How to Break Into Any Niche Part 3: Virginal Markets

If you have spent even 3 weeks or less learning about Internet marketing, I'm sure you have heard about blogging, videos, squeeze pages, pop-ups, and autoresponders.

Everyone in internet marketing uses them. There's one problem with that: EVERYONE IN INTERNET MARKETING USES THEM. When you are in the internet marketing niche and use autoresponders, you are Superman and you are still stuck on the planet Krypton -- you're just like everyone else.

If you take all the internet marketing techniques you know into other niches, you become a guy who can fly around in the air while everyone else is stuck walking from place to place.

Say you are in the fly fishing niche. Everyone else is being non-imaginative and tossing up poorly made web pages with hundreds of articles and no call to action. Or placing AdSense on pages and not trying to make the site sticky with an autoresponder newsletter or with backend products or paid memberships

No one is making YouTube videos, displaying one time offers, or split testing. You will be the guy setting up joint ventures while everyone else is still trying webrings and link exchanges.

If you take what you know about internet marketing and apply it to a sleepy, underdeveloped niche, you will become Superman. You will kick ass.

Never sell to the "how to make money" niche. It is full of people with no money lying about how they made money, or people with no money wanting to make money.

If you have to do internet marketing, narrow it down. Internet marketing is too broad of a niche. That's like having "computers" or "computer programming" as your niche... it's too damn non-specific. Instead of internet marketing, focus on search engine optimization, or article marketing, or Web 2.0 promotion (Squidoo, StumbleUpon, MySpace) ... don't be the same as everyone else.

Don't be the same as ANYONE else, in fact.

Don't try to sell your niche stuff to internet marketers. If you are breaking into a new niche you have to start from scratch. The exception to this is if you want a jumpstart, create something that's NOT just an e-book -- a DVD or CD -- and sell resale rights to the internet marketers.

NEVER offer private label rights. In doing this you are creating more competition for yourself but you are getting your name out there.

Don't brag about or mention your extra-cirricular efforts to other internet marketers. If word gets around that your niche is lucrative and an easy target you could get some fellow Supermen trying to take away some of your action.

This is why some hardcore niche marketers will use a fake name, register a totally new business name and host their sites on a separate server with WHOIS protection to keep their real identity secret.

I don't do the fake name stuff with my PHP niche because I am just outside of the internet marketing niche. My niche is where PHP and internet marketing overlap. I teach site builders how to write PHP scripts. So I am not teaching something as advanced as the techie people who want to learn programming as a career, but slightly more advanced than people watching WordPress videos or learning Flash and HTML.

My competition consists either of rockstar programmers who know a lot but can't or won't teach it to dummies, and have more fun talking about XML processing or RAID arrays instead of the easy stuff I teach. I also have competition who are internet marketers but not rockstar programmers, who pass along little tips but don't understand PHP enough to write their own code. They only know how to pass along other peoples' stuff.

To sum breaking into virginal markets using your existing IM skills:

  1. Be unique.
  2. Get into a niche that you know like the back of your hand.
  3. Stay away from the how to make money niche.
  4. Use your internet marketing skills to outperform everyone else in non-IM niches.
  5. Don't talk about your efforts with internet marketers.
  6. Know exactly what kind of people you are selling to.
  7. Know exactly who your competition is and what kinds products and web sites they have.

Once you've got that site setup, use:

  • The 5 Minute Article method to get an infoproduct developed quickly in a couple of hours.
  • Fast Food Copywriting to put together sales letters quickly.
  • PaySensor to handle PayPal payments and deliver products to customers via email.
  • Action PopUp to gather leads and stick them into a mailing list like ListMail or Aweber.
  • JV Plus along with a system like Clickbank to turn competitors into your affiliates.
  • Sales Page Tactics to increase your conversion rates even more.

My question to you is:

What is your best tip to establish yourself in a new niche?

Filed in: Niche Selection
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Comments (15)

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  1. GANESH says:

    Focus on your specialisation. You know gardening, develop a site on it. Insert ads relating to gardening like fertilizers. You also sell something in it. Sky is your limit to earn.

  2. Kurt says:

    I agree with GANESH. You should definitely know what you are doing that’s why you need ot focus on your specialization, on what you are actually good at!

    It also helps to have a vast network particularly of friends that will help you in “spreading the word”.

    Also, ORIGINALITY IS THE KEY!!! If you have or created something that is very original and there’s a market for it, you’re definitely in luck!!!

  3. Lowell says:

    Robert,

    My 2 cents:

    Actively be part of whatever community exists for the niche.

    If a community doesn’t exist, start one.

    Keep up the good work,

    Lowell

  4. Higgins says:

    Be prepared to pay to get people to visit your site. Yes, you will need to expend some cash if you want to get your specialist site at the top of the page on searches.

    Defining search terms or figuring how people are going to be looking for you will help you in narrowing down your field. For instance, if your speciality is fly-fishing then a search on that is going to get a lot of response, why not narrow it down further? How about fly-fishing lures or any other single term that only the serious customer would want to search by. Think about it – do you type in only two keywords when you are looking for a particular item?

    Specialise and be specific!

  5. Kara Bean says:

    Be prepared to pay to get people to visit your site. Yes, you will need to expend some cash if you want to get your specialist site at the top of the page on searches. Defining search terms or figuring how people are going to be looking for you will help you in narrowing down your field.

    For instance, if your speciality is fly-fishing then a search on that is going to get a lot of response, why not narrow it down further? How about fly-fishing lures or any other single term that only the serious customer would want to search by.

    Think about it – do you type in only two keywords when you are looking for a particular item? Specialise and be specific!

  6. Amanda says:

    Thanks for this information! You’re right about having to stay unique. I think another great tip is to enlist support from professionals who have experience in the topic you’re focusing on. That way, you can incorporate solid advice from someone who is in the field. That, combined with your own marketing skills, is a winning combination!

  7. Sam Hanson says:

    I think breaking into new markets is the toughest part of any new business venture. Once you have broken in, then the easy work can come. I really like your method and I think it will work. I will have to try it. Sam

  8. Robert- What an amazing post!

    (i know that that sounds cliche- but how on earth to do i describe the difference between your posts and all the others i have read??) you make me actually want to get off my lazy chair and GET MOVING! đŸ™‚

  9. sunshine says:

    Hi Robert,
    Thank you for your post.This is great information.

  10. Robert Plank says:

    Thanks for the comments.

    Amanda, how do you get experts to give you this information? Phone, guru.com, e-mail, message boards??

  11. Bob Lowell says:

    I have 3 questions about tracking:

    1. What do you think of http://www.phpmyvisites.us/ for tracking?

    2. I don’t beleive you use it because a friend was teasing you about cats said something about checking your web server logs. What do you use?

    There doesn’t seem to be any medium priced tracking programs as either thay are very “high-end” or only track website clicks. Valid tracking is necessary for good niche profits. Any recommendations?

  12. Dave Alston says:

    Hi Robert,

    really like what you do here – especially helpful the informative post on Optin Accelerator.

    As I was browsing the rest of your site I noticed that you had a broken link on this page linking to http://www.actionpoopup.com/ – I take it you meant http://www.actionpopup.com ?

    All the best,

    Dave Alston

  13. Robert Plank says:

    Oops, thanks for pointing that out Dave… yeah, I meant Action PopUp not Action PoopUp… an “Action PoopUp” sounds quite dangerous and disgusting đŸ™‚

  14. Ron Eason says:

    Robert, your video for JV Plus was not clear to me how the co-branding, sale crediting, etc., occurs for multiple affiliates promoting the site. Do you have to manually ad to the code for each and every affiliate, or is there another way that I obviously missed.

    Also, how do you collect the affiliate Clickbank ID’s? Is there an affiliate “registration” routine…link all other affiliate programs, or is that something else I missed.

    I am engrossed with this products potential, but need to connect all the dots.

    Thanks much,
    —Ron

  15. Ron Eason says:

    Ooops…I meant: LIKE all the other affiliate programs, not “link all the…”

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