at the numbers.

Alternatively there is a Firefox add on called Wordtracker which opens as a small window on the side of your screen.

If there are reasonable numbers of searches on a keyword or long tail keyword then that shows there is a market.

You could also look at the Cost Per Click function in the Google Keyword tool which will tell what people are actually paying for the keywords on average to advertise.

The higher the cost, the more likely it is that you have come across a profitable market.

The next step it to type the keywords into Google and look to see who is advertising for those words.

If you can find say 5 ads on the right for these words it means that people are bidding on them and buying them.

Decent marketers will not continue to use keywords in their campaigns that are not converting for them.

Another tool which will really help you drill down into a Niche and look at Strength Of Competition Indicators is a piece of software called Micro Niche Finder.

This piece of software has been around for a long time – it gives you a graphical view of search terms and has a whole load more functionality.

What About The Competition?

The final part of the jigsaw before deciding on a Niche is to evaluate the competition.

In addition to the Micro Niche Finder software option above there are plenty of free and simple ways you can do this.

We all know that the Internet Marketing Niche, Health, Weight loss etc are extremely crowded so like in any arena of business if you are up against many other marketers doing the same thing you have to be able to evaluate whether there is money to be made.

A simple method is to look at how many competing pages there are for the search I am doing. You can do this by typing the keywords in quotes and looking at the amount of competing pages.

It’s important here though to go to the end of the search results in order to get a true idea of the amount of competing pages.

Go all the way to the last page on the results and you will see the figure in quotes change sometimes.

The figure in quotes at the very end of the pages when you are scrolling through is the true number of competing pages.

Another effective method for evaluating competition is to have a look at Clickbank to get an idea as to what a profitable niche looks like.

Every product for sale in Clickbank has what’s known as gravity score and although nobody really knows what it comprises of, it’s generally accepted that the higher the gravity score the more profitable the product will be.

Some people say that the gravity score equates to the amount of affiliates that have sold the product in the last month so obviously the higher the score the better here because people are making money in this niche.

gain you will notice that the areas of Health, Wealth and Love are some of the major players here with Weight Loss, Internet Marketing and Relationship products having some good gravity scores.

If you really want to open your mind to more profitable niches you might also want to consider looking at various physical products to market online with the wealth of other affiliate networks out there at the moment.

Setting up sites and campaigns related to specific products can be a really great way of getting people who are laser targeted on something specific and they can convert a lot easier for you.

Ultimately giving people what they want in a niche where there is a demand as long as there is not too much competition in that specific area is the ultimate recipe for success.

I hope this Blog post has given you a few pointers as to what to look out for.

Feel free to leave a comment below letting me know your thoughts.

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