In years past, creating a professional blog design required internet marketers to hire a professional. This was often a costly and laborious endeavor – most good blog designers charge $1000 or more for a unique design. Then, there’s the problem of going through several “drafts” to obtain the look and feel you need to attract readers and keep them coming back.

Today, the process is much easier (and less expensive). There are several premium Wordpress themes you can use to create your blog’s look and feel. These themes are fully customizable, so it takes just a few minutes to build a blog that is different from the thousands of other sites out there.

For the beginning blogger, FlexxThemeis a good choice. The setup is pretty straightforward. Plus, Flexxtheme offers 2056 unique configurations, so you can create a unique design on the fly, even if you have no programming knowledge. It’s easy to add featured posts, affiliate banners, and direct advertising to monetize your site – the theme’s widget-based platform does most of the work for you.   

If you’re primarily interested in affiliate marketing, Affiliate Themeis a good investment. This theme is designed with affiliate marketers in mind, so you can showcase affiliate products without the headaches of coding. These sites aren’t quite as extensive as traditional content blogs, but they’re great for jumpstarting your affiliate marketing efforts.

If you’re willing to put a little more time into your site, Thesis offers the greatest level of customization. You can build a static website with a blog, or put your blog posts front and center. Because Thesis offers so many options, it comes with a bit steeper learning curve… but if you want a truly unique site that fits your vision, this theme will give you all the tools you need.

Each of these themes cost less than $100. In my years of experience, I’ve found that they are more than adequate for creating professional, unique sites that will impress first-time visitors and subscribers alike. And they’ll save you from countless late nights that you would otherwise spend hunkering over a keyboard, trying to figure out how to get your design “just right.”

Lee

Twitter: @JJMbuzz

___

Choosing a Niche – Finding Your Passions

Choosing a Niche – Practicality

To summarize: In order to build a successful online business, it is important to select a niche that fuels your passions,  and offers practicality. You have be on fire about your subject matter in order to stay motivated, and you have to have a reader base that is just as excited.

Now, let’s look at the third “P” of internet marketing success: Profitability.

So if you’ve been playing along so far, you’ve identified quite a few niche markets that fuel your passions, and discarded those that won’t attract much interest. The next step is determining if a niche can be profitable.

When you evaluate a niche market, consider the products that might be relevant to that topic. After all, products and services are what will bring in the profits.

As an example, let’s look at one of my passions, vegan cooking. Suppose I’m thinking of launching a website or blog that offers vegan recipes – what types of products would my  readers likely be interested in?

• General cookware (pots, pans, utensils, etc.)
• Specialized cookware (dehydrators, spiral slicers, etc.)
• Small kitchen appliances (food processors, blenders, juicers, etc.)
• Cookbooks
• Culinary courses/instruction
• Specialized ingredients (spices, flax meal, organic flour, etc.)
• Vegetarian/vegan “convenience products” (tempeh, seitan, veggie burgers, soyrizo, etc.)

And more loosely associated:

• Fitness equipment
• Vitamins and herbal supplements
• Yoga instruction/equipment
• Spiritual/conscious living products
• “Green” household products

These are just a few of the potential products I could offer. Keep in mind that this is a fairly small niche market – larger niches will present more opportunities.

Now, once you’ve come up with the potential products and services, the next step is to see if you can sell them online, or if anyone else is selling them. This can be accomplished pretty easily through a Google search for the products you’ve come up with. If you come up with sites selling relevant products, then there is profit potential in your niche.

When you search for a product on Google, pay special attention to the listings on the right side of the results page. These are “paid listings”, meaning that the advertisers have bid a per-click fee to get you to see those listings. Chances are, if people or companies are paying to get their products in front of you, there is a sufficient market for those products online.

We’ll get into several way to market your products later – right now, we’re just trying to determine if there’s any money to be had. What I mean by that is that, if you’re going to start an online business, you should be reasonably sure that the money making opportunities exist before you spend your time and money launching your site.

Ok, your list is probably now full of strike-throughs and tick marks. Take a look at the ideas you have left – the ones that meet the three criteria for a successful business venture:

1. They ignite your passions;
2. They are practical, in the sense that you can reach a sufficient reader base without wading through immense competition;
3. They have the potential to bring in profit.

These are your core niche markets. Congratulations – you’ve already made it further than 99% of internet marketers!

Lee

Twitter: @JJMbuzz

___

• Passion
• Practicality
• Profitability

If you haven’t had a chance to read the first post in this series, you can find it here: Choosing Your Niche - Finding Your Passions.

Last time, we looked at ways to identify your passions when choosing a niche market for your online venture.

Just to summarize: Unless you select a niche market that you’re passionate about, or at least very interested in, it’s difficult to build the momentum to make your venture successful. Depending on whether the niche topic interests you, building an online business can be quite enjoyable, or it can be a lot of difficult, tedious work. Picking a topic you’re passionate about will provide a solid foundation for you to build a successful business.

Now, let’s look at the next ”P” of choosing a niche market: Practicality.

Practicality is a hard concept for many internet marketers, because at their core, successful marketers are creative people. Being practical seems to take a bit of the wind out of our sails, because suddenly, there are constraints around what we can reasonably do.

But in order to build a successful online business, you have to exercise a measure of practicality. Your niche topic has to interest not only you, but your potential audience as well.

There are four main aspects of a practical niche:

1. It has a sufficiently large audience. You may be passionate about a certain topic, but does anyone else care about it? I don’t mean this to sound negative – most of us have obscure interests that very few internet users care about. For example, I’m a huge fan of cello rock, but I’d have a hard time developing a successful business around that interest.
2. It has reasonably low competition. The more blogs and websites there are dedicated to a particular niche market, the harder it will be to gain “traction” – that is, to attract enough visitors to build a critical mass of traffic. This isn’t to say that you can’t build a successful business in a highly competitive niche, but things will go much more smoothly if you choose a niche that isn’t being targeted by thousands of other marketers.
3. It offers long term interest. Hot button topics such as celebrity deaths are great for short term traffic, but they don’t provide sustainable interest. After the buzz around a hot button topic has died down, how many people really want to continue reading about it? Successful businesses are built around content that will continue to be relevant for years.
4. There is enough information about the topic to build a wealth of content. Content will drive traffic, build credibility, and keep readers interested in your niche. The more relevant content you provide, the more potential customers you will attract.

Ok, so now we know the facets of a practical niche. So if you’ve already created your list of topics you’re passionate about, get it out and begin examining each potential niche to see if you can use it to build a practical business.

In my next post, we’ll explore the third “P” of choosing a niche: Profitability.

Lee

Twitter: @JJMbuzz

___

So if you haven’t started already, now is the time.

Before you ever launch a website or hire a copywriter to create your content, you need to decide what kind of audience you’re going to target. The days of “build it and they will come” are essentially over – your internet marketing venture has to be a balancing act of passion, practicality, and profitability. These are the elements that will sustain you during the early days, and help you build a lucrative online business.

Let’s examine the first of these elements in a little greater depth:

Passion: It may sound obvious, but if you’re not passionate about the products or services you are promoting, you’re  not likely to be very succesful in your online venture. Sure, there are marketers who can promote products in just about any niche market, but for the vast majority of us, there has to be more than a passing interest in the niche.

I’ve learned this from personal experience – I’ve launched websites in more than a few niches that 1) I knew nothing about; and 2) I could care less about… just because I saw them as having high profit potential. Invariably, chasing these niches proved to simply be a waste of time and money.

For example, the weight loss niche is quite lucrative. But since I’m about 6 feet tall and weigh all of 130 pounds, I couldn’t really relate to the target audience. I got bored with it very quickly, so it wasn’t a good choice for me. If I had taken the time to assess my own interest level,  instead of just seeing it as a money maker, I would have saved myself an untold amount of time and effort.

So before you do anything else to build your internet marketing empire, grab a sheet of paper and a pencil (remember those?) and take a half hour to jot down ideas for marketing ventures that will actually be fueled by your passions. It doesn’t matter at this point how ”out there” the ideas may seem - you will begin weeding through all of the possible niches a bit later. The important thing right now is that the ideas excite you.

Again, I can’t stress enough that you dismiss practicality during this stage. The more ideas you can come up with, the better. Don’t toss out a topic just yet because you think it won’t fly. If anyone had told me that I could build a successful business telling people how to blog for money, I would have laughed. But fortunately, I didn’t know any better… and it has turned into a good money maker. Why? Well, there are several reasons, but the foundation comes from the fact that I care about helping people find freedom from the drudgery of a day to day job, and I enjoy writing the posts every day.

Take the time to put together your list today… in the next post, we’ll start looking at the ideas you’ve come up with, and assessing their revenue generating potential.

To Your Success,

Lee

Twitter: @JJMbuzz

___