Just in case you are still struggling with finding a good niche to begin your internet marketing journey, I thought I’d give you a couple more places to look for ideas for niches.

Magazines

Look at the magazine covers. Magazines have a huge research budget so any story that has made it onto the fron cover of a magazine has a large potential audience. You can check out what’s hot by heading down to your local newstand or check out www.magazines.com. This website has magazines under any category you can imagine. Just browse through and look at all of the front covers.See which topics are popular and what they are publishing articles about. If a magazine has devoted several pages to an article on a particular topic then you know there are people out there who are interested in that topic.

Dummies books

If someone has taken the time to write a Dummies book about a topic then you can be sure there is a hungry market out there. Either the bookshop or Amazon.com is the place to look for Dummies books.

While you are at Amazon.com you might also want to check out the best-seller lists. The top 10 best-sellers might give you an idea of a profitable niche.

And always remember you can never be too rich, too thin or too beautiful!

Still stuck? – Ask yourself the right questions

What products do I use everyday?

What videos are popular right now?
You can check out the top 10 videos on YouTube.

What are my friends and family talking about?

What are the issues being discussed on current affair shows and morning TV? Read more »

This is the most important thing you will ever read about affiliate marketing –

Before you choose the product that you want to sell make sure that there are people out there who want to buy it.

There is no point in spending time and money trying to sell something that seems like a good idea to you but that no-one else can see the need for. This seems extremely obvious but many internet marketing newbies and even those that are moderately successful will tell you at one time or another that they too have fallen into the trap of trying to sell or promote something that nobody wants. It’s even worse when you spend a lot of time creating and developing a product without first checking that there is a market out there.

Niche Marketing

The next thing that you want to consider when choosing the product that you want to promote is how much competition there is. Some of the most profitable markets on the internet are related to health, wealth and happiness but these are the most competitive as well. If you choose a market with a large amount of competition it will take much longer for you to get a result. Whilst you are learning I suggest that you pick a less competitive market so that you have small successes before you get discouraged. The major reason that people don’t succeed in internet marketing is that they give up way too early.If you pick a smaller goal to begin with you will have small successes and this will encourage you to keep going. If your target is too large to begin with then you may not have enough determination and persistence to keep going. Set yourself up for success rather than failure by using effective strategies. Read more »

What is Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate marketing is when you drive traffic to someone else’s website and help them sell their product.Affiliate programs work in different ways. Some will pay you commission on the sales that you are directly responsible for. So if you send a prospective customer to the merchant’s website and the prospect makes a purchase (becoming a customer) you are paid a commission on the product sale.

Commissions are usually a certain percentage of the purchase price. The percentage is extremely variable and depends on the product and the merchant and probably the profit margin. I have noticed that the percentage commissions are usually more generous with digital products than with physical products and that is probably because once a digital product is created there are no further costs involved. Whether you sell 20 copies of a digital product or 20,000 the cost involved in producing the product is only the initial creation and time costs of the product owner. Digital download can be completely automated and doesn’t incur any extra costs. Physical products, however always have a cost per unit. Merchants can get discounts for purchasing from wholesalers in bulk but in general there is a fixed cost per unit and therefore a fixed profit margin.

Lead Generation

Another type of affiliate program is essentially a lead generation or lead capture business model. In some industries or niches where the product or service is expensive even a prospective customer is valuable. Rather than paying you, as the affiliate marketer, a commission on any product that is sold to that prospect, the merchant can set up their affiliate program so that they pay you a smaller sum of money just for the lead. I think that this is definitely a win-win situation. You, as the affiliate, win because the prospect just has to be interested in the product or service and you get paid. In this situation the affiliate gets paid whether or not a product sale occurs. Read more »

In the last few posts I have discussed he first couple of things that you need for your website. You need a domain name and you need a server(hosting)  to store the files that you need for your website. The next thing you need to know how to do is …

FTP.

What is FTP?

FTP stands for file transfer protocol.

This is the way that you transfer the files that you need for your website from your computer to your server so that your website can be displayed when someone types your URL into their internet browser program (eg Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Safari).

The process of FTP is done using a special software program. These programs are called FTP programs or FTP software. If you type “FTP program” into the Google search box you will find over 9 million results so let me help you narrow it down a little. An FTP program must be easy to set up and easy to use. If it is inexpensive or free then that is an added bonus!

The program that I have found which is the best free FTP sofware is called Filezilla. When you go to Filezilla you will see a couple of options:

Read more »

If you need a little review then here is the post on how to register a domain name. Once you have a domain name you need hosting and you can get hosting here . If you need to watch a video about web hosting then here it is.

Ok now you are up to speed, I’m going talk about what to  do next so that your domain name is setup on your server. This is a little bit different depending on the level of hosting that you have.

Basic Hosting Package

If you bought a basic package,you are allowed to have as many domain names as you want under the one main domain name. This is a subdomain arrangement. If you purchased hostgator hosting it would be either a baby or a business account. Just login to your c-panel (the details will be in your welcome letter ) and navigate to the add-on domain area. Simply fill in the required fields and you have now connected your domain name to your hosting. Read more »