There are so many ways to be successful on your niche online. In this article, I will share to you the process that I have found to be the most reliable and sustainable ways to be successful in your online business. This is not the way to get rich quick or earn money at the first second you come online but I will teach you how to truly and slowly build up your business and make it continue for a long time. Here are 4 steps to be dominant on your forte.
- Choose Your Niche
- Build Your Platform
- Grow Your Audience
- Refer Products
Step 1- Choose Your Niche
This step is the most critical part. You must do a lot of research and spend much time to undergo this step. In choosing your niche you have to be very specific and make sure you are interested about it. You should think about your field of interest that you truly love and want to be the motif of your business. You may consider your choices from your hobbies and passion, trends, problems that you want to solve such as obesity, depression and others. Whatever you pick you must stick with it. You will need to consistently create content and be involved in the niche and the community. You cannot be passive; rather, you must be interactive with other people in the niche. You must think about this like your long term business, you’re going to invest time and potential money. So you must think about something that will keep your interest, which keeps you wanting to work on.
Do people spend money in it? The answer is usually yes, especially on advertisements. You will also consider if there are products to promote because you can probably earn there too. It could be info-products like books or physical-products like utensils, tools or any other products that you want to promote related to your desired niche.
In choosing your niche you have to be very specific, don’t think broad topics because you might have a lot of competitors and it will be very hard for you to rank higher on search engines. You will have to narrow down your niche so you can be dominant on your niche against others. For instance, if you are interested in the “Health and Fitness” category it is very broad, there are still a lot of sub categories under the health and fitness so might consider choosing “Dieting” but it is still a broad topic. You can choose a narrower topic like “Weight Loss for Busy Moms”. You also have to be specific on your niche market so you can be leading on your niche. Choosing your niche is the most important thing you will consider before starting your own business online.
Step 2- Build Your Platform
After identifying your niche we will go to the next step which is building your platform. What is a platform? Platform is a “home base” for establishing your authority and audience. It is basically a site, a channel where you can start sharing your thoughts and ideas interact with people and have people come to listen to you and see what you have to say. You need to have your own platform so that you have the control of your brand. There are different kinds of platforms that you could build. You can use wordpress to create your own blog or you can create a facebook fan page, or even create a youtube channel and a lot other platform options. It’s a great way to build your audience.
Before creating your platform you also need to think and create your “branding” or a name of your business. Next is you need to get a domain and hosting. It probably cost only more or less $12 a year but it’s absolutely worth it. It makes you so much more trustworthy and more people will listen to you and take you more seriously if you have your own domain. You can choose your branding as your domain name or you can make it personal like using your name as your domain name or you may also use a descriptive domain name to get some SEO benefit. After getting your domain and hosting, the next thing to do is to create your blog. I recommend you to use wordpress as your platform because it is easier to manage and it has a lot of professional themes that will fit to your desired niche like woo themes, elegant themes, studio press, theme forest and a lot more others. Finally, you should build a mailing list from the start. It will help you to reach out your subscribers by sending them your news, products that you want to promote and updates regularly through your email. Email works better than hoping that people will see your particular blog post or posting on facebook and twitter where it can get lost in the stream anytime. Some of the mailing list providers are Aweber, GetReponse, iContact and a lot more.
Step 3- Grow Your Audience
Growing your audience is the most exciting part because this is where you can see the progress of your online business. The first step in growing your audience is to do a lot of research just like choosing your niche. You need to understand who will be your audience. Who is your ideal reader? What do they like, care about, fear, desire? What products, brands and personas do they love and hate? What lingo or terminologies do they use, because it will give you idea what keywords to use. You should use their language so you could connect with them. Great content is a great foundation of building your platform and growing your audience. In creating a content it needs to be honest, valuable (don’t waste your reader’s time) and make it short as possible and concise. Above all make it results oriented so your readers will come back and tell others about you.
Moreover, you also need to create your own logo for your business because it will help them recognize you from others. You should also add images on your posts and have a branded social media pages. To look professional you must also have a real email address. Instead of using yourname@gmail(dot)com you may use yourname@yourdomain(dot)com so people will trust you.
Putting up a good content and connect with people will really help in building and growing your audience. Link building and using other SEO strategies are also the best way to gain audience. You need to get active on your social networking sites and interact with your audience to connect with them. Link out other valuable resources and sites, your audience will surely appreciate it if you will share to them some valuable and useful resources for more info and to support your content. Don’t forget to stay contact on your mailing list. Be consistent on your niche to get better results rather than changing your niche again and again which will confuse your audience.
Step 4- Refer Products
When you have grown your audience and make them trust you, you can now promote some products but you must only promote products that you believe in. You can promote the products through your platform by creating a banner ads, promotion to your list and social media, reviews, bonuses, recommended page and in-content referrals. This is where you start gaining money from the products that you promote. As what I have mentioned above products may either be a physical product or an info-product. When you try to recommend or promote products you must be honest and fair. You need to tell your audience all the advantages and disadvantages of your recommended products so they will really trust and rely on you. Recommend only products that are related to your niche.
Above all when you are promoting a product, always bear in mind that this is not just about promoting the products. It’s about how you do in building a platform and growing your audience. Always remember to respect your audience. Think of them as actual people with actual needs, goals, fears and desires. Make sure that in everything you do and in the content that you’re creating, in the way that you are talking to them, in the products that you promote to them really respects them because that’s what makes them trust you and buying when you promote things.
So, that’s it! I hope you learn something from this article.