1) "Niche Markets, Mini Site Profits and A Good Way to Soar Your Poor Affiliate Sales!"

2) "Three Cheap and Effective Ways to Drive Tons of Highly Targeted Traffic to Your Web Site."

3) "Classified Ads."

4) "Tell Us What You Think!"

Niche markets and mini sites are taking lately by storm the internet marketing field. But despite of all kinds of free information you receive, there still plenty of tips couple of Netpreneurs "forget" to tell you.

Now don't get me wrong, I would not go here into deeply analyses of niche marketing and mini sites strategies. The subject is too big to discuss it in one single article. Rather than this, I will try to outline couple of things which been overlooked and might influence in a good way your mini Net empire profits.

First time first, you have to understand WHY a niche market can be so profitable. Well, the answer is simple: just because people need to find quick answers to their SPECIQUE problems. And the fastest way today to reach information are the search engines. That's why niche markets, mini sites and the search engines cannot be considered separately.

A niche market offer the right kind of information to a crowded mass of searchers. It's TOTALLY focused arround one subject, and ONLY ONE. This way searchers are coming "right to the point" and become highly targeted visitors to your web site. These overlooked niches represented huge business opportunities that could quickly change your life and put you on a path to Internet success.

So I'm not kidding when I'm saying that 90% from your mini site success reside in founding a very profitable niche market! A wrong niche market (or the topic of your web site) can mean a wasting of time & money on trying to (pre)sell something no one wants, or looking for.

The equation is simple: good niche market + nice mini site + top position on search engines = solid monthly profits!

But from were profits come? There are two ways: either you promote on the mini sites your own products or services, either you build them up arround an affiliate program or a joint venture association. A short look around will tell us that the second option it is the most used today!

Speacking on niche markets, let me confess a little bit. Couple of time ago, when I first start to build mini sites around profitable niches, I was hunted for three different markets. At that time I first realize the immense help from an extraordinary online service. Wordtracker was invaluable for my searches and definetelly influence my final decision on creating my mini site. If you are not familiarised with Wordtracker, take a little break and read my review, then come back:

http://www.internetmarketingprofitscenter.com/advertising/search-engines/wordtracker.html

The KEI values for what I've been looking for was:

• keyphrase #1: 6.486
• keyphrase #2: 306962.112
• keyphrase #3: 3480.255

If you read my Wordtracker article you know that a KEI over 400 is a gift! For two of my keyphrases I was way above, but couldn't decided which one to choose it. K1 wasn't attractive, not at all. K2 and K3 had very good potential.

K3 it wasn't so close to my expertise. As a matter of fact, I didn't know too much about this subject. And since I decided to build a mini site around an affiliate program, my expactations on K3 affiliate potential wasn't fullfilled. What I found was 5 affiliate programs with very, very poor information, statistics, etc. I wasn't able to identify primer tools which makes an affiliate program to work. Not to mention what kind of customer/ affiliate service they had! Uugghhh... what a waste of time. I dump the idea of using K3 for my mini site.

What was left was K2 with his impresive KEI value. By the luck I was found 2 affiliate programs which best suit my affiliate needs and requirements. Even better, I was able to find the right kind of information for this topic (niche market), so I simply "reserve a spot" on building future search engine highly targeted web pages full of helpfull information!

OK, but what other people hide from you? Long-time mini site and niche marketing planification!

When it comes to mini sites, most folks think at a web site with 1-4 pages. This is totally wrong. It can works for some niche markets for a period, but on a long run I'm certain will not. That's because of the search engines and their continue improvements. And what would be a mini site without getting free traffic from them?

Let me explain:-)

It's all about your web site structure and your ability to build search engine friendly web pages. And you have to understand that your niche market will not live forever. Through the time, more and more people will come and build web sites around your niche market. Don't make the mistake of considering yourself the only smart guy on the Internet.

To asure your always top position on your niche market, you have to build a proper web site, with a very flexible structure and compeling information. By "flexible structure" I mean an internal web site disposure so you can easily allow search engines to find your new web pages. Ideally would be to start with 5-12 pages and a maximum of 2-levels deep. This will allow spiders to index your site quickly and to score ALL your internal pages!

Even more, if you use an affiliate program on your mini site, consider that your merchant company will always try to build new products. Better will be to do businesses with a company which frecvently will create/ improve new products related to your niche market. More products in equal to more separate web pages.

With multiple pages on your site, you'll concentrate each page on a different keyphrase, thus increasing the number of ways people could find your site. Better yet, if you find more affiliate products for the same niche, consider to build multiple mini sites and link them together! Build a mini net empire around a niche market and watch how your profits will soar from the thin air.

Nothing beets your competitors more rather then your own mini site niche empire!

The great thing with mini sites: their running totally on autopilot. Even if you do nothing, it will continue to generate sales month after month using the search engines. Well, at least as you score well on the top 10 of major players. But could it be another way to generate profits fast with mini sites, since a good listing for a new web site can take up to 8 weeks?

Yes, using the pay-per-click search engine, which by far it's the most targeted way of bringing prospects to your site. In this case, just forget about search engine optimization and try to focus on compeling ways to pre-sell your merchant product('s). But PPC is a number game and if you use them from the start, you are half blind.

Why? Because PPC are unique in their way. You need to have certain results before you deep down into their traffic, unless you want to be left poor right from the beggining. The next article from this issue will cover exactly what information you'll gonna need to know if you want to run a PPC successfull advertising campaign.

So if you want to play the niche marketing and mini site game, I would suggest first to start generating FREE traffic from search engines. Once you'll know exactly how much a visitors will "worth" to your new mini site, you can go on PPC promotions or other profitable Internet marketing strategies. But never BEFORE!

Last Thoughts:

Mini sites build around a niche market has been and will be a successful financially from a pure numbers of visitors. It depend only on YOU to convert a higher percentage of them into buyers. And of course to get their personel informational and to follow-up them later down the road (I bet you mis that!!)

Phil Wiley, the author of "Mini Site Profits", considered by many Netpreneurs (including me) to be the definitive work on mini sites, and a must-buy for anyone who wants to know more about the subject, said into an interview:

"A mini site doesn't have to be made to sell a product, but the kind I build are designed to make sales... to make a profit! I think mini sites will survive as long as search engines survive in their current form. If they all end up becoming pay per clicks you might not want the hassles of handling 20 to 100 sites, but that's not to say they'd stop working. Even if you had to pay for all the traffic, that wouldn't really matter too much once you know that the site makes so many dollars for so much spent you can just leave it running on autopilot."

Great stuff Phil! And speacking of niche profits, allow me to finish by telling you how my first mini site didn't end-up on top 20(!) on major search engines, but score in one month $6,045.65 in sales from 146 unique visitors, and $2,000.00 in one single day in the next month... from only 5 unique visitors! Believe it or not, I DO NOTHING to deserve this -- I DO NOT invest a single dime into buying traffic, or posting ezine ads, or writing articles, or other stuffy promotions (excerpt registering my domain name and website hosting, all under $100). I DO NOT waste a single minute to promote it!!! Traffic came only from different search engines.

The bottom line: start building profitable niche mini sites right now. Take this article as a starting and reffering point. Printed it, "learn" it and pass it to your closest friends (excerpt your competitors!) But please don't leave it into dust...

It's been a long time since I talked about a couple of my favorite Internet marketing strategies: Pay-Per-Click (PPC) search engines and Affiliate Programs. These are two of the best tools you can use to bring hordes of people who are interested in buying your product or service to your web site -- with little or no risk to your pocketbook.

Pay-Per-Click search engines are great because once you've done your homework and chosen the keywords people will use to find you in the search engines (I'm going to show you how to do this), it's easy to attract visitors who are interested in what you have to offer, often for just a few pennies.

And Affiliate Programs are one of the best ways to get tons of interested visitors to your site by having other people do the legwork, promoting your web site for you. And the best part is that there's absolutely no risk to you because you don't pay a dime unless visitors referred by your affiliates buy your product or service -- so you don't pay out commissions unless you already have cash in hand!

And last but not least, after we take a closer look at these strategies, I want to show you a cool way to combine these two techniques that I'd bet my left shoe you've never thought of...

1. Using PPC Search Engines to Get Cheap Targeted Traffic

As many of you may know, I've been a strong advocate of PPC search engines for years. They remain one of the most effective tools you can use to bring quick, cheap, targeted traffic to your site. True to their name, with pay-per-click search engines you pay a premium every time a visitor clicks on your link -- anything from a few cents to a few dollars. For example, let's say you have a web site that sells woolen mittens. And you want to rank #1 in the search engines for the term "woolen mittens."

To get a top-ten position in the free search engines, you'd probably be looking at a few months (at least) of arduous effort. But in the pay-per-clicks, you can grab the #1 spot in just minutes! That's because all you have to do is see how much the person who has the #1 position is paying per click, and simply outbid them by paying one penny more! Then, when your potential customer searches for the term "woolen mittens," your link will show up as the first listing on the search results page. And each time searchers click on your link, you'll pay however much you have bid for that #1 position.

    Determine your keyword bidding strategy

There are three advantages to bidding on keywords in the pay-per-clicks:

1) You get effective advertising, because you only pay when someone actually clicks through to your web site.

2) Your listing will get posted within a couple of hours to a couple of days at the most, meaning you can start profiting from increased traffic and sales almost immediately.

3) In order to rank in the #1 position, all you have to do is outbid your competitors, which is usually only a matter of a few pennies per click.

Done right, pay-per-click advertising can be very profitable; however, you can lose a lot of money with your PPC advertising if you're not careful. Here are some tips to help you ensure your campaigns are profitable:

• Avoid keywords that are too general. More general keywords will attract a lot of traffic, driving up the cost of your PPC campaign and converting few visitors to sales because general search terms are not specific enough to attract the right audience.
  
  
• Ensure that the sales process on your web site is converting visitors to buyers before you launch a full-scale PPC campaign. You don't want to be spending money on getting the traffic if your web site can't produce sales.
  
  
• And finally, make sure you calculate how much you can afford to bid on keywords to guarantee that you still turn a profit.

To determine how much you can afford to bid on your keywords, you will need to understand the value of each visitor to your site. You can do this by determining the number of sales you will get, the profit you will earn per sale, and the # of unique visitors your site will receive during a set period of time. It's generally easiest to calculate these numbers on a monthly basis.

Here are 3 steps that will help you determine the value of each individual visitor to your site:

1) To determine your Visitor Conversion Rate (i.e., the percentage of visitors who buy from you), calculate:

   number of unique visitors / number of sales = visitor conversion rate

2) To calculate your Net Profit per Sale, calculate:

   (gross revenue - total expenses) / number of sales = net profit per sale

3) To determine the Value of Each of Visitor to your site, calculate:

   net profit per sale / visitor conversion rate = individual visitor value

Once you understand the value of your visitors, you will be able to set your maximum bid for keywords. For example, you may determine that each individual visitor to your site is worth 50 cents in pure profit. This means you can afford to bid a maximum of 49 cents per click to guarantee that you will generate profits. The value of your visitors may also help you determine which PPC search engines you will use, as the minimum bid on keywords in some search engines may be higher than in others.

    Choose a pay-per-click search engine to use

Overture.com is the largest and most far-reaching PPC search engine, but its popularity has driven up the cost of advertising with the company. The beauty of bidding on keywords in Overture is that your web site will be listed not only on Overture, but also at Yahoo!, MSN, AltaVista, CNN.com, and InfoSpace, provided your bid is in the top three for a particular keyword. Other good, cheap PPC search engines worth exploring include Findwhat, 7Search, and Kanoodle.

    Get listed on the first page of Google

Google Adwords is also an excellent option, though technically it's not really a pay-per-click search engine. Instead, it's a "pay-per-position" advertising model that is the only way to get listed on the first page of Google without fighting your way through the free listings. Google Adwords listings show up in colored boxes on the right-hand side of Google's free search results, giving you tons of great exposure.

With Google Adwords, you bid on keywords for placement; however, Google Adwords also lists ads by popularity (how many clicks they get). You may be paying for placement, but unless your link receives more click-throughs than your competition's links, your listing may not appear in the top spots of the search results.

    Find the keywords that your market is searching for

Start by checking your web logs to see what keywords your visitors searched for to arrive at your site (check with your web host if you don't have access to these statistics). These will provide a good indication of what kinds of terms your potential customers think of when they're looking for a product or service like yours.

You may also want to consider using a service such as WordTracker, which allows you to easily see which keywords are frequently searched by your target market in the major search engines -- but are not being used by your competition.

All you have to do is enter your keyword, and WordTracker will check its massive database to see how often people are looking for that term, how many competing sites are using that particular keyword, and how much they are bidding in the PPC search engines. A tool like this will help you choose excellent keywords to bid on. It will also allow you to view the bid price of each keyword in separate PPC search engines, which will help you decide whether the cost of bidding on the keyword is in your ballpark or not.

For example, WordTracker might display the following results for the keywords "Atkins Diet" in Overture.com:

As you can see, if you wanted to be ranked #1 in the search engine results for the keyword "Atkins Diet" in Overture, you'd need to bid 49 cents. You would also need a great sales process -- because at over 24,000 clicks in the last 30 days alone, this term would cost you almost $12,000 a month to keep a top listing at 49 cents a click! A free trial version of WordTracker is available at: www.marketingtips.com/wordtracker. There is also a much more robust paid version as well.

Now let's shift our focus to an even more powerful tool that I've used to grow my own business, and that I strongly recommend as one of the key strategies you can use to direct massive amounts of qualified traffic to your site... without spending a dime up front!

2. Using Affiliate Programs to Get Loads of Qualified Traffic

An Affiliate Program (also referred to as a "Reseller" or "Associate" Program) is a way to get other people to promote your product or service. For every customer (not visitor) that your "affiliates" send to your web site, you pay them a commission. Your affiliates send visitors to your web site using banner ads, text links, letters of referral, etc... and you track these visitors using special software. For every visitor who decides to buy, you pay your affiliate a commission -- a percentage of the profits you make.

It's an extremely powerful, profitable way to grow your business because:

1. It's a win-win partnership, so enlisting an army of affiliates to promote your product is extremely easy. Your affiliates get paid when they refer a paying customer to your web site.
   
   
2. There are no up-front advertising costs, because you only pay your affiliates for advertising that gets you sales. Whether they send 10 visitors a day to your site or 10,000, you only pay them for the sale of your product or service.
   
   
3. It's extremely low-risk. Setting up your own affiliate program doesn't cost much at all if you're prepared to do some work yourself.
   
   
4. You can literally explode your online sales by enlisting an army of affiliates to promote your product or service for you.

Since you know your product or service better than anyone else, you'll probably have an idea of how you want to promote it. Providing your affiliates with banners, product images, text links, etc. will allow them to get started promoting your product or service faster and more effectively.

One of the best strategies for motivating your affiliates to promote your product or service is to pay them well for their efforts. If the commissions you offer aren't attractive enough, your affiliates just won't be motivated. Additional incentives, such as bonuses for a certain number of sales, will motivate your best affiliates to actively promote your site, putting in as much effort as possible to refer sales on your behalf.

    Set up and manage your affiliate program

In order to run a successful affiliate program, you need to be able to:

1. Create a separate account for each new affiliate
   
2. Track each of their referred sales on each of your products that they are promoting
   
3. Calculate commissions based on referred sales

A few years ago, there was no special software to do all this. It was a complicated and time-consuming process to track affiliate sales. But today, you can use software to automatically keep track of which affiliate made which sale and exactly how much you owe each affiliate. Tracking 10,000 affiliates is just as easy as tracking one! A number of software programs are available to manage your affiliate program, but you'll want to check out a few to see how easy they are to set up and use.

All-in-one affiliate tracking software like AssocTRAC will cost a few hundred dollars and will give you an easy and functional way to automate your affiliate program. Remember that cheaper programs may be appealing at first, but may lack the functionality of tried and tested software.

3. How You Can Combine These 2 Strategies for Even BIGGER Profits!

Now that you've had a "refresher course" on the power of PPC search engines and affiliate programs, I want to show you an extremely effective way to combine the two strategies and boost the flow of targeted visitors to your site!

Here's all you do: encourage your affiliates to try bidding on your keywords to market your product or service in the PPC search engines.

You might think that this would drive up bidding costs, and that you'll wind up actually competing for pay-per-click placement against people who are supposed to be working for you. But the fact is, encouraging your affiliates to bid on your keywords can help to get you a LOT more exposure in the search results! Think about this: typically, when searchers enter their search term and your site appears in the results, your link will be listed alongside links to other web sites... your competitors' web sites.

Now imagine you have a handful of affiliates using the same keywords as you. People enter their search term and your site appears in the results. But instead of being surrounded by links to your competitors' sites, you are surrounded by more links to your OWN web site!

By using this strategy, you are taking up valuable search engine "real estate." Picture the search engines as a strip mall, and the web site links as the storefronts in the mall (also known as real estate). The more of these storefronts you occupy with your product, the less space there will be left for your competitors' product -- and the more likely it is that a shopper is going to see your product and buy it.

You may feel that some keywords should be yours and yours alone -- like your company name -- and wish to include a clause in the contract between you and your affiliate, restricting them from using those keywords.

It's up to you if you want to do this, but note that your affiliate does not need your permission to bid on your company name unless you've specifically asked them not to. That said, it doesn't hurt to let your affiliates bid on your company name in the pay-per-click search engines. Whatever your affiliates are doing to get qualified traffic to your site can only benefit you.

So there's no need to worry that your affiliates could outbid you, or drive up the costs of your PPC advertising...

Because the most important thing to remember about your affiliates is that they are your teammates or business partners, working with you to market your product or service. Competing with them for the top spot is counterproductive, especially since the goal is to occupy as much of the search engine results page as you can with links to your site.

If your affiliates are taking the initiative to advertise on your behalf in the pay-per-clicks, don't waste your money outbidding them. Instead, check to see how much your competitors are bidding on keywords and spend your time and money keeping ahead of them. Your campaign should be aimed at outbidding your competition, not your affiliates, for top placement in the PPC search engine results.

You may want to consider actively encouraging your affiliates to try PPC advertising! If you decide to do this, you might want to provide them with a few tips and strategies on how they can use the PPCs to their advantage -- because, in the end, this will be to your advantage, too.

4. Final Thoughts

By themselves, both PPC search engines and affiliate programs are hugely effective ways to draw a paying crowd to your site. They are two of the most powerful traffic-generation techniques on the Internet today, and the real beauty of them both is that they will cost you next to nothing. Once your affiliate program is up and running -- and automated with software like AssocTRAC -- you won't have to spend any time or money at all. As your affiliates promote your products for you, your software tracks their sales for you, and it makes sure they are only scheduled to be paid after a sale is made.

It's one of the smartest marketing strategies you can use.

And I feel just as strongly about using pay-per-click search engines -- particularly if you are a small business owner going after a niche market on the 'Net. Pay-per-clicks are the fastest way to get your product in front of your exact target audience so you can see immediate results. And, by keeping a close eye on your return on investment for each keyword you bid on, you can ensure that your pay-per-click campaigns are always enormously profitable.

By combining these 2 powerful strategies to maximize your coverage in the pay-per-click listings, you can dominate your market space swiftly and effectively. Having your affiliates join you in the pay-per-clicks is really only a natural extension of both affiliate programs and PPC advertising, but it's a technique that doesn't get taken advantage of often enough. There are lots of online resources to help you get started with your affiliate program or PPC campaign. One of the best is the Insider Secrets to Marketing Your Business on the Internet course, where you'll find detailed descriptions of how you can profit with these proven strategies.

3. Classified Ads

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4) "Tell Us What You Think!"

Dear friend, I would love to hear what you think of this issue of The Internet Marketing Profits^™ newsletter. And of course, if you have any suggestions for upcoming issues that you'd like to share with me, please send those, too -- just email me right away! And don't forget to check out the previous issues at the Internet Marketing Profits Newsletter Archive.

Warmest Regards,

Valeriu S. Popescu, Editor and Publisher
The Internet Marketing Profits^™ Newsletter

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