7 of the BIGGEST Advertising Mistakes...

You’re spending good money for advertising… but you’re not getting the results you want. Or worse, you’re not getting any results at all. And by results, I mean ‐‐‐ a bigger customer list, more sales, and more money in the bank. It happens to almost everyone spending money on advertising. Most of this is caused by 7 “Big Mistakes” that most people make when placing ads.

1. NOT Making an Offer    Smart advertising gets your target market to TAKE AN ACTION.
2. NOT Making a Compelling Offer
     Make a STRONG OFFER that will cattleprod your customers in the behind to jump up and take action
    NOW.
3. NOT Knowing Your Numbers 
    One of the quickest ways to eat through your advertising budget is to simply not know your numbers.
4. NOT Diversifying Your Advertising Efforts
    Test new advertising opportunities – and work on maximizing the marketing efforts.
5. NOT Making Your Advertising Look Editorial
     Most advertisers make their advertising look like – ADVERTISING.
     Advertising is usually the “annoying pest”, NOT the “welcome guest”.
6. NOT Negotiating for Better Advertising Rates
    This is a big mistake – but one of the easiest to solve.
    Getting a discount can be as simple as asking.
    If you can’t get a discount, ask for other “considerations”.
    But never, ever place an ad without at least asking for a discount – or for special consideration.
7. NOT Maximizing Your ‘Free Advertising’ Opportunities
    If you’re not getting LOTS of free advertising, you’re missing out on huge opportunities to build your 
    customer list… make many more sales… pocket bigger profits… and build up your image, brand, and
    name.

However, even when you do EVERYTHING right, free advertising can often outperform advertising that you’ve paid to place.
HERE’S HOW YOU CAN START GETTING FREE ADVERTISING TODAY

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How to Find and Master a Niche Market

Niche Marketing Can Be Your Ticket to Success

One common path to success for many small businesses is establishing themselves in a niche market. Because no matter how hard they try, no large retailer can be all things to all people, there are always going to be segments of the population whose needs for particular products and/or services are going unmet – leaving room for the small business to succeed by meeting those needs.
So how can your small business capitalize on these unmet needs and find and dominate your own niche market? Concentrate on these four basic concepts for niche marketing success:

1. A unique product or service.
For starters, if you’re going to master a niche market, you need to have a unique product or service. Ideally, you want to be the only one selling what you’re selling.
The trick to coming up with such a product or service is to “look on the fringes” for unmet needs. For example, one East Coast entrepreneur’s business consists of creating hand-made medieval outfits. Large retailers and even shops specializing in costumes don’t supply these types of garments.
Don’t forget that processes can be products as well. They’re ubiquitous now, but someone once looked at an inkjet printer cartridge and came up with the idea and the process for refilling them. Need help getting started with this sort of idea spotting? 7 Sources of Business Ideas will spark your thinking.

2. A marketable product or service.
You can create all kinds of wonderful and wonky products and/or services but if no one wants what you’ve produced, what’s the point? Maybe there’s no one selling fried insects from a vending cart on your street, but that doesn’t mean it’s a good idea. The niche market of people who enjoy eating fried insects in this country is so small they wouldn’t even fill a phone booth.
There has to be enough of a demand for your product or service for your business to make a profit. How do you find out? By trial and error or by conducting extensive market research.
I, of course, recommend the latter. If you want to know if there’s a market for dog coats, bamboo flooring or counseling for the Blackberry addicted, the best way to find out is to get out there and ask. Making or buying a lot of something and throwing up a Web site to see if there’s any interest in what you’re doing is for people who don’t want to make money.

3. Choose a niche market that’s available.
Remember, niche markets tend to be smaller so there’s only room for so many players. When it comes to niche marketing, if you try to jump on a bandwagon, you’re only going to fall off the back. For instance, I mentioned the niche market for gay marriages in Best Business Opportunities 2005.
Before you started such a business yourself, you would certainly need to carefully research the competition and the size of the market to see if a new business in this niche would be viable. It might well be better to find a different niche in the marriage or gay markets and make that niche your own.

4. Market, market, market.
Marketing is perhaps more important for niche market businesses than for any other kind, because the niche market business is by definition, unknown and succeeds or fails on making the connection with exactly the right kind of customer/client. If I open a Starbucks, for example, people know right away what that business is about and what kinds of products to expect. And because Starbuck’s market is “anybody who likes coffee”, they really don’t have to worry much about advertising at this point in the game.
But if I open a business providing naturopathic treatments for pets, selling tub/shower conversions for the elderly or providing virtual assistant services to professional speakers, to give just three examples, people won’t know what to expect or even that my niche business exists at all unless I make the effort to reach and educate them. So market, market, market – and once you have a customer or client, make contact on a regular basis.
A unique product or service that will fulfill the unmet needs of a specific group of people – that’s niche marketing in a nutshell. If you apply all of the four concepts above, your small business will enjoy the powerful competitive advantage that mastering a niche market provides.

Source: by Susan Ward, About.com Guide

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Start Your Online Business by Finding a Niche

Everywhere you go online, you hear the same thing - You must find a niche for your online business. If you are new to Internet Marketing, this is advice you will do well to pay heed to.

Every day thousands more people come online in search of wealth. Many jump right into the markets that are already completely saturated and then wonder why they are not making any money.

Given unlimited time, money and patience, they might succeed. For those that do not have unlimited supplies of these precious resources, aiming for a smaller niche market can be a much smarter way to start your online business.

So just what is a niche?

If you want the long answer, you can buy any one of the thousands of e-books being sold online about niche markets. You can go to a dictionary and see what definition of niche it gives. But the short answer is niche simply means distinct or individual.

Everyone and their mother wants to start a business focusing on Internet Marketing. This is how the big guns are making all their money, so it must be the way to go. That is the problem. The market is totally saturated with people who have years of experience in this area. A new person trying to compete in such a broad market does not have much chance of success.

On About.com, Susan Ward defines Internet Marketing as "the strategies that are used to market a product or service online, marketing strategies that include search engine optimization and search engine submission, copywriting that encourages site visitors to take action, web site design strategies, online promotions, reciprocal linking, and email marketing". A new person coming online to start a business has little chance of knowing enough about all the above areas to be able to compete in this market.

So how is a new person to have any chance at success?

Thing Smaller - Think Niche!

Just from the above definition you can come up with the following pieces or niches:

Marketing
Search Engine Optimization
Copywriting
Web Site Design
Promotion
Linking
Email Marketing

Even if you are lucky and are extremely experienced already in one of the above niches, you will still have a lot of competition in such broad niches. This may be what you decide to do in the end, but at least be willing to explore niches within the broader areas. You may find a niche you are much better suited to.

When it comes to finding a niche market, the best resource available online is Wordtracker. You can find pieces of this program on different sites and software programs but Wordtracker brings everything together in one place for those trying to find a good niche to go into.

Using Wordtracker is a breeze. If you want to break Internet Marketing down to many more niche markets, just type in Internet Marketing and look at all the ideas that pop up. Each of these can become keywords that you decide you want to focus your niche on. Or you can pop in those keywords and keep defining your niche.

Using Wordtracker, what you will end with is a list of niche keywords that you can focus your Internet business on. Having a smaller niche will give you a much better shot at being successful then trying to build a site around a broad topic like Internet Marketing.

Remember, success in any business always comes back to supplying a product that the public has a demand for and that the market has room for. Find the right niche and you are on the right path.

Source: Free Articles |Autor: TheBusinessPro

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Make Big Money With A Killer Product

Ultimate Income Booster is an one-in-one affiliate marketing application that WORKS. They have made it thinking on their own needs as affiliate marketers. It basically does ALL THE HARD WORKS that an affiliate marketer normally must do in order to make sales, for example: automatically researching for the hottest niches and keywords, creating unique contents from chosen keywords, generating traffic, building backlinks, dominating Google rankings and making affiliate sales.

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The 3 Keys to Successful Traffic Buying

It’s an undeniable fact that buying your traffic is one of the fastest ways to get traffic to your offers. Whether it’s through pay per click, cost per view, banner buys, or social media, putting money down and buying your traffic can bring you results faster than just about any method out there.

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