Tag: online business

What is a Niche Audience and How Can I Make Money From it?

A niche audience is a specific group of people where you choose to focus your communication or marketing/promotional efforts.

Niche audiences can be super-specific – like focusing on people with an interest in playing the didgeridoo, or they can be broader, like focusing on people in a particular age range like 18-30yr olds.

Building a niche ultimately ensures you can communicate effective material that serves their particular needs and interests. It keeps promotional costs down, conversion rates high, and limits the competition you go up against.

And why do I ask this?

Because just recently I was catching up on Pat Flynn’s progress over on his Smart Passive Income blog.

I was amazed to see that he still includes his Security Guard Training adsense income on his monthly income report.

And although it’s now a relatively small part of his very healthy $150,000+ monthly income, at just $1,300 per month – it’s still a very rewarding and realistic starting point for most people looking to start an online business.

Pat started this niche website back in 2010, so I’m a little behind the times covering this in 2016 – but there’s a method to me revisiting this far on.

The fact that Pat is still earning a healthy monthly income from his own niche sites is testament to the fact that building niche websites is an evergreen way to make money online.

Once they’re up, capturing a good amount of traffic, and they’re optimised for monetisation, they are a great way to make consistent passive income – pretty much for the rest of your life.

But have all the niches now been taken?

In an age where the necessary information to start your own niche website and to research the most potentially rewarding niches is publicly available, are there still gaps and niches that haven’t yet been tapped and that you can make money from?

Of course, new niches can appear all the time with the latest fads and crazes, but I’m talking about the evergreen niches – the ones that deliver consistent income, for decades, not just for a few months.

So, Pat, 6 years on, I’m taking you up on your challenge to take part in your niche site duel – and I too will document my progress throughout, from selecting the niche, to setting up the site, creating the content, getting the site ranked in Google, and monetising it.

The aim?

To hopefully prove that there are still endless niches that people just like me and you can use to quickly and easily generate a consistent online income.

In my Udemy course ‘Fasttrack Entrepreneur: Start an Online Business in 4 Weeks’ I teach people how to start their own business from scratch, across a broad range of business models (ecommerce through to blogging and vlogging) – so I see this experiment as an extension to this – I’ll go back to where I started, from scratch, and with less than £20, I’ll show you how you can create a profitable online business (I hope!).

I’m putting my reputation on the line, and I’m willing to do this to hopefully prove how anyone can set their own business up online.

When I’m done, I’ll use this post to link to each post I create to show you every stage of the process I follow.

But for now, just stay tuned to my blog for updates as I start my journey towards creating a niche website.

Fancy taking the challenge too?

I invite you to start your own niche site and to document your progress – updating me and readers on your journey, strategy, and steps to building a successful niche website in the comments below.

Why Online Marketing is Like Dieting

Neither are an exact science.

Both depend on other variables to be successful.

And results take time.

Being an advocate of health, fitness, and good diet, and also running several successful online businesses, I have a fair bit of experience in both online marketing and dieting.

A recent article I read really highlighted to me the similarities between the two.

You can find the original article here.

Have you ever been on a diet and become frustrated with how the scales fluctuate from day-to-day with no real reasoning?

You stick to your diet rigidly each day, but yet some days still show an increase on the scales or no movement at all.

Well, this article explains why this can happen, and the scientific reasoning behind these frustrating fluctuations.

Ultimately, there are a number of factors that can cause your weight to fluctuate on a day-to-day basis – sodium levels, glycogen stores, water retention, and much much more.

The lesson of the article is to not become obsessed over these daily fluctuations in weight when you are working towards a goal – weigh yourself maybe every couple of weeks instead of every day.

This allows the, sometimes unexplainable, daily fluctuations to iron themselves out without you even noticing or having to worry about them.

In dieting, as in business and in life as a whole, there are variables – often too many to comprehend – that will affect your short-term progress.

In business, it could be not getting anything crossed off your to-do list on a certain day because the kids need to go swimming, or you’re ill and need a day in bed to rest.

Whatever it may be, there are distractions, other priorities, and unexplainable factors that can influence our short term progress.

But in the long term, provided we are consistent and persistent with our efforts and drive, we will see progress.

It’s rather like monitoring the currency exchange – you can micro-analyse all those troughs and peaks in the graph, but ultimately it’s about how things go in the long term.

Provided that point on the graph ends up higher than when you first started out, you’ve made progress towards your goal.

Forget about the turbulence in-between – this can be ridden out with consistent effort.

I liken this approach to online marketing – particularly with PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising – in the short term, you might blow a fortune on campaigns that aren’t quite working out.

But you build on what works and what doesn’t for you and your business.

You ditch the expensive keywords that aren’t converting and you spend more money on the keywords that are converting.

You consistently tweak and improve your campaign using the data it delivers back to you over time – until, in the long term, you’re left with a very effective and profitable campaign.

If you start trying to tweak your campaign too early though, you may end up scrapping some potentially high-converting keywords because they don’t start out too well for you, and you don’t have enough ‘meat’ on your data to make an informed and accurate decision.

Dieting is similar. What works for one person may not work for the next. You have to follow a process of trial and error – ditching techniques that aren’t delivering results in the medium to long term, and focusing on what is working for you.

Until eventually, in the long term, you reach your personal weight loss goals.

The Lesson?

Consistency leads to success.

But micro-analysing data too quickly can often be contradictory to achieving consistency.

You need to give it time for accurate data to show, in order to make informed decisions and changes/tweaks going forward.

This applies to online advertising, dieting, and almost all other aspects in life.

By all means take corrective action when things aren’t heading in the right direction – but don’t analyse things too quickly, give them enough time to deliver actionable data, or you’ll lose your direction and consistency that ultimately leads to long-term success.

Do you have your own tips and techniques to share on these topics? Please share them in the comments below.