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How to Define Your Target Market

How to Define Your Target Market

Defining your target marketing is one of the most important things you’ll ever do in your internet business. This one decision may very well determine whether or not you’ll have a profitable business a few weeks or months from now.
How do you find your target market? Where do you look for ideas? Once you have a target market in mind, how do you research it? Here’s how.
What to Look For in a Market
There are several factors that make for a good target market.
The first factor is that the market is small enough that you can be a major player, but not so small that you can’t make good money. For example, you wouldn’t want to start a new online dating site because Match.com and eHarmony clearly have the market in a stronghold.
However, you probably don’t want to start a site on underwater basket weaving, as it’s too small to make any money.
The second factor is that there is money being spent. Sure, “dog pictures” may not have a major player – But chances are, there’s no money being made!
The best markets are markets that have a problem that needs to be solved. People who have problems are more willing to spend money.
Where to Look for Ideas
There are several great places to look for target market ideas.
The first is Google Trends. Google Trends will give you a good idea of what things are hot right now. This can often help you identify new target markets and become a major player before others hop on the bandwagon.
Another great place to look is Amazon Magazines. If there’s enough of a market for a magazine, chances are there’s enough of a market for you to make money online.
eBay Pulse is another great place to look. Again, you’re looking for potential markets where you can become a major player.
How to Research a Target Market
Once you have an idea, then what? How do you do your research to see if it’s viable?
The first step is to check the volume to make sure there’s enough traffic for you to make a living. You can do this through checking the Google Keyword Tool.
Once you’ve made sure you can actually make enough money for it to be worth your while, the next step is to get to know the market and the market’s spending habits.
There are two main places you should look: Your competitors and the niche forums.  How are your competitors doing? Are they selling high ticket items, or are they scraping by with advertising? Are AdWords bids high or low? These factors will help you determine how much money is being spent.
Take a look at the niche forums to find out what are typical problems people have in this market. If someone asks a question and others say “I have that same issue!” then you should definitely take note.
Once you’ve brainstormed a few niche markets, identified the ones with promise and then narrowed them down to the winners through a good research process, then the next step is to take action and make it happen.
Julianne Alvarez-Wish is a military wife, mother, business owner, professional writer, blogger and legislative advocate. She is the Director of Communications for Our Milk Money, the Colorado State Leader for the National Association for Moms in Business and the owner of Buy By Mom and Buy By Mom Blog. She is the Colorado Springs Stay-at-Home Mom Examiner for Examiner.com. She also blogs at A Wishful Thought. Her passion, purpose and goal is to help parents work from home so they can be home with their children.

How to Build a Website – The Right Way

How to Build a Website – The Right Way

Building a website the right way will ensure you get plenty of traffic – Not just today, but repeatedly over time. Most people who get started in web marketing try to cut corners and end up getting nowhere. The reality is, if you build your website the right way from the start, you’ll be able to create a very nice steam of traffic and income for months and years to come.
What Makes a Successful Website?
A successful website is based on giving real value to your visitors. In other words, it’s not based on trying to game the system, not based on trying to earn a quick AdSense check, not based on any black hat or spammy techniques.
These are websites that people will actually pass on to their friends, because the content is so useful. If you create a genuine online asset, that’s when the payoff really comes.
Why Great Content Matters
There’s a saying in the world of journalism: “Content is King.”
It doesn’t matter how pretty your site is or how good you are at writing copy. If the actual content, the real meat of your website isn’t good, then you’re not going to succeed.
Having great content will mean having your content passed around, getting links and getting ranked. Make sure your content is truly first class.
Work With, Not Against, Google
It’s true that you can game Google for a short period of time. However, eventually Google will update their algorithm and put these kinds of sites out of business.
It really doesn’t make any sense to try and game your way around Google when you can actually give Google what it wants instead.
What does Google want? Good, high quality, relevant content for its searchers. If you give Google’s users that, then every time Google updates it’s algorithm you’ll win instead of lose.
Connect With Your Visitors
Connecting with your visitors is key. If you can build a real relationship with the people you’re serving, you’ll get both links and traffic.
You’ll also start to become better and better known in your market. If you treat your market as just a “target market” to market to, you will get some traffic and sales. However, if you treat your market like you’re talking to real people, then you’ll actually start to build trust and a reputation in your industry.
That’s when your site will start moving away from small-time internet website to a real business.
It Doesn’t Pay to Cut Corners
There are many, many marketers who’ve been trying to cut corners for years. They’ve started website after website trying the latest blackhat techniques to no avail.
Sure, you may make a few bucks here and there by cutting corners. But in the long run, you will spend far more effort cutting corners than if you just built an asset with real value right from the beginning.
Julianne Alvarez-Wish is a military wife, mother, business owner, professional writer, blogger and legislative advocate. She is the Director of Communications for Our Milk Money, the Colorado State Leader for the National Association for Moms in Business and the owner of Buy By Mom and Buy By Mom Blog. She is the Colorado Springs Stay-at-Home Mom Examiner for Examiner.com. She also blogs at A Wishful Thought. Her passion, purpose and goal is to help parents work from home so they can be home with their children.

Different Types of Online Business Models

Different Types of Online Business Models

There are many different ways to make money on the internet. Instead of trying to reinvent the wheel, the fastest and easiest way to ensure your success is to replicate a model that’s already proven to make money. Here are five such models.
The Informational Website
The informational website is based on giving away free information. It’s primary source of income is AdSense, advertising and affiliate product sales.
For example, if you were to start a small website on fishing, put up 50 articles about various fishing tips and techniques and populated it with AdSense ads, you’d very likely get decent traffic as well as make a decent amount of money.
Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is when you’re making money by selling other people’s products. Instead of having to create a product, a detailed website, setup billing and handle customer service, all you need to do is bring in traffic.
Once you get the traffic to their website, their job is to make the sale. Once the sale is made, you get a percentage of the sale price. For physical products, the commission is usually between 5% and 20%. For digital products, the commission is usually between 50% and 75%.
eCommerce Stores
Another way to make money online is to actually sell products from an eCommerce store. Here, you would actually own a web store where customers would place orders and then ship them a physical product.
At first you might start out by having a dropshipping relationship with manufacturers so you don’t have to warehouse your own products. Then, as you become more successful you’ll want to start housing some of your own products to reduce your per item costs.
Infoproduct Marketing
Infoproduct marketing is when you’re selling products that teach people how to do things. These products can be anything from “How to Get a Girlfriend” to “How to Get a Babysitting Job” to “How to Increase Your Miles Per Gallon.”
The possibilities are endless. You need three primary skills to succeed in information marketing:
1) The ability to bring traffic to your website.
2) The ability to create good content in a specific area.
3) The ability to convince people online that your infoproduct is a good investment that will help them solve their problem.
Once you have these three skills, you’ll be able to produce many profitable infoproduct websites.
The Made for Acquisition Model
If you’re looking to build something larger than a website that’s making a few thousand dollars a month, then you’re looking at building a real company that’s meant for acquisitions or IPOs.
These are companies like LinkExchange (acquired for $250 million,) Facebook (valued at over a billion.)
The trick to building such a company is to find a market need to serve and to serve that need. In the process, you’ll generally have to learn how to raise capital from Venture Capitalists and angel investors.
Before trying to build such a business, it’s usually a good idea to build at least a couple smaller successful online bsuiensses using the models above.
There you have it – Five different online business models with a proven history of success. Just pick the one that sound smost actionable to you now and get started today!
Julianne Alvarez-Wish is a military wife, mother, business owner, professional writer, blogger and legislative advocate. She is the Director of Communications for Our Milk Money, the Colorado State Leader for the National Association for Moms in Business and the owner of Buy By Mom and Buy By Mom Blog. She is the Colorado Springs Stay-at-Home Mom Examiner for Examiner.com. She also blogs at A Wishful Thought. Her passion, purpose and goal is to help parents work from home so they can be home with their children.

How to Build a Website – The Right Way

Social Networking Crash Course

Social networking can seem a little daunting if you’ve never dipped your toes in. There are so many different sites – What is each one about? Which ones should you sign up for? How do you use them? In this crash course, you’ll learn enough about each social network to get you started.
Facebook
Facebook is the largest social networking website in the United States and Europe. Its main features are that you can add your friends and stay in touch, as well as see a constant news stream about what’s going on with the people around you.
In many places in the world, “Facebook me” is a common phrase. Being on Facebook will allow you to stay in touch with people you may otherwise slip out of contact with.
Twitter
Twitter specializes in fast, sound-bite sized 140 character messages called “tweets.” These can be anything from quick life updates to business tips.  Twitter utilizes a “following” system, where you can “follow” other people to see their tweets and others can “follow” you to see yours.
Blogging
Blogging allows just about anyone to publish a website quickly and easily. Through blogging, people who wouldn’t otherwise start a website can quickly become ranked in the search engines and publish their ideas to a lot of people.  A blog is short for “Web Log,” a sort of online journal. Blogs tend to be updated more often than other websites.
LinkedIn
LinkedIn is like Facebook for professionals. You can upload your resume, work history, references, and testimonials as well as have professional relationships online.
In many industries, especially tech related industries, your LinkedIn profile can be as important if not more important than your physical resume.
Digg & Reddit
Digg and Reddit are voting based news sites. Other users submit articles which are then voted on by the users. When you browse the front page, you’re presented with the highest rated articles.  That means that your news is chosen by democracy and end users rather than by magazine editors.
StumbleUpon
StumbleUpon is a unique social networking site that helps you randomly find websites that you might enjoy. It does it through a combination of the interests you provide as well as your previous habits.  Here’s how it works: First, you install a browser toolbar. When you want to “StumbleUpon” a new site, just click the Stumble button and you’ll be taken to a random website that the system thinks you’ll like.
Meetup.com
Meetup is another popular social networking website. With Meetup, however, most of the interaction happens in person rather than online.  Meetup helps create physical meetings where people get together around various topics, from philosophy to dating to hiking.
Taking Your First Steps in Social Networking
As you can tell, there are all kinds of different social networking sites out there. The best way to learn is to just pick one or two and get started. It’s a lot easier to learn than it looks!
Julianne Alvarez-Wish is a military wife, mother, business owner, professional writer, blogger and legislative advocate. She is the Director of Communications for Our Milk Money, the Colorado State Leader for the National Association for Moms in Business and the owner of Buy By Mom and Buy By Mom Blog. She is the Colorado Springs Stay-at-Home Mom Examiner for Examiner.com. She also blogs at A Wishful Thought. Her passion, purpose and goal is to help parents work from home so they can be home with their children.

Local SEO

Local SEO

Ranking for area specific terms can be a big boost to your business. Many people don’t think local SEO makes a big difference, but this isn’t the case.
The good thing about it is that it’s usually quicker to rank for local terms. This is because you have so little competition. While there might be tons of sites going for the keyword “weight loss,” there are significantly less going for the term “Orlando weight loss.”
So how do you get ranked for local terms? Here are four tips to make it happen:
#1) Use the keyword in your title and content
This is the most important factor in getting ranked. You should put the keyword at the beginning of your title, as well as in the content a few times. This lets Google know what the page is about. Therefore, it will make it more likely you will get ranked.
#2) Use anchor text to your advantage
When you do get links to your site, make sure the anchor text (the actual link text) includes your main keyword phrase. Google looks closely at the anchor text to let them know what the site being linked to is about.
So if you have one hundred links pointing to your site, and seventy of them say “Houston condos”, they will be able to surmise what your page is about.
However, you don’t want to have every single link to say the same thing. Google likes natural link building. So if 100% of the links say “Houston condos, they will view this as unnatural, and this may affect you in a negative way.
#3) Get links from quality sites
Every link is not created equal. Google puts more weight on the links from quality sites a lot more.  Therefore, be sure to target legitimate sites for your link building efforts.
#4) Geo-tags
This is not a new strategy, and it’s been around for a long time. However, many internet marketers aren’t familiar with it.
Basically, geo-tagging is where you put metadata in your HTML code. This lets the search engine spiders know where your site is located. You can do the same for pictures you put on your site. This will help you rank for localized searches.
The metadata includes your latitude and longitude coordinates, and sometimes other variables like altitude. If somebody is doing a search with geotagging enabled, your site might show up.
While geo-tagging does work, you can definitely rank without doing it. However, there’s no reason not to use it, as it definitely couldn’t hurt.
The bottom line is, getting ranked for local SEO terms is a great way to get more business. Implement these four tips and you should see results from your SEO efforts shortly.
Julianne Alvarez-Wish is a military wife, mother, business owner, professional writer, blogger and legislative advocate. She is the Director of Communications for Our Milk Money, the Colorado State Leader for the National Association for Moms in Business and the owner of Buy By Mom and Buy By Mom Blog. She is the Colorado Springs Stay-at-Home Mom Examiner for Examiner.com. She also blogs at A Wishful Thought. Her passion, purpose and goal is to help parents work from home so they can be home with their children.