DAY 1: Analyzing The Viability Of Your Niche

In the next 3 weeks, there will be a guest post series about Search Engine Optimization and how you can improve and optimize any niche website. It’s been a huge topic from within my membership course and it’s something that can be easily outsourced. So let’s get started…

“Money isn’t the most important thing in life, but it’s reasonably close to oxygen on the ‘gotta have it’ scale.”

– Zig Ziglar -

Learn how to pick your own battles.

This may sound like a joke for many of you, but this is the primary reason why many sites or online businesses fail online.

Having a niche marketing strategy, that is focusing on a specific topic rather than a broad query allows you to perform better as you are competing with much less other sites on internet.

Your visitors will be much more targeted and thus will convert better.

Getting yourself into an overly competitive market is a recipe for disaster and a way to ensure that your site will never be found.

On the other hand, entering into an overly niche market may result in insufficient traffic volume to monetize your site or store and ensure your survival.

Remember, because you think you got a great idea doesn’t mean that other people share your feelings!

In the end, it’s all about money

Depending on the nature of your site, the way you plan to monetize your efforts may differ from site to site.

However, as a general rule, you’ll be monetizing your site through one or more of those following methods:

• Ecommerce– selling products, be it physical or digital.
• Affiliate Marketing– selling other people’s product and getting a commission for it.
• Advertising– selling ads space on your site.
• Services– selling your skills.

Regardless of the method you intend to use, you should have a number in mind as to how much money minimum you expect or you need to make out of your website for it to be worth your time.

I won’t elaborate much on it as this goes with all the information you should have gathered already in your business plan. You have one right? It would be foolish to start a business without one!

Ok, for the sake of illustration, I’m going to say that I want to start a new business online selling “nail polish”.

After my estimation, I also know that I’ll be making $1 profit for each bottle sold, and based on the marketing strategy I have established, I estimate that I’ll be able to sell 2 bottles to each customer in average.

Now, based on my expenses and personal needs, I want $2,000 of net profit per month to make this project worth.

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Ask About Outsourcing Your Internet Business

Continuing on from the 10 part video series on how to outsource your Internet business, it’s time for me to open up this for discussion. I’ve received a huge response asking me to create other videos and I will definitely do my best to add more to the blog. Before I do, I would like to share with you some of the questions that have been asked already:

How do you track outsourcers for the time they put in?

Can you start a brand new business from the ground up and do it all by outsourcing without knowing everything about Internet marketing?

How much should you outsource? All or only some aspects?

How do you prevent staff from stealing your ideas and personal information when you tell them about a project and don’t deliver?

How do you handle taxes in the US when you outsource an employee fulltime?

Ask Your Questions About Outsourcing

Now, for me to create more videos that will help you outsource your work, I would really appreciate if you could spend a few minutes answering some questions below:

Question 1: If you could learn from a coach who is an expert in this area about outsourcing an Internet business, what questions would you ask? (List as many questions as you want)

Question 2: Describe in a few words what is your main reason for outsourcing your Internet business? (e.g. more time, more money, expand business, travel, charity work, etc.)

Question 3: List some tasks you need staff to help you complete on a regular basis?

Question 4: Specify in hours the amount of time you want to work in your Internet business?

Question 5: If there was a coaching program to assist you with outsourcing your Internet business, how would you like the material to be presented? (You can select one or all)

• • Video presentations
  • Audio only recordings
  • Workbook and manual
  • All of the above

You can either

1. Leave your answers in the comments section, or
2. Answer them privately by clicking on this link.

Also as an incentive, I would like to give you a report that contains some really valuable interviews and 10 resources that I recommend to use when you complete this survey. So to get your report, simply answer the survey questions provided here or comment here.

Thank you and talk soon.

Tyrone Shum

Creator of Mass Outsource Videos.

To ask your questions click here now.

Setup Your Business Emails Using Google Apps

Something very common new business owners overlook when starting an e-commerce business is not having a professional e-mail address. I have had people give me a business card and the first thing I notice is an email address that says “motorcyclestore@gmail.com”. Using free services like Google, Hotmail or Yahoo is not a smart option and I highly recommend moving away from this. In this post I will show you how to set up your own business email address that will cost you nothing going from “motorcyclestore@gmail.com” to “info@motorcyclestore.com”. If you know how to setup a Google Mail (GMail) account already, this will be a breeze for you and no one will know that you use Google Mail to send your emails.

Have A Professional Email Address

Here are the reasons why it is important to have a business email address when you are running an e-commerce website:

• A business email address makes your business look professional whether you are the sole operator or a company with 100+ employees.
• You keep all your business correspondence separate to your personal emails.
• You can have multiple email addresses for different departments such as sales, support or orders.
• The business email address can always be transferred without having to notify contacts.

The next question most commonly asked is what email addresses should we setup?

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Tips For Choosing A Profitable E-commerce Domain Name

If you are starting a new e-commerce internet business, one question immediately pops into mind, what name should I choose? Have you heard of the saying in property, “location, location, location”? Most associate buying property with choosing the right location and it may mean that you make or lose money. Your e-commerce domain name is no different. Think of your domain name as your Internet property, which represents your business presence online. Choose a domain name that is customer friendly and easy to remember:

How To Choose A Profitable E-commerce Domain Name?

Keep It Simple And Easy To Remember
Most customers who look for a website want to remember something that is associate with the product or service you are offering. Unless you have a lot of money to spend on advertising like eBay or Amazon your best bet is to choose a domain name that represents your products and services. Use simple and easy to remember words that are spoken often by your customers. For example, your e-commerce business might be selling racing bikes so consider the domain name: racingbikes.com or roadracingbikes.com. Try to avoid names like joesracingbikes.com or smithsracingbikes.com even if your company is called that. We want to make sure your domain name is easy to remember and captures the widest scope of customers.
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Building A Successful Ecommerce Business: Find A Niche – Part 1

Over the years of running my own ecommerce businesses I have learnt to find markets, rather than create markets. Finding profitable niche markets is the smarter option than to create a new untested market. Many ecommerce businesses fail because they tried innovating new products that no one wanted and spending all their time and resources on a product they wanted for themselves. I can tell you from experience that I have tried an unknown product in some of my ventures and unfortunately they did not take off the way I hoped. I also did research but not thorough enough and I went by instinct rather than relying on the facts. The facts told me that it was not going to be viable and I was forcing myself to make it work. When you have a feeling of uncertainty, it is a signal to say get out or do not do it.

I want to show you how to find profitable niche markets and how to overcome some of the mistakes I had when I was starting a new ecommerce business.

Find Your Niche

Research is the key to your success in finding a profitable niche market. No matter how good a product sounds or how good someone else says about your idea, you need to do your own thorough research. Sometimes just reading one article or hearing a few testimonials from others is not enough. There are 3 major qualities to determine a profitable niche market:

1. Exists already
2. Easily identifiable
3. Marketable and targeted

Looking for a profitable niche market is about finding the buyers first. Most people start off with the wrong idea and look for a product to sell first. Find out what their problems or needs are and then provide a solution. A classic example from my experience is how I started the Dragonboating business. I was frustrated to not find any company in Australia offering carbon fiber paddles to the dragonboat teams. Furthermore, to order and delivery one from overseas took months. So I decided to create a company and become a distributor of carbon fiber paddles in Australia and guess what happened? Paddlers came flocking to my company and buying dragonboating gear from me and I made money whilst I continued to dragonboat.

Determine How Hungry Your Buyers Are?

Once you can determine whether or not your idea or passion works, then it’s time to really test the market and see how hungry these buyers are. The easiest way to determine how strong the demand will be for your idea is to do research on keywords in that market. Here are the 3 steps in determining if your idea is viable:

Step 1: Investigate Traffic Volumes.

This is the first and most important step. If you find out that your keyword only has 20 people searching for it, it may not provide a good income from that niche. To investigate how much traffic you will get for your niche market keyword, go to http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com or any other similar site and type in a broad term such as golf. The site will give you a list of the top 100 search results for that word. For example, you will find golf clubs, golf carts, golf buggies, golf gloves and so forth. Next to each phrase you will see the number of daily searches. Using this list, select the results that have enough searches to determine your targeted niche market.

Step 2: Determine The Amount Of Competition.
Your next step is to find out how many people are competing for the keyword you are wanting to market your idea to. Ideally you want to find out who are the advertisers and marketers and take note of this:

• Few competitors = great keyword
• Lots of competitors = not a good keyword

To determine the level of competition, go to Google.com and type in each of these potential key phrases from step 1 and make a note of how many competing sites there are in that market. See the number of results near the top right of your Google results page? Write that number down next to the keyword you searched.

Step 3: Find Out If There Is Money In This Niche.

The final step is to find out if the buyers you are targeting are willing to spend. There is no point targeting a market where everything is free because these buyers will expect this as well, meaning it is not a good market to target. Continuing your Google search from Step 2, record the number of advertisements that appear for each keyword that you search. If there aren’t any ads, then it is not a niche worth targeting.

I would suggest spending at least a few hours and compiling the information together as part of your research. This will help you determine if your idea is viable for your targeted niche market. If you follow this to find out if there is a niche market for your idea, then you will be on your way to building a successful ecommerce business.

Follow on to the next post as I will show you how to create the content to market your idea: Building A Successful Ecommerce Business: Creating Content – Part 2

Tyrone Shum
Building Niche Ecommerce Businesses

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