Growing your niche internet business doesn’t need to require a huge influx of capital provided you’re smart about marketing and developing the business. Just like an offline business, it requires business savvy and a focused strategy to reach the top. Here are seven ways you can grow your niche without breaking the bank:
Do your homework—invest a lot of time into market research. Keyword research similar to that search engine optimizers recommend can go a long way toward helping you in your niche discovery explorations. Start with a broader term and work your way down to a term that is heavily searched for yet doesn’t have an overwhelming amount of competitors. Comparing the number of searches for a particular term to the number of competing pages for that term can weed out the poorer terms and help discover potentially profitable ones.
Write frequent articles to promote your business—these days, it’s all about word of mouth and pull marketing. Articles are one of the best ways to initiate a word of mouth campaign and place your company on the map when people are searching for information on a particular product or service. A simple article can pay dividends for a long period of time provided you submit it to some of the higher quality e-zines, trade journals, and print publications. Instead of shelling out a lot of cash for an ad in an expensive media, try generating a high quality article instead. Look at it this way: people won’t hunt down an ad in a newspaper or magazine down the road, but they may search for the information in your article long after the article is published.
Build a mailing list—one of the easiest ways to build a list is to generate a free report that provides insight and a unique perspective on an in demand topic. The length of the report is not as important provided you’re providing significant value. The report could also be used to pre-market a product or service you are selling through other marketing efforts.
Offer an affiliate program—having others do your marketing for you is a great way to leverage other people’s circle of influence. There are a lot of people sitting out there looking for a good product or service to market as an affiliate. Some of those same people have no interest in developing or supporting their own products so they simply market others’ stuff and take a piece of the action in return. This is a great way to boost sales, and the top affiliates will appreciate having another quality product to market.
Accept multiple methods of payment—just like a brick and mortar business, it’s important to accept multiple methods of payment because people like to pay their bills in a multitude of fashions. Credit card acceptance is a no brainer once you’ve established yourself as a legitimate entity, but online payment systems such as PayPal and 2CO are very popular as well. If you sell a high ticket item, consider accepting installments to make it easier to purchase your product.
Make it extremely easy to do business with you—be a customer of your own business to experience things from a customer’s point of view. Would you do business with you after going through that exercise?
Follow up consistently—follow up leads to loyalty, and loyalty leads to repeat purchases. Repeat purchasers don’t have nearly the cost of acquisition as new customers so it pays to have a follow up structure built into your sales and customer services processes. Remember: out of sight = out of mind.
Niche marketing is one of the hotter topics in internet marketing today, but many marketers struggle to effectively build their business. By following the seven tips above, hopefully you’ll reach the top of your niche in little to no time.
