If you want to succeed online, you have to have a strategy (or theme, a purpose, or community) for your website, with a central focus on a specific WANT that your prospects have. Then, you find products which follow along the theme.

So, the three keys to creating income from ANY web site and ANY theme, according to Terry Dean, are:

1. Have a lead product that people WANT.

2. Have freebies at your site that follow the theme.

3. Have multiple backend or supporting products for the theme.

You can’t develop a business around a single product. Even if you are promoting a single product upfront, it is not the product that people want.

They want the BENEFITS they receive out of the product.

When designing your site, think about that ever abiding “WANT” or “GOALS” that your prospects have with them continually.

Things such as: more money, weight loss, online success, being sexually attractive, self-defense, etc.

These ultimate benefits are what your prospects are really seeking.

So, don’t base your business just on products.

John Thornely
© John Thornely www.johnthornely.com 2008

To learn more about how YOU can
Profit From The Internet – Fast, visit
www.Internet-Tycoons.com

Did you know that there’s a very simple way to get Amazon to find your Niche Products for you?

Go to www.Amazon.com or www.Amazon.co.uk and select a ‘Department’ from the drop-down menu at the top left of the main page or  the fixed menu on the left side. Let’s select ‘Camera, Photo & Video’ from the ‘Electronics’ Department (‘Camera & Photo’ on .co.uk).

As well as category listings and a search box, you’ll also see ‘Most Wanted’ and ‘Best Deals’ listings (we’ll come back to these a little later).

On the menu bar at the top, click on ‘Bestsellers’ and you’ll get a page listing all the hot products that are selling best at present. In other words, Amazon is telling you what products people are buying most of right now! And you can safely assume that people are searching for those products to buy (although the two things are not identical)!

Ideas on a Plate!

Now, did your competition in the ‘bricks and mortar’ world ever tell you straight out what was selling best? Talk about giving you ideas on a plate!

But it doesn’t stop there, there’s plenty more…!

In the top left corner, under ‘More in Camera and Photo’, you’ll see four more categories that are of distinct interest to you…
* Hot New Releases (or Hot Future Releases on .co.uk)
* Most Gifted
* Most Wished For
* Movers & Shakers

While there are some variations, these pages will display many of the same products, underlining what’s selling well. The ‘Movers & Shakers’ page also shows you how the rankings are changing – ie what’s ‘hotting up’ just now!

The only thing Amazon doesn’t tell you is how many of each product they sold and from which suppliers, but you can check out the top ranking sites just by clicking through the links on the Amazon pages!

Niche Ideas

Now, let’s put all of this together and think about what Amazon is telling us about your potential niche markets…

Go back to the ‘Bestsellers’ page. At the time of writing, Canon cameras occupied 10 of the top 15 spots, while Flip video cameras occupied 3. So you could set up a Hub site offering Canon cameras and a series of Mini-Sites for individual Canon camera models (and accessories for each, too of course).

Keep an eye on the Hot New Releases and Movers & Shakers pages and add new Mini-Sites and Hubsite pages for new products.

And don’t forget to target keywords and page titles, etc, to respond to the ‘Most Gifted’ and ‘Most Wanted’ items.

You’ll note that the top sellers on Amazon.com, which is aimed at the North American market, are different from what’s selling fastest in the UK on Amazon.co.uk. So think about which market you’re targeting with your niche sites and how to optimize for that market.

Don’t forget your Research!

And before you rush in and set up mini-sites galore, though, don’t forget to do your research and optimise your website for both longer-tail keywords – but don’t leave out the more competitive keywords from your pages, either.

Have a think about some of the criteria I discussed in ‘Niche Product Strategies For Your Hub And Mini-Sites‘.

Check the number of searches using Google’s keyword tool. So, for example, when I looked there were 450,000  searches a month in the UK for ‘Canon Powershot’ and 8,100 for ‘Canon PowerShot SD1100IS’ – a pretty healthy market!

And make sure you check the product type numbers available in the market you are targeting before you optimise your page – you don’t want to set up to sell models that aren’t available in the country you’re targeting, do you!

Do a ‘broad match’ search for ‘Canon Powershot SD1100IS’ on Google and you’ll see there are around 27,000 competing sites. A ‘phrase match’ search – ie using “” marks around the phrase – indicates only 4,900 or so competing sites, so there’s surprisingly low competition for such an in-demand product.

And don’t forget you can see the keywords your competition are using and how they’re attracting customers by using tools like www.keywordspy.com and www.spyfoo.com!

Talk about giving it to you on a plate…!

Happy Niche-ing!
John Thornely
Internet Tycoons

Before you spend a lot of money setting up in your chosen niche, you’ll want to research it thoroughly and test it out, to see what traffic you get and the quality of this traffic – are they ‘hot buyers’ or just browsers?

Hot Tip: One of the ways that you test a niche, before you get started, is to send some traffic to an affiliate site (you sign up as an Affiliate to sell someone else’s product – they’ll generally set up a website for you). If you are getting sales as an affiliate, then you could make sales with your own product.

John Thornely
© John Thornely www.johnthornely.com

To learn more about how YOU can
Profit From The Internet – Fast, visit
www.Internet-Tycoons.com

A great way to find new niches is to use Google searches and Keyword tools to do all the hard work for you!

Hot Tip: Go to one of the keyword tools and type in short phrases like “How to”, “Where to”, “Make”, “Do It Yourself”, “Discount”, etc – you’ll get a list of the most searched items – and some ready-made ‘hot niche’ suggestions!

Most marketers recommend looking for markets where the total searches per month (the numbers on the left hand side) equal 15 to 20 thousand or higher.

But some people do really well in smaller markets (more than about 5,000 searches per month) – it depends on the niche and you can dominate in a small market.

When you work in niches with at least 20,000 searches a month, you can make yourself a few hundred to a few thousand dollars, on a weekly basis.

John Thornely
© John Thornely www.johnthornely.com 2008

To learn more about how YOU can
Profit From The Internet – Fast, visit
www.Internet-Tycoons.com

One of the first questions that people have when looking to start up any web business is… “What niche should I choose?” – I’m sure you, like me, have been there too?

This question has surfaced several times recently, in talking to Mastermind Members, so I though it might be helpful to look at some of the criteria for selecting suitable products to promote with a Hub and Mini-site strategy.

As ever, the first thing to do is take off your ‘YOU’ goggles and put on your prospective customer’s shoes, hat and glasses – and see life as they see it and live it! As they say in marketing circles… ‘walk a mile in your customer’s shoes’ – see my blog post “The Anatomy of Great Copy”.

Next thing is search volume, of course… As a general rule, go for a product (range) that has good traffic – more than around 3,000 searches a month.

And the number of competing websites should, preferably, be less than 200,000 – that’s using ‘phrase match’ on Google by putting quotation marks (“ ”) around your search phrase. If you use ‘broad match’ for a term like ‘portable garden equipment’, Google will return ALL websites that have EITHER the term ‘portable’ OR ‘Garden’ OR ‘equipment’ – ie likely to be in the millions and not relevant to you.

Stiff Competition?

Now, 200k other websites would seem like stiff competition – but you can bet that most are not well optimised for the keywords you’re targeting and you’d be surprised how easy it is to get up in the top rankings, as a result. Especially if you focus on ‘long tail’ keywords (more on that in a moment).

And think how you would react, as a prospective customer, to the website you’re creating and the product you’re targeting…

Yes, you want to maximise the return you’ll earn from affiliate commissions by going for higher-priced products, rather than $2.50 toys (unless you can attract thousands of visitors a day).

But people looking for products online costing over say £100 will want to shop around much more than people buying lower-priced products, where the differences in price between different sites are likely to be rather less important.

And the higher the price, the more prospects will want to buy from a ‘professional’-looking website and the more pre-selling you’re going to have to do on your website, so the more effort will be required in setting up the website.

So it’s perhaps best to focus the Hub and Mini-site strategy at products in the range of £100 or so, rather than higher-priced products, where price differences between sites encourage shopping around.

Your Keywords

Now, back to Keywords… The trick is to focus on ‘long tail’ keywords, that include the primary (highly searched) keywords and have a reasonable search volume themselves, but on which you’re not competing with the whole world…

And each page of your Mini-site should be optimised for a different keyword. So your ‘Butterscotch Pony’ mini-site could have separate pages focussed on ‘Butterscotch Pony’, ‘Butterscotch Pony Saddles’, ‘Butterscotch Pony Gadgets’, ‘Butterscotch Pony Interactive’, etc. And you’d have one page of your ‘Toy Pony’ Hubsite focussed on the ‘Butterscotch Pony’.

Or your Mini-site might offer Flip video cameras, for example, and the individual pages might focus on ‘pink Flip cameras’, ‘silver Flip cameras’, etc. And your keywords would reflect the subject of the page. See for example www. flip-cameras .co.uk (Tip: check the keywords they’re using for each page by right-clicking on the page somewhere and selecting ‘View Page Source’). Your Hub site might offer hand-held video cameras, and the individual pages of the Hub site would include Flip and other cameras.

So I hope this helps with Niche ideas for your Hub and Mini-Sites!

Happy Niche-ing!
John Thornely
Internet Tycoons

Google has lots of excellent tools to help you research your niche – including Google Trends,  Google Reader – and now Google Blog Search.

And they’ve just added RSS and Atom feeds to the Blog Search, to make it evn easier for you to get fresh information from your Target Market.

Simply click on the links under “Subscribe” in the left-hand column of the Blog Search front page to subscribe to any topic or story in any feed reader, like Google Reader. Google also offer an iGoogle gadget that lets you embed the Blog Search front page right inside of your iGoogle page or any other page where iGoogle gadgets are accepted. You can browse topics and drill into stories from within the widget, and you can customize the gadget to choose which topics you want to follow.

And Google have added two new features to the Blog Search homepage to better help you discover what people are talking about right now on the web: Hot Queries and Latest Posts.

Hot Queries lists searches currently popular in Blog Search — it’s an easy way to quickly dive into the trending points of conversation on the web.

Latest Posts, on the other hand, shows new posts from popular blogs. While Hot Queries highlights what people are looking for, Latest Posts lets you find out about stories even before people start searching for them.

There’s a lot of great, fresh content being published in blogs every day.

So use these tools to help you research your markets and plumb new depths of your inch-wide, mile-deep niche!

Happy researching!
John

Ever spent a lot of money developing products and ideas that nobody wanted to buy? What a horrendous waste – there are so many ideas that people will spend money on!

With Google AdWords, you should never need to invest more than a few hundred dollars – or in the worst case a few thousand dollars – pursuing an idea that won’t work.

Let’s say you’ve got a product idea. The product itself costs $5,000 to develop, and you’re sure it’s a good idea because it solves a really thorny problem.

So here’s what to do: You write a report, ebook or white paper about how to solve that problem. You create an opt-in page where people can get your report in exchange for their contact information.

Then you ‘buy’ keywords, send people to that page and see how many people you can get to opt in. That’ll give you a gauge of interest.

If you absolutely cannot get anybody to opt-in to your report – or if you can’t find keywords that anyone is searching for – then that’s a good sign you should abandon the project before you throw any more money at it.

When people do opt in, you can send them an email (or even call them on the phone) and ask them what they’re really looking for. If your report is any good, they’ll be happy to talk to you, and you’ll get LOTS of input about the kinds of problems they’re trying to solve.

John Thornely
© John Thornely www.johnthornely.com 2008

To learn more about how YOU can
Profit From The Internet – Fast, visit
www.Internet-Tycoons.com

Selecting a hot niche is all about finding Customers.

I like the fishing simile. In order to be able to catch fish, you have to work out where the fish (customers) are biting, what bait they’re going for (your ‘offer’) and what tackle to use (your website, marketing methods, etc).

But it’s no good just going and sitting by any old pond and using the wrong bait and tackle… if there are no fish, or you’ve got the wrong equipment, you won’t even get a bite!

One way to make sure you’re fishing in the right place is to look at the water and see where the fish are. But that can be a bit hit-and miss if you’re not sure where to look.

Better to watch those who know – by finding out where the other fishermen (your competitors) are and see what they’re catching and what bait and tackle they’re using.

So, you need to search the market to find where there are lots of ‘fish’ and see where they’re biting.

And don’t try to ’fish’ in a market where there are no other ‘fishermen’ – there’s probably a good reason why, and you’ll need to know exactly what you’re doing if you are to succeed!

This all sounds ‘old hat’ stuff, but it’s amazing just how few people do it right! I find I have to keep reminding myself!

Hot Tip: If you want to short-cut your own learning curve and minimize your costs, watch to see who is successful and what ‘bait and tackle’ they’re using. Then copy them!

Hot Tip: And if you talk to real fishermen, they’ll always speak about how to catch fish by describing what the fish do – where they swim, what they like to eat, what tackle works, etc. So, if you’re going fishing, you need to understand the fish and think like they do!

John Thornely
© John Thornely www.johnthornely.com 2008

To learn more about how YOU can
Profit From The Internet – Fast, visit
www.Internet-Tycoons.com

Your Business

Which comes first… …the product? …the web site? …the customers? …the marketing?

Many people put the cart before the horse. They have a product they want to sell and they’re looking for people to buy it. But that’s all the wrong way round! And just how hard can that be?

Do you know how easy it is if you start with the people who want to buy something first…and then offer them a product they WANT?

A Hungry Market…

Pick a ‘hungry’ targeted niche market first. Then build a site…build traffic…and then you can either find a product they already want, sell advertising space or sell the leads on to others. All you have to do is target a niche market with a specific subject and a good number of customers.

Hot Tip: We often try to make things so complicated. The simple truth of how to make money on the web, in one short sentence:

“Build a Site That Gives People What They Want!”

Burn that into your mind. I like to remind myself of this every time I want to go dashing off down some ‘rabbit hole’, chasing something more exotic!

Keep It Simple – Keep It Focussed

And KEEP IT SIMPLE! Complicated won’t work for you in this business and can be very expensive!

And KEEP IT FOCUSSED! The tighter your niche, the easier it is to dominate it. Once you’re king or queen of your niche, you can expand.

But you can’t just put up a sales letter and expect to profit. You’ll need to:

1. Find a market. There are many ways to do this. But as a starter, look at your local magazine rack. No matter what your hobbies, passions or interests are, there are going to be others with similar interests – you’ll be amazed at the selection!

2. Find out what they want. You do this by asking them. Look at magazines, message boards or newsgroups which already cover your subject or similar subjects. Do a search for your subject on Google^TM, or Google Groups^TM at www.groups.google.com.

Go and read the articles and posts and ask what people want or what they think is lacking in your market online. Don’t be shy – people love to discuss things they want!

Or set up a free on-line survey questionnaire using any of the free online survey sites, such as http://freeonlinesurveys.com or www.surveymonkey.com.

3. Give it to them. Once you figure out what people want, give it to them. Design a site which is exactly what they are looking for. Send out press releases, mention it in the newsgroups, write articles, trade links with other sites, and start growing – none of this is difficult and we can show you how to do it all!

OK, so how do I find a Niche that’s not already overcrowded? Enter ‘Mindset Marketing’… and we’ll look at that in a future blog post.

Until then—happy researching!

John Thornely
© John Thornely www.johnthornely.com 2008

To learn more about how YOU can
Profit From The Internet – Fast, visit
www.Internet-Tycoons.com

How To Make YOUR Business Fly!

Everyone looking to start their own business should think carefully about why you’re starting up and where your focus will be to optimize the returns from your business!

It’s easy to get caught up in the ‘I’ll start a Web business and make a fortune’ enthusiasm, without really thinking about your longer-term strategy.

Once you have established that the business can be profitable, you need to learn the difference between working on your business and working in your business.

As Andy Gwynn, of Action Coach says…”Small business owners can spend 60 hours or more per week just trying to keep their business running. Most often, what we find is that they are working on the wrong aspects and end up spinning in a relentless circle until the business finally folds in on top of them.”

He suggests that, from the start, you should be thinking how to build a profitable business that will have real value in the marketplace — ie it should become an asset that you can sell on and make a fortune.

The same good business principles apply to any type of business — they may look a bit daunting when you see them in black and white, but start by keeping them simple and work up each level as you get there.

The six steps you need to take in building your business are:

1. Niche – You need to think carefully about your business niche, and your marketing and sales. Where and how will you sell your products and services? Who are your customers (at least the ones you want)? How do you reach them with a message that will get them to visit your business and buy?

2. Leverage – You can’t realistically do everything yourself — you’ll need to outsource some of your business. So you need to think how to put systems in the business so that the customer has the same positive experience and you, the owner, reduce the amount of time you spend in the actual business (ie working “on” your business instead of “in” it).

3. Team — If you need other people to support you, or you will be working with joint venture partners or outsourced resources, getting the right team revolves around not only getting the right people on the bus but making sure they are in the right roles where they, and the business, will be successful.

4. Mastery – This is all about understanding and controlling what is happening inside your business. At this level, you need to address processes/production, financials, marketing/ advertising and your team — and how you will manage each aspect.

5. Synergy — the collaboration of the previous four levels moves you to the stage of a commercial profitable enterprise that can operate without you. This is important. Now, as an owner, you have a business that can really deliver some value in the market place without taking your every waking hour — and is based on your exit strategy!

6. Entrepreneur — at this stage, you have built a successful business. The best part is that now that you know the sequence, you can do it again and again in any business you become involved with!

You need to stay focused on your goals, testing and measuring results, working through potential obstacles for growth, systems implementation, etc.

Stay focused on these 6 steps and you’ll have a profitable business!

John Thornely
© John Thornely www.johnthornely.com 2008

To learn more about how YOU can
Profit From The Internet – Fast, visit
www.Internet-Tycoons.com