Niche Markets are your Fortune

All the big interent marketers will tell you not to turn your hobby into your main website as this means you're far too focussed on the content rather than the money you can make from the website. To a great extent they are true: in that if you're writing aboout a hobby or interest of yours you will tend to get into the minutiae of what you're writing about and before you turn around you will have written a six-hundred page site and six months have somehow flown past.

That's definitely what happened to me. I was so focussed on adding good, useful, content to my website that I completely ignored the monetization aspects. I wasn't even concentrating on the SEO techniques that would actually drive traffic to my site. The truth is that I had a good site with solid content but everything else in the internet marketer's arsenal was missing. What I did next was undoubtedly arse-about-face but I slapped some quick AdSense banners up (pretty much randomly) then I began on the SEO. I learnt a lot about SEO from this and put those techniques into practice to drive-up my monthly visitors by more than seven-fold in three months (and the numbers are still increasing month-on-month).

Next I bagan playing with the placement of AdSense banners, which led to the writing of my internet advertising effectiveness page which gives you many tips and tricks on ad placement. The basic message is put a banner ad on your pages and add an ad on your right-hand sidebar. These are by far the most effective places for ads. If you have relatively long pages you can embed your third AdSense ad in the middle of the text (another effective strategy).

The other thing not to forget is to add AdSense ads on each and every page within your site. I forgot to do this and lost 40% of the possible clicks in my site. What I hadn't done so far was to add any affiliate marketing content. After all, much of the received wisdom about affiliate marketing is that you need a big but profitable niche to work in.

You need a niche because you need to dominate the area of Affiliate Marketing that you're working in. There's no point in making a 'me to' affiliate site as this is going to be dominated by the big players and you undoubtedly won't be able to compete with them. So you have to chose a niche but it needs to be a 'profitable niche'. But the question is, what's a profitable niche? My site was focussed on Celtic gods, Celtic texts and ancient cookery — could I do anything with those areas?

When I started doing my research it emerged that there were many Celtic-associated affiliate opportunities out there. These ranged from Amazon books (which is why I set up my Celtic Art Sourcebooks page all about sourcebooks and mothods for generating Celtic art) through Celtic clothing (hence my Celtic Sheepskin Company affiliate page) to jewellery and even gourmet meats.

Basically there was a huge range of affiliate products that I could use to monetize my site. What was better most of these fitted with the main content of my site. After all, if people were doing Celtic-assoicated searches on my website they'd be interested in Celtic-related products. And the point of the pages I was creating was to make real content that would be indexed by the search engines as well as ofering people opinions on the products. I was pre-selling here rather than selling. A good example is the Celtic rings page I'm working on now. This is based on the history and meanings of the Celtic designs and the rings are there to show good examples of what I'm talking about so people can buy them. The focus is on information and the products are only incidental. The same goes for my Amazon-assoicated Celtic Art Sourcebooks page. I'm telling people here the sourcebooks I use to create the artworks on my main Celtnet Celtic Information site and how I use them what I'm not doing is actively trying to sell the book.

It has to be said that for certain web pages I do go for the hard sell. An example is the AdWords Secrets page. Yet the focus of the page is how the product helped me and how it could have helped me even more had I bought it earlier.

The message of this posting is that you can make your niche profitable and your passion about your niche can be an advantage as long as you don't lose sight of your goals. Yes, you can monetize your hobby. But make sure that you keep your eye on the ball and write relevant content even when you're trying to sell something. If you have an information-based site use information to sell and promote the products by stealth. After all what you're trying to do is to get your visitor interested in the products. It's up to the site you're sending them to to do the actual selling. If they can't sell their own product then there's no point in having an affiliate partnership with them.