The first key to the success of a blog or mini site is that it has to target a group of people (a niche) who are hungry for information of a specific nature. 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 problems. Problems in the sense that they are looking for a solution to something, looking to improve something. Furthermore, in a great niche, that SOMETHING, is something that causes 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 buy solutions to that pain, and hopefully from your website.
If that sounds a bit sick, trying to exploit people with pain, it's not. It's called marketing. You've had marketers doing it to you your whole life and you probably never even knew about it, 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 being helpful!
Anyhow moving on.
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? It's a good question. With certain kinds of sites, all you need is 10 visitors to your site a day and you can turn a nice monthly profit. Other niches and products that you promote you might need thousands per day. It all depends on what you 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, as indicated by a tool like Wordtracker. Here you're simply looking at how many searches per day a particular keyphrase gets in the search engines. Then after that, you want to look at 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 CRAPPY competition that you can DESTROY by making a better site, providing better content and in a better way.
The final piece of the puzzle 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, has great marketing material (sales letter etc, so it will convert your traffic well) and pays a decent commission.
This is of course 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 other ways to make money where you might think about some different factors in your niche selection.
So if you can combine all of the above factors when selecting your niche, you'll be giving yourself and your new blog the best possible chance of success. I hope you've found this valuable.
Blogs in particular have become such a popular choice for niche marketers because of their extreme ease of use, ease in maintaining, and ease in updating. Not to mention that the structure of a blog is generally by nature, search engine friendly. AND furthermore, where it isn't, there is always a third party plugin to make it so.
There are many ways to create a successful blog, and the one you choose should reflect an understanding of your target market. What we'll look at here is an example of one such method, that focuses on the generation of free traffic, and the promotion of an affiliate program for monetization.
The first thing you need to do is create a blog that's visually or aesthetically sound. A visually sound blog, other than just looking pretty, is arranged in a way that maximizes all the content you create, by maintaining your readers attention, and drawing the most attention to your affiliate program.
There are a few ways you want to do this:
1. Choose a blog theme with a predominantly white background and with black text. Simple advice, but often ignored. Black on white is the easiest for the eyes to read. Other colour schemes can quickly tire the eyes and make it hard to maintain concentration.
2. Choose a clean and neat theme. You don't want too much going on. It should be very clear where your content is located, very clear where your sidebar and navigation is located, where your other categories can be viewed and so forth. If a reader comes from a search engine, they should know exactly where they have to click to get the information they want. Generally I say the less options the better in terms of other features on your blog.
3. There are certain pages you absolutely want to have on your site. These are a Privacy Policy page, an About Us page, and a Contact us page. Google in particular looks at these things as indicators of a serious, quality, non spammy site. Furthermore, you want to have an archives page (easily achieved by the SRG Clean Archives plugin if you use Wordpress), so as not to have your archives taking up valuable room in your blog sidebar.
There are more factors but for the sake of this article not being 9000 words, we'll move on.
Once you have an aesthetically pleasing blog, you need some reader pleasing content.
We're going to assume here that you have a product selected. Of course the next step after picking your niche (sometimes these tasks are one and the same) is to select a product that you'll promote to the niche. This is where you'll earn your cash.
So once you've got a product selected, and the base of a good blog created as above, your job is to create some content that the people in your niche will find valuable and use that content to drive your website's visitors to the merchant's page and earn an affiliate commission.
At this point, you should have your niche's keywords researched - by that I mean you should have some idea of what might be a good place to attack the niche from. Ideally you'd have some keyphrase related to your niche that are uncompetitive in terms of the number of pages optimized for them in the search engines.
Where you'd ideally start your content creation is by writing an article on this uncompetitive term, posting it on your site and getting it ranked in the search engines. From here, you can develop as much content on search phrases from your niche, as you desire (remember you got those phrases from a tool like the Wordtracker keyword tool) in order to increase traffic to your site.
Some factors we didn't get to mention in this article are things like On page optimization, making your pages of content rank well in the search engines - and monetization - the art of getting the highest percentage of visitors to your site actually making you money. But for a basic overview, I think we've done alright.
Karin Manning has sinced written about articles on various topics from Vacation, Nutrition and Recreation and Sports. Ramp up your blogging traffic and profits with Firepow software today. To learn more about ">Firepow software or to invest in it now at a. Karin Manning's top article generates over 368000 views. to your Favourites.