Online Coaching can be Lucrative Business

Making money by coaching others to solve their problems is big business. Just do a Google search for “online coaching” and you’ll find 590,000 results. There are all kinds of coaches out there, online executive coaching, online life coach, health coach online and the list goes on. There are lots of people earning a good living online by selling their coaching services, me included (see 1on1 coaching).

Who is a coach?

A coach is someone who takes his/her knowledge, experience and expertise in a particular field and teaches others to be successful in their own fields. It is not necessary for your clients to be in the same field as you, for example a leadership coach can help business owners in a variety of industries to be successful in their respective businesses. Or you could be an expert in business-to-business (B2B) copywriting and coach general copywriters to become successful specialists in B2B copywriting.

There are even coaches for coaches. A more experienced coach can teach new coaches how to master their own coaching skills. They are like mentors who are always there for you to answer questions and guide you when you are at a loss. There is very good money to be made in doing just that. [Read more]

Trend Spotting for Hot Niche Markets in 2010

When it comes to marketing and selling information products (Info Products), there are some evergreen topics and then there are those that are hot for a period. Timing is everything! If you a niche marketer, trend spotting is important. It is a skill you need to master quickly.

A word of caution – do take the time to learn the difference between hot niches and profitable niche markets.

Trends may not be important if you are selling an eBook on Overcoming Grief or if you are selling an eBook for creating a video series on Dog Obedience because those are evergreen topics. The basic information is not likely to change from year to year.

However, if you want to market an information product in niches like fashion, Internet marketing, technology, finance or real estate, then you need to brush up on what is hot right now. Do your research on the issues that are of concern to your target audience. In other words, what are their wants, needs, problems and hot buttons? Those will develop into selling opportunities for you. [Read more]

Optimize, Promote and Monetize Your Mini-Sites

This is my second article on mini-sites and how to use them effectively in Internet marketing. You can read the first part at Creating DiY Mini-Sites – Spend a Little, Make a Lot!

Assuming you’ve got your mini-site ready and uploaded to your hosting server, it is now time to move onto Phase II. That’s where you’ll optimize your mini-site for your chosen niche to find your page, promote it using methods to attract qualified traffic and finally monetize it to make money.

Search engine optimization (SEO) for mini-sites

At first glance, it may seem like a difficult task to optimize a single web page. It is natural to assume that a website with hundreds of pages or an authority site would have a distinct advantage over a mini-site. After all, a large site can optimize for hundreds of keywords and phrases since it may have thousands of pages.

Sometimes being small can have its advantages. A mini-site targets a specific niche or product. That means it can target keywords/phrases that are very specific to that niche. You can optimize your mini-site for long-tail keywords that may be ignored by those gargantuan sites but are very important to your niche or product.
[Read more]

Don’t Look for Hot Niches, Find Profitable Niche Markets

If you’ve been around Internet marketing for any length of time, I’m sure you know “niche marketing” is hot. Every marketing guru on the planet is pushing his/her secret weapon for finding tiny, untapped niches that will make you rich overnight. And you are supposed to buy their product/training and build your entire online business around that.

Big mistake!

Here’s the typical niche marketing process:

1. Identify a red-hot niche by doing keyword research
2. Set up a mini-site or sales page
3. Add a giveaway and build your list
4. Create an information product or buy one with Resale Rights or promote affiliate products
5. Spend hundreds of dollars on Google AdWords to drive traffic
6. Spend countless hours in article, video and forum marketing in the hopes of getting free traffic
7. Start bombarding your list with emails to buy your products
8. Make some money and repeat the whole process in the next hot niche

There is a much better and more profitable way than the above process. This is a key niche-marketing concept that I’ve learned from Jimmy D. Brown. What is it?
[Read more]

The 4Ps of Website Domain Name Selection

Your are probably familiar with E. Jerome McCarthy’s classic 4Ps of marketing that he first proposed in 1960. For those of you who haven’t heard of it, here’ a quick recap:

Product — an object or a service that is mass-produced or manufactured on a large scale with a specific volume of units.

Price — the amount a customer pays for the product.

Place — the location where a product can be purchased. It is often referred to as the distribution channel.

Promotion — all of the communications that a marketer may use in the marketplace

When it comes to Internet Marketing, probably one of the first things you have to do is choose a domain name for your online business. This is one of the most important decisions you’ll ever make. To help you with this important first step, I’ve come up with the 4Ps of website domain name selection.

Whether you’re creating a blog that will act as the hub for your business or registering a domain for a niche site, you need to take the time to find the right domain because changing domain names after you’ve built up traffic and credibility can do irreparable damage to your business.
[Read more]

How To Do The Niche Marketing Two-Step

You are probably familiar with the very popular country-western dance, the Texas Two-Step. It is two quick steps followed by two slow steps. Couples perform this dance where one is the leader and the other a follower.

Well, here’s my version of doing the niche marketing two-step. Do try this at home and with practice, you’ll be the “leader” in your niche market(s) and others will be forced to play the role of “follower.”

Quick Step 1: Evaluate the popularity of the niche market by using Google http://www.Google.com or your favorite search engine.

In this step, you are trying to determine how many results appear (how many pages exist that have your keyword phrase), as well as how many competitors appear within Google Adwords (sponsored).

In my example, I entered the term “getting your ex back,” here are the results returned by Google:
[Read more]

Carving Out Your Niche

[Excerpted from my new 64-page eBook, The Online Business Building Action Plan. Follow this complete step-by-step guide for building a profitable online business even if you have not been successful before.]

One of the biggest obstacles that new marketers face is not knowing what product or service they should offer first. They may have an idea about the market that they are interested in, and they may even know the type of product that they wish to create, but they simply don’t know where to begin.

The easiest way to carve out your niche and determine what angle to take is by first evaluating your existing knowledge and skills.

• What are you able to create that would be unique, and different from what already exists in the market?
• What topics interests you or have expertise in that you believe you could stay focused on?

It’s critical that you evaluate your personal interests and then determine whether there’s an existing market for it, or whether the market is overly saturated or quite simply, too small.

Many of the Internet’s leading marketers and developers will tell you that you shouldn’t necessarily follow what you are personally passionate about and instead, focus on what is most profitable.

From a personal perspective, I believe you should focus on both these elements. If you choose a topic or industry that isn’t of interest to you personally, you may find it difficult to stick with it, and to continue developing your community or website.

While keeping this in mind, it’s equally important to ensure that whatever industry you are interested in is viable in terms of interest, existing buyers and scalability, so that you are able to consistently grow your business by catering to the existing market and developing future products and services to serve the market as it continues to expand.

Don’t overlook this step because it’s one of the most important factors in determining whether you will be successful or not. Choosing the right market and understanding your target audience is very important.

Write down a list of potential ideas and topics that you are interested in. Whether you have experience with golfing, consulting, parenting, or even public speaking, it’s important to create a rough draft of ideas that you can investigate further.

To learn more about how to build your own profitable online business, take a look at “The Online Business Building Action Plan.”

Finding Hungry Markets

If you’ve been in Internet marketing for the last five years, you’ve heard about niche marketing. Niche marketing involves finding an as yet untapped area of business and dominating it for business success. Even if you knew what niche marketing was, the trick is actually finding those hungry markets that are waiting to be exploited.

One helpful tool is to know what market you want to do business in. Your business focus could be selling jewelry. There are many jewelry sites out there. You may specialize in African jewelry. Once you have your area of expertise you can conduct some research to see exactly who you will market to.

Perform a keyword research. Find keywords that describe your product. Some will get millions of search results. Just the number of search results is not enough. You also need to look at the available competition. This is known as Keyword Effectiveness Index (KEI). The KEI compares the number of results with the number of competing web pages to provide a measure of which keywords are most likely to be effective for your campaign.

The higher the KEI, the more popular your keywords are, and the less competition they have. This means you have a better chance of getting to the top. The idea is to whittle away at the list until you find keywords with the highest KEI and are relevant to your business. Now you are beginning to zero in on your niche market.

Do some test marketing. Buy some AdWords around your keywords and measure traffic and conversion rates. Set up an eBay account and hold a few auctions.

Sometimes a niche may bring you smaller number of visitors but they are the ones who are very interested in your products, so they will convert well. In other words, that niche is very profitable even though it is small. That’s what good niche marketing will do for your business.

You probably have ideas for several products or services to offer on your website. Trying to advertise all of them at once can be tricky, especially if you want to establish a niche. Instead, set up a website for each product and market them separately.

It may take several tries to find the product that makes your niche profitable. The word here is patience. Several niche websites may be required to find even one that is a goldmine.

Another way to find hungry markets is to learn about your customers. There is nothing worse than spending money marketing to the wrong group of people. Set up polls and surveys on the website to get information from all traffic that visits you.

Ask yourself a few questions about your product or service to get you going in the right direction:

• Who would benefit the most from my service or product?
• Who can afford my service or product?
• What can I offer that is different from others?

Finding niche markets that are ripe for profit requires some legwork on your part. It may also require more than one website to realize the success that you seek. But, it will be worth it if you are the first one to market to that niche.

To learn more about finding profitable niches, take a look at Niche Navigator.