When it comes to making money over the Internet, the secret is that you can’t just throw everything at the wall and waiting until something sticks. That method will take too long and will drain too many resources. The most effective way is to find a niche that you can sell into.

Niche markets are very effective because your strategy will be very targeted and competition will be minimal at times. Additionally, a niche market is the ideal balance between a marketer trying to sell something and prospective customers who are looking for something specific to buy – it’s basically seller and buyer meeting halfway.

For far too long, marketers have been trying to market to a general audience, resulting in wasted opportunities and resources. All because they didn’t take the time to find an untapped niche. The truth is that niche markets exist in just about every industry, and in order to maximize your success rate, you need to find untapped ones, but how do you do it?

1. Keep Your Ears Close to the Ground

Many untapped niche markets usually start out as fads or trends, but they don’t magically appear out of thin air. They’re usually coming from something else that got people’s attention and piqued their curiosity. You have to really pay attention to the things that are happening around you, and to current events.

The news is one great way to keep an eye on things, as is pop culture. This is particularly true if you are planning to enter the market via products that are related to pop culture or current affairs. For example, when the local news did a story about using sounds in certain frequencies to affect mood – the niche market for binaural mood enhancers came into being. Be mindful of what people are currently interested in, and see if there’s a product related to that. This works especially well for new problems or concerns, as you can just create or find a product that will address said problems. (more…)

A couple of decades ago, businesses only wanted websites for vanity purposes, mainly because the Internet wasn’t as widely used and building a presence online didn’t really have much of an effect on their operations. Fast-forward to today and you’ll see that having a website is almost always a necessity. Businesses find themselves missing out on opportunities for branding and marketing straight to their customers all over the globe for a fraction of the costs of an extensive marketing campaign in other platforms and media.

However, too many businesses fail to maximize the benefits of a website because they commit one of several big mistakes when they first set up their websites or in really unlucky cases, commit all of said mistakes, leading to an online presence that is not only failing to provide any benefits to the business, but is actually turning out to be detrimental. If you want to make sure that you have not committed these mistakes or want to avoid committing it in the feature, you should take a look at the following list of mistakes business owners make when setting up their website:

1. They Don’t Have a Top Level Domain Name

Many businesses fail to realize that free hosting services and the sub-domains they come with only have one benefit: it’s free. But that single benefit is negated by all the cons that come with a sub-domain, some of which include:

A. Your website loses credibility – people, and search engines themselves, don’t put a lot of weight on sub-domains. It reeks of amateurishness, and it shows that the owner doesn’t care enough about the site and what it represents to even bother investing on their own domain name. A multinational company that is still using a free subdomain URL will almost always get beat by a basement blogger who had the smarts to build an online presence around a top level domain name. (more…)