If you are setting up a web site to market a product on the Internet, one of the first things you should do is define the niche you will focus on. Is is important that you choose a niche that is small enough that you won't have to compete with large companies. On the other side, it has to be large enough to attract a reasonable amount of traffic.

The first thing to do is brainstorm to get a few ideas to explore. You just need a few, say half a dozen. After you gather up a few ideas, you will need to do some keyword research on your topics. Pick topics that you are interested in. Things you have a passion for. It is much easier to write great content when you are passionate about the subject.

You can do keyword research to help choose your topic. There are a number of ways to do keyword research, some for free, some not. You should start by creating an Adwords account at Google. Even if you don't intend to do pay per click (PPC) advertising, the tools available there can give you a lot of information as to the popularity of niche you are researching, and it will show how heavy the competition for the keyword will be as well.

After you get your Adwords account setup, login and click tools/keyword tools. Then you can enter a keyword or keyword phrase that you feel represents your topic. Google will generate a list of keyword that are relevant to your topic.

You can see there are 3 columns to get an idea of how your keywords will work. First, if they have high competition, will be difficult to achieve highs rankings, or affordable PPC. Lower competition with adequate search volume is what you need to look for. Choose a topic with lots of keywords that have low to medium competition, and have decent popularity.

Clickbank is another useful resource. Here is an example of an affiliate product that you can sell.

You can sort the products by popularity, and see the statistics for products close to your topic, even if you don't wish to market these specific products. A high gravity (grav) suggests a very popular product. This can give you a general idea of how popular your topic is.

Your topic needs to be in demand. A reasonable number of people must be searching for information in your topic. If it is too narrow, there will not enough interest in your topic.

Your topic cannot be too broad. A broad topic will have huge competition. The competing web sites are too numerous. Also broad themes will have major companies competing for the niche. A tight niche, even though it has good demand will have less competition. The big companies will find it too small to mess with, that makes it just right for the little guy to rank their pages in the search engines, or afford the PPC. You will get highly targeted traffic that tends to be easier to sell that broad untargeted traffic.

Your niche must have high return on investment (ROI) possibilities. You should have multiple ways to make a profit from your site. If you take some time and planning at this stage, before you are committed to building your site, you will be able to hit the ground running when you actually begin marketing your site.

I've setup a basic instruction manual for creating a web site to market a product. You can find it at http://www.marketingideasandtools.com/website_development.html. If you're a beginner, you should find it helpful.

Wednesday, June 18, 2008 9:32:42 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)      Comments [0]  web businesses