October 16, 2012
by Shane Jones
How Marketers Should Inspire Action…
My opinions to come shortly. Just want to share this for now.
October 4, 2012
by Shane Jones
Beginners and veterans in Internet marketing make niche research much harder than necessary. It doesn’t have to be difficult at all. Many marketers are stuck looking at numbers, trying to evaluate different keyword phrases and looking for that magic product or niche. This won’t help you, and there is a better way to create power generation when it comes to your niche research.
How to Find the Right Niche for your Needs
Your first step is to find a challenge that a group of people have. Your second step is to provide them with a solution to that challenge. This may seem difficult, but it doesn’t need to be. If you spend time in forums, on message boards, reading questions and looking at the answers to those questions, you will find a niche you can use to make money.
For example, if you are a member of an Internet marketing forum, and you keep seeing members asking about how they can use Facebook to make money, this could be your niche. For instance, you could create a downloadable guide that you can promote to this market. If a few people are asking the same question, chances are many people are asking it too.
The most time-consuming part of the process is identifying your audience and their need. Doing it, however, is better than not doing your homework at all. It’s much better than trying to guess and ultimately failing. Many niches may surprise you and can be very obscure or seem odd. You wouldn’t think someone could make a large income in a targeted niche, such as Caterpillar heavy equipment, but it’s possible.
What to do Once you Find a Need
Once you figure out what a group of people need, just match your solution to them. The best examples of this are found in the health niche. If you struggle with your energy level, want to lose weight, hear ringing in your ears or have another health issues, there’s probably a guide that will introduce you to natural remedies for your issue.
This works in any niche no matter how broad or targeted. Of course, the more targeted your niche is, the less competition you will usually encounter. This doesn’t mean you cannot enter into a larger niche and make money, as well. Sometimes you can enter a larger niche and target a small group within that niche.
Another way to make money within a larger niche is to find a new way to approach it. We see this in the weight loss niche all the time with the many fad diets. Some of the programs actually stick and they last much longer, but others will have a lifespan that’s much shorter. The key is to deliver a quality solution to a problem or challenge a group of people face. If you do this, you can easily make money from any niche.
October 4, 2012
by Shane Jones
What if you created a site all about farm equipment, something happened and Google penalized it? Or maybe you just decided you wanted to move it to another domain? Is this safe? What will happen to any existing ranking? Will Google penalize you for moving the content? With all the Google updates, many webmasters are facing this decision because of bad linking strategies, DMCA penalties and other issues.
If you are facing issues that have caused your website to drop in rankings, and you know it’s not a content issue, moving your content might help. This could give you a fresh start without wasting the content you already have on the site.
Before you move your content from one site to another, you need to understand what to expect.
How Each Situation Will Differ
1. Bad Linking
If you were penalized by Google because of bad links —links that used to work for ranking before the update — and you cannot get them all removed, moving your content to a new domain name might help.
You can buy an aged domain or register a new domain to get a completely new start. You’ll eliminate the bad links because the new domain name won’t have any backlinks built.
You can expect this type of strategy to work well, but it will take a little time for Google to de-index the content from the original site and recognize it on the new site. Make sure you download all of the content and save it, delete if from the original site, and then schedule it all to go live on your new site over time.
2. DMCA Issues
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act protects website content from being stolen and used without authorization. If your site was penalized due to a DMCA issue, you may need to consider fixing your content before you move it. It may not be necessary to move the content if you can figure out which part is causing the penalty.
Find the original filer of the notice and see if you can get a copy of the complaint. This will lead you to the actual content that has been used from their site on yours and you can fix the issue. If the issues cannot be fixed, but you know it’s only a few pages or posts, you can move the rest of the content to a new site and gain ranking once again.
3. Changing Domain Name
Another common reason to move all the content from one site to another is if you decide to move from an “exact match domain” to a domain that can be branded. For example, if you have a site about heavy equipment called bestheavyequipment.com and you want to move all the content to a site that uses the domain name yourcompanyname.com, you can do so.
This isn’t a big deal and can be done quite easily. You will need to make sure you delete the content from your original site and you don’t just move it all at once. Schedule it over time to go live, so that it doesn’t look unnatural.