Part 1. How to create a profitable blog or mini site.
We have created a three part series on the two biggest questions facing most people building an online business.
What makes a successful (as defined by profit) blog or mini site?
Who do you make it repeatable?
In my experience there are 4 essential elements to this.
Over the next week we will publish an article on each of them.
Let’s get started.
The first key to the success of a blog or mini site is that it has to target a group of people (a niche, or target audience) who want information of a specific nature, a group that are hungry for information. In other words, I’m talking about the selection of your niche.
The group of people that your blog or mini site targets has to be a group of people who have a set of problems. Problems in the sense that they are looking for a solution to something, looking to improve something, looking for knowledge and perhaps something to buy.
Furthermore, in a great niche, that problem, is something that is causing pain. Financial pain, physical pain, emotional pain, some sort of pain, for the simple reason that people who have pain are the people who will want to find and buy solutions to that pain, and hopefully something from your website.
If that sounds a bit sick, trying to exploit people in pain, it’s not. You are providing a service that people want and need.
Marketing is about telling people about a solution that you have found.
You’ve had marketers doing it to you your whole life and you probably didn’t notice most of the time,
Why can’t you do it too? And what’s more, you’re actually going to provide these people with a real solution, so you’re actually being helpful and getting paid!
Anyhow moving right along.
So you’re looking for a group of people with a problem, but that’s not all.
Your next concern has to be whether there are enough of these people searching for solutions to their problems on the internet.
How many is enough you ask?
Good question. With certain kinds of sites, you only need 10 visitors to your site a day and you can turn a nice monthly “blog money” profit.
Other niches and products that you promote might need thousands per day. It all depends on what you choose to sell, and who to, AND how much commission you make when you sell to them.
The things you should do are look at the search volume in google, yahoo etc , as indicated by a tool like Wordtracker. Here you’re simply looking at how many searches per day a particular key word phrase gets in the search engines. Then after that, you want to check whether there are other sites or blogs that are competing in the same niche.
Contrary to what alot of people think, NO competition isn’t necessarily a good thing. NO competition could and often does mean that it’s not a profitable niche. What you actually want is SOME competition, but competition that you can DESTROY by making a better site, providing higher quality content and in a better way.
The final piece in the puzzle is the product.
The final piece of the challenge of finding a good niche, is whether the niche has a quality product for you to promote. You need something to sell to these people, that is
high quality (presents well and offers reasonable value),
has some great marketing material (sales letter, articles etc, so it will convert your traffic well)
and pays a decent commission.
The product you choose needs the first two to make your job easy.
What we are assuming.
We are assuming you’re looking at the affiliate marketing model of making money with your blog - which I suggest if you’re looking to retire from your job and earn a full time passive income, you SHOULD be.
There are many other ways to make money where you might think about some different factors in your niche selection. We will address some of these in the future.
If you can combine all of the above factors when selecting your niche, you’ll be giving yourself and your new blog or mini site the optimal chance of success and profit and the least amount of stress for you.
I hope you’ve found this useful.
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