Profitable Niches

What makes one small business more successful than another online? Put quite simply, the successful marketer is a creature of habit. They have set very clear business goals and have created their daily routines with those goals in mind.

Most of us already have the knowledge and information we need to succeed. What we lack is a clear course of actions needed to transform that information into dollars and the motivation to stick with it.  The best way to develop a plan of action is to sort through the information you have and set a daily routine that will map out the route you need to take to arrive at your goal.

For online marketing, there are 4 main goals.

1. Develop or find a product.
2. Generate traffic.
3. Gather leads.
4. Make sales.
5. Analyzing results.

Sounds simple right? It really is if you set your daily routines with these goals as the main focus. Lets break down each goal into a workable routine.

1. Developing or finding products. Whether you are selling information or tangible products, you need to spend a certain amount of time either creating them or sourcing them out. The easiest way is through affiliate programs where you sell someone else’s product for a commission. There are many different sources such as Clickbank, Commission Junction, Amazon and Paydotcom where you can find products that will pay you anywhere from 5%-75% of the sale price. Creating your own e-books and videos or membership sites is another way of generating a sellable product.

Whichever you choose, you should focus one day per week with this sole purpose in mind.

2. Generating traffic. There are a whole string of ways to do this. You can purchase traffic through advertising on other websites and pay per click ads. If you want to do it organically, you can spend time doing SEO on your website, posting in forums, answering questions in Yahoo Answers, writing articles to submit to article submission websites and commenting on blogs.

Social media and social bookmarking sites also is another way to generate traffic to your website. Posting your pages on Stumbleupon, Twitter, Facebook and other social sites is very effective. Doing up simple videos and posting them to video sharing sites like YouTube will also send lots of traffic to your site.

3. Gathering Leads. Building an email list is very important to your business. Making sure you have an opt-in box on your website and giving your visitors incentives to sign up can mean a huge difference in your bottom line at the end of each month.

If you are not skilled in this area you need to focus on learning more about it and sourcing out ways of growing your list.

4. Making sales. If you do everything else correctly the sales will automatically follow. Learning how to do effective sales copy writing and making a point of following up with your leads can add many dollars to your revenue every month. A weekly email to your list can bring you tons of sales that you would not have gotten without this little bit of effort on your part.

5. Analyzing results. You can’t get a sense of what is working and what is not unless you take the time to analyze the numbers. Tweaking is often needed to get the best results. When you take the time to go over your numbers, it will become very obvious to you where you need to focus more attention. Are you wasting your time in one area but getting great results in another? If you know this, you can focus the majority of your attention on what is working for you and therefore increase your sales and save yourself time.

You will notice that there are 5 goals and 5 work days in a week. The best way to tackle it is to devote one day per week on each specific goal and set all of the tasks that day accordingly.

If you can focus yourself in such a way you cannot help but reach your goals. Put it in writing and keep it visible at all times. This will help keep you on task.

Here is an example of the daily success routine.

Day 2- Traffic Generation

Today I will:

• Write and submit at least one article to an article submission site
• Answer 10 questions on Yahoo Answers
• Comment on 10 niche related blogs.
• Post a reply in 5 niche related forums.
• Submit my latest blog posts in all of the popular social bookmark sites.

If you break each of the goals down into doable actions it becomes easy to get into the success habit. It becomes routine for you and you will start to see the results. It is the results that will, in turn, keep you motivated to stick with it. The results will be dollars in the bank.