So your online business is doing ok. Your brick-and-mortar business of course is driving all of the sales, and the site is merely an online advertisement and you’re lucky to get one or two online sales a month. That’s a huge waste of time, you know. You can do so much more with your website and your not even utilizing your site’s potential to the hilt.

You can try promoting your products on social media channels like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, all while placing a link to your website for online sales. It doesn’t hurt if you have an online checkout/shopping cart solution in place already. Submit your site to an Australia Business Directory as well, that will work wonders if your site’s located in Australia. If you’re somewhere else, it goes without saying that you just need to look for your location’s business directory.

The problem may also be because your possible customers may be having a hard time to find your site online. Have you tried googling for your product? Did your site land in the first page of results? Then a bit of search engine optimization may be needed. It’s expensive, it will take a lot of time before you see results, but yes, it works and has great results in the long term.

Your website isn’t something you just create and put on the web and just expect people to come and visit it. It needs to be constantly tweaked and updated and promoted for you to maximize it.

When creating a new website for your business, the layout of the overall site and each visual page is key both in creating an attractive outlook and driving customers to particular points within your site. With an interesting and professional layout, you have ensured a solid foundation on which to develop your website. There are a number of factors to consider in order to optimize the appearance of your site.

The main elements that go into web design are headlines, navigation, images and text. It may sound simple, but the primary point to remember is that your company logo should be clearly displayed at the top of the page and each page within the site should have a bold and informative headline explaining the content underneath. More →

One of the first things that we talked about when we started this series on niche blogging is how to asses if a niche is already crowded. The idea was to choose a niche that is not too saturated. However, it does not mean that you should not enter a niche if it is already crowded. If you think that that niche is what you are best at, then by all means, create a niche blog focusing on that topic! Although admittedly, it could be more difficult to create a place for your blog because of the competition, there is still a chance for you to create a name for yourself.

One of the first things that you have to remember in order to succeed in a crowded niche is to establish connections. A crowded niche means a LOT of bloggers talking about your topic. This means that there are other bloggers out there who could benefit from you and vice versa. As such, making connections is one of the most important things that you could do to help establish your niche blog despite a crowded niche.

Another important consideration is for you to create a unique style and stand. In a crowded niche, this would be a little bit more difficult. With so many bloggers writing about the same topic, you just might run out of angles to present the topic. Then again, I think that combining your topic with your different ideas and points of view can always attract a specific audience. Pour all your energy into making your posts unique and you will have better chances of attracting readers.

(to be continued)

Photo courtesy e-chan

I was doing some reading on niche blogging and looking for tips from other people. I was a bit surprised at something I read at OpTempo. In a post titled Niche Blog Beginner Tips, jfc wrote:

Update Frequency Isn’t That Important
The common train of social blogging thought is that you have to be constantly updating your content, usually on a daily or at least weekly frequency, or else you’ll lose traffic. With a niche blog, updating daily isn’t needed after the site has gained a degree of search engine traction. In fact, you may find that if you’ve done things right by accident or design that your traffic will actually increase over time rather than decline even though you’re no longer actively updating it.

I know it seems counterintuitive to those who’ve been doing social blogging. The thing is that over time Google begins to consider your site, due to the way your keywords are constructed and your link building exercises are done, an authority site on your topic. This, in turn, means you’ll get an increasing number of valuable search engine visitors even though your core articles haven’t been updated in a year and may be of limited utility.

I understand that your blog can gain search engine traction over time and that even if you do not regularly update your blog anymore, you will still get a lot of hits because you are already well established up in the SERPs. However, I think that this defeats the purpose of providing your readers with something new to read. In my mind, one creates a niche blog in order to address a need for information in that certain niche. If the most recent content was published a year ago, do you think that your old readers would keep coming back for more? I really don’t think so.

What is your take on this?

We have to admit it, there will be times when you find yourself short of time. You may want to continue giving original and fresh content all the time but you have to keep your ideas flowing. And when you find yourself short on ideas and time, you might have to resort to other options. My suggestion is for you to keep your own “treasure chest” of niche blog content ideas. This way, you will always have something worthy to write about and post in your nice blog. Let us look at some types of content that you can play around with.

News blogging
Some people dub this as “lazy blogging” but I seriously disagree with them. One of the points of niche blogging is bringing fresh news regarding the topic or subject area to your readers on a regular basis. Of course, you have to make sure that your news is always fresh and not stale. Otherwise, your post will be good for nothing.

Another point that I have to raise about news blogging is that you should always do more than report the news. Give your own input. After all, your readers can read about the news item from other places online, especially your source. Your edge will be giving your own ideas and sharing your perspective. Now that is priceless.

To make it easier for you to create news posts, make use of tools such as Google Alerts and other aggregators that can inform you when something newsworthy relating to your niche comes up.

(to be continued)

We have talked about posting schedule a long time ago. We were not really focusing on niche blogs then but the general idea was to have a regular posting schedule. Does the same thing apply to niche blogs?

I would have to answer a resounding YES to that question. You see, niche blogs may be tightly focused on a specific subject but it does not mean that it is much different from other blogs. The idea behind blogs is to provide fresh content on a regular basis. It does not have to be daily, especially if you are maintaining several niche blogs. If you decide to post daily and you have several niche blogs, you might find yourself having a hard time juggling your posting schedule. In fact, I would say that posting every other day or even two or three times a week would be a good enough frequency for a niche blog.

Another consideration that you have to think about when it comes to content for your niche blog is the possibility of future posting. Basically, future posting is writing entries for your niche blog before you actually publish them. So for example, you can write the posts for the week on a weekend and then just pre-date them. With WordPress and Blogger, it is not a problem as they allow this. This idea is very important for those who have day jobs and other commitments. This means that they might not have the ability to set a regular schedule during the week.

The important thing is for you to lay down the guidelines for your posting schedule and stick to them.

Two posts ago, we talked about how commenting is important in niche blogging. More so, we emphasized how important it is for you to choose the blogs that you leave comments in; that, as much as possible, you should choose the blogs that are the most popular in your niche.

The next question then is this: how do you determine which blogs are the most popular in your niche? Here are some tips to help you find those blogs. They are really easy and you may actually be doing some of them already.

Technorati
Everyone in the blogging business knows about Technorati. Even newbies are quite aware of what Technorati is and how important it is to building up one’s blog. One good thing that I like about Technorati is that you can download a file of the top 10 blogs in any of the existing category. That means almost no work for you!

Del.icio.us
Here is another simple way to find the top blogs. Just go to http://del.icio.us/tag/topic+blog.

StumbleUpon
I have been hearing about StumbleUpon for the longest time but to be honest, it was only recently that I joined the community. I wish I had done it earlier. There are tons of people using StumbleUpon and the classifications are quite specific. However, there is no single file that you can download like in Technorati. Still, StumbleUpon is a good way to find blogs in a particular niche.

Of course, these are only some of the tools that you can use. Do you have any suggestions as to how to easily find the top blogs in a niche?

Way back when I was writing the posts on getting started on niche blogging, I overlooked a very important thing – your domain name. Now we all know that you can create a blog on Blogger, Typepad, WordPress, etc. for free. Then again, if you are really serious about your blog, then you would want to have your own domain. Choosing a domain name for your niche blog is essential in making it. So how do you go about it?

I am assuming here that you already have chosen your niche – we have already talked about this in detail. Once you have that down pat, you have to generate some domain names that would fit with your overall niche blog strategy. One good thing to do is to choose a domain name that has keywords. This is especially important if you are aiming to get a lot of search engine hits.

So for example, if your niche blog is focused on the Wii, you should choose a domain name that has Wii in it. Of course, Wii.com is already taken so you have to add some other keywords in your domain name. You can try wiijunkie, wiienthusiast, everythingwii, and so on. You would have to check if your chosen domain name is available – that is why you need to come up with several in order to have other options.

There are many domain name checkers on the Internet but I personally prefer typing www.domainname.com (or whatever extension you want) on Google to see if it is parked, taken, or available. Once you have decided on an available domain name, do not waste time – register it at once!

Niche blogging is not that much different from blogging about general topics. The basic premise is still the same. The significant difference is that a niche blog is tightly focused on a specific subject.

When it comes to networking, though, a niche blogger still needs to exert some effort. Just because you are focusing on a particular topic or subject does not mean that you will be getting the traffic that you want for that topic. Not everyone knows that your blog exists. More so, not everyone will see your blog as the authority in that field, especially in the beginning.

One important thing for niche blogging is making comments in other blogs in your chosen niche. Just like with “ordinary” blogging, leaving pertinent comments in other people’s blogs is a good way to make your mark in the blogosphere. For niche blogging, though, you have to be very particular about the blogs where you leave your comments.

The most profitable thing for you to do is to comment regularly and actively in niche blogs that are similar to yours. More so, it would be better to choose those niche blogs which have more traffic than yours. Why is this so? One reason is so that you can increase your exposure. The more traffic the niche blog has, the more chances you have of being discovered by other people interested in your topic. This way, you can also gain more traffic. An other reason is that you can build relationships with these “successful” bloggers and that is always a good thing – basically what networking is all about.

In the previous post, we took a look at the first step in picking your niche, which is to narrow down your interests. The next step would be to assess the potential traffic for your blog. In the interest of monetization, you have to be able to somehow forecast the potential interest that your niche would get.

There are many tools which you can use to determine this point. One kind of tool that you might want to use is a keyword tool – there are plenty in the market. Google has even come up with a new tool – Google Insights – which can help you determine search patterns.

Wordtracker is another useful tool. Ken McGaffin writes about it:

Wordtracker is a great tool for helping you identify and quantify niche markets. Keyword research tells you what people are looking for online and so helps you assess the size of the market for any particular product or service. To explore the size of any market, there are three stages involved:

1. Find the most popular keywords in your niche market.
2. For each popular keyword, see how it is used in longer search terms and use the total predicted volume of searches to estimate the number of people searching for that particular keyword.
3. Add up the total predicted volume of searches for each popular keyword within the niche to give an estimate of the size of the market.

Based on this and your narrowed down list of interests, you can already pick your niche. Do note, however, that the tools mentioned in these posts are only some of the many out there. Do not limit yourself to them.