I think the best way is to build a relationship with as many people interested in your topic as possible. Encourage them to participate in commenting and get them to subscribe rss and also join your email mailing list. Offer a short course or a free e-book or video as an incentive. Once they join your list send them useful information related to your topic. In a soft sell way offer them affiliate products or your own unique products.

Implementing will take more work but that is a whole business plan.

Someone said your business plan should be clear enough to write on a napkin. Think of even some big companies: Fedex - overnight delivery, Ford - make cars, Rolex - make watches.

Not that good businesses are ever built overnight, but a clear focused idea is the foundation.

To be successful in niche marketing it is important to find the longtail keywords with the least competition and most searches. This is how you will get free search engine results and traffic.

You may already be familiar with the often sited method of niche marketing keyword research. Take your keywords which show enough monthly search volume, wrap them in quotation marks then search at Google. The result of the number of competitive sites that show for that keyword or keyword phrase determines if it is good for niche marketing.

This is a reasonable method that is workable and often effective. Does this tell you how many competitive sites are fully SEO’d for that? No.

There could be other interpretations of what fully SEO’d means that could include the other biggest factor links. For this discussion of keyword research I will use these on site factors. KW used in title, KW used in URL, KW used in body of page.

Let me backtrack a moment and mention that KW used in body of page typically  means the KW is used in bold, in italics, and 3-4 times per page. It is not good to overload a page with the same keyword. Another trick to optimize for search is to use related keywords and phrases. In reality nobody can anticipate every possible search on any niche topic so remember to use lots of good quality original content for best results

Wordpress is particularly useful here because if you had set up your permalinks to show the title in the url you are well set. (select custom on the permalinks page then use: %catagories%post%)

Maybe right now you are wondering how to find fully SEO’d keywords. Here is what i do; I use this tool Micro Niche Finder. It does good discovery and offers a lot of options all geared to finding niche keywords.

Sometimes I do find it usefull to use the Google Adwords Keyword Tool and for building big keyword lists Nichebot since it gives access to a bunch of different tools.

I loved reading this. This sooooo has to be said.

Internet Marketing Sins: An Open Letter to all Internet Marketers

I just read this page and the first chapter of a report written by Sylvie Fortin, Michael’s wife.

Fantastic. I applaud you both for having the guts to stand up and “tell it like it is”

They are both completely authoritative people to have written this profound report exposing the “sins” of Internet Marketing. This report was written clearly with a love of truth and a love for a better industry for everyone involved.

Thank you both.

Now please go read this if you are, ever have been, or ever may be involved in anything resembling Internet Marketing: Internet Marketing Sins: An Open Letter to all Internet Marketers

Just listened to this interview with Kevin Hughes of sproutbuilder. Keven has a very extensive background in developing web tools and sites. There are some partners with very extensive backgrounds as well. I think Sproutbuilder will be kind of a big deal.

Anyone who has a bit of tech skills, enough to use powerpoint or photoshop can make very advanced interactive widgets there.

Developers with advanced skills can even include custom functions.

Widgets are potentially as unique and involving as a whole website. My interest tends toward ways to get something a lot of people like and get a lot of backlinks. I see possibly a good method to do surveys and find out what people want too.

Sproutbuilders also offers a nice set of tutorial videos for the not as tech savvy people like me.

You can check out their Blog here.

What determines success? There may be many reasons. This is one of the biggest.

President Calvin Coolidge once said,

“Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not. Nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not. Unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not. The world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.“

He said this so well. Haven’t you seen the same thing?

Do good keyword research.

Find some words that have low competition in your niche.

Use those keywords in your post title and 1 to 3 times in your post, one time in bold.

1,2,3. Done.

(Should I call this the ADD marketing blog for all my short posts?)

Wordpress.com is pretty adiment about having real people blogging there and are kind of on the warpath against spammy blogs. That is what I hear anyway. They also fixed it so forms don’t work so you cannot capture emails.

Just as an expeiment, in a small health related niche, I have been writing a blog there. Well kind of writing, mostly I just add related articles (with author box).

What I notice is growing traffic from wordpress.com for the tags. Apparently people search there and get results from tags. Nothing from Google yet.  It is a pretty fresh blog so I cannot say a lot about the traffic, except in a couple days it is growing on a nice 60 degree up graph. I did add a link in the blogroll to a more commercial related niche blog and I will check to see if I get any traffic.

It takes about 5 min to drop in 2 articles so maybe I am on to something. I pick articles from different article sites and they are very specific to my blog topic.  I have no ads or affiliate links in there, just content.

If you are not familiar with comment luv it is a plugin that adds the last post of anyone who makes a comment. This helps build traffic.

You can get the Comment Luv Plugin here

To find blogs in your niche is as simple and fast as a google search. This is the search format to use: <your keyword> more:comment_luv  for example marketing more:comment_luv

Spread the Luv

There are a lot of ways to find markets. It can be as simple as a newspaper, TV Show, or, one I like, NPR News. Their in depth discussion of many things can tip me off to emerging and growing markets. A couple days ago they interviewed 2 women who write books about gardening. They said gardening is a rapidly growing market. It makes sense too, lots of people want to save money and eat high quality healthy food. Since most Americans grew up nowhere near a farm and likely grew little more than a houseplant, the new gardener is hungry for information.

There are some very sophisticated sites that offer free market research in a more officially businesslike way:

• ResearchInfo.com

• KnowThis.com

Amazon top selling products is a good place to look. Ebay pulse and ebay kewords will show you what people are searching for.

Del.icio.us searches will show you what people are interested in enough to save the sites. You can search your interested keywords then see what sites people are saving.  I should mention Google Alerts too, it is a great way to see what people are writing about from any keyword.

Markets evolve around us. I remember when roller blades started to become popular. Looking back the many discussions people had were a tip off. People talked about how they might be dangerous, how they were better than old style skates, about how to stop when using them. People talked. What do you see people talking about?