Traditional marketers have defined a niche market as a large group of people sharing several characteristics (for example, men in a specified age group, or men in a certain age group that enjoy fishing. However, when you’re selling online, you need to narrow the focus A LOT more than that! So we define a niche market as:

A group of people who are searching the Internet for a solution to a problem — and NOT finding many relevant search results.

Identifying a strong niche market is one of the biggest challenges on the road to choosing a product. Many people have difficulty being as tightly focused as they

should be. They often try to go after niche markets that aren’t really niches at all, but huge general markets in which they couldn’t hope to compete. For example, all of the following might seem like good niche markets:

• Golfers

• People interested in weight loss

• People over 65

• Pet owners

… But the truth is that all of these markets are WAY too big! Try entering the word “golf” into a search engine. You’ll get millions of results! Do you really want to try to compete in that market?

Narrowing your focus to a small, niche market gives you the following advantages:

• There’s WAY less competition.

• Small markets are much easier to dominate — so you can become the main source for your product or service online.

• Since niche markets are often close-knit communities, your reputation can spread by word of mouth — providing you with an ever-growing base of potential customers.

• You can easily gain the loyalty of your customers — which gives you lots of opportunities to expand your offer with related products and follow-up offers.

Remember, people typically don’t go online looking to buy a product or a service — they go online to find information and solutions to their problems. Your task is to think like your potential customers, which means you must determine what problem they’re trying to solve and what you could offer as a solution.

Selling ad space: Big players on the Internet are always looking for new places to sell. If you are generating lots of traffic, you can make money simply by allowing associated ads on your site. Inviting merchants to advertise on your website will give you immediate ROI (Return on Investment).

Affiliate programs: This is the cheapest and easiest way to monetize your web traffic. By integrating popular affiliate programs into your website, you get a chance to earn a high percentage of commission on the products you promote. Promoting products closely associated with the theme of your website has a very high conversion ratio. You can promote as many products as you want.

Ebay programs: This is another great way to make money from web traffic. Simply place an Ebay product listing along with your website content. For instance, if you sell weight loss tips, place a block of weight loss supplements listed on Ebay on your website. The advantage? Ebay pays excellent commission rates. And if the products you promote are good, your visitors will thank you for it!

Sell text link ads: Sites like text-link-ads.com allow you to increase your revenue in a quite and uncomplicated manner. Simply place their text link on your site and start earning! They take care of all the hassles of billing and payment; you only need to receive the cash! More importantly, they offer you various tools that help you ensure that only quality links are published on your website. The commission are not bad either, usually about 50%!

Google Adsense: This one has been around for a long time but people STILL manage to under-utilize it. Get a membership from Google and start publishing appropriate adsense script along with associated content. Every click you generate earns you money, sometimes even as high as $25 per click!

Newsletter ads: Your newsletter is a vehicle of interaction and you can promote anything you want through it. Besides promoting products, you can even sell ad space on your newsletter.

Membership website: Every successful guru has at least one of these. The logic is simple: people pay money to access content on your website. Why? Because you are the expert!

Link directories: If you are the proud owner of a page rank of 5 or more, many websites, particularly the new ones, will want to place their links on your website. You can charge a nominal fee for this.

There are additional ways to monetize your traffic, but these are the most common. However, if you’re already itching to generate more traffic and start making more money from your website, just visit http://1.EZ-MoneyFromHome.com for the scoop on improving web traffic to your web site.

Getting your customers and prospects to actually read your newsletter requires you to follow a few important design steps. That’s right, there’s more to publishing a great newsletter than simply good writing.

If you want people to look at something in your newsletter, you should present it in a way that attracts the eye.

• Color and contrast draw the eye. A colored element on a black and white page attracts the eye. So does a thick, black border around a text box. It isn’t absolutely necessary to produce your newsletter in color. With the proper use of shading, reverse text (white text on black background), borders and bold fonts, you can design a black and white professional newsletter.

• Headlines draw the eye. Decades of newspaper reading have taught us to look for headlines. We look for them to get an idea of what to read. We scan the subheads to pick up on the key points.

• Position draws the eye. Without anything else to draw it, the eye comes to rest about two thirds of the way up the page and slightly to the left of center. That’s a good place to put something interesting.

• Pictures and graphics draw the eye. We love pictures. They may not be worth a thousand words, but pictures and graphics draw our attention. That may be why the captions on photographs are among the most-read parts of any publication.

As I mentioned,  there’s more to producing an effective newsletter than simply good newsletter writing. Your newsletter design must be pleasing to the eye. You can learn more about effective newsletter design in my book, The Magic of Newsletter Marketing – The Secret to More Profits and Customers for Life or by visiting No Hassle Newsletters.

Hootsuite also has a built in link-shortener for those distributing pages frequently, and it also provides a robust tracking feature for your shortened links. It also supports multiple team members (if you have multiple people controlling one corporate account) and has mobile applications for Android and iPhone, Chrome and Firefox extensions, desktop applications, and more. And with all of this, add to the benefits that it’s free! If you have not checked it out as yet you can do so HERE.

With the number of emails that business people already receive it becomes important not to overwhelm your prospects and customers with more email. On the other hand it is important to keep your name and message in front of them so they don’t forget who you are or what you can do for them. It becomes a delicate balancing act that is best handled by a system designed for this type of marketing.

The Instant Sales System (ISS) is a business emailing marketing software program that includes all of the necessary tools to successfully promote a business at a price that any business can afford. For more information on the ISS go to http://www.businessemailingmarketingsoftware.com.

A USP is a way of summarizing and communicating one of the primary benefits of your business, product, or service. It can be based on just about anything (price, an ingredient, positioning, color, location, etc.). For instance, which beer is made from “the cold, clear water of the Rockies? Which coffee is “mountain grown? Which retailer is the “Low Price Leader”?

As you concentrate on creating a USP for your business, consider what other businesses are doing. Ask yourself if they have an idea that you can modify and use for yourself. Once you start becoming sensitive to USP’s it is not that difficult to create one for yourself.

Newsletters tend to be treated as informational sources which make them more welcome when they are received. Because people tend to be less resistant to reading information, the newsletter provides a huge marketing advantage over sales letters, or other sale oriented material. If you don’t have a newsletter, or struggle with publishing the one you do have then CLICK HERE to access an excellent source of newsletter help.

You will now be able to find people in groups, by location, age, etc. Remember not to enter too many parameters or you will not receive many hits. It’s best to start off with broad parameters  and then narrow down the list as you get more specific. You will find it still has some quirks they have not as yet fixed, but overall, it’s a handy tool to have available.