Cheap Professional Web Sites

Finding Your Market

Decide on your area of expertise or “niche”. What product(s) do you plan on selling, and is there a market for those products? What is the competition in that market like? Are there a lot of other well constructed and optimized sites that carry similar products? Examine the top 10 listings for your major products in Google, Yahoo! and MSN searches to find out what they’re doing, and decide if you think you can compete with them. If you already know your market, try to find areas that aren’t being served by other merchants.

This can be a lot of work, but there are specialized tools and software to make it easier. Some of these, like the Google keyword tool and the Wordtracker trial, are free. Other, better tools may cost you a few dollars, but save you days of time and work, and will also give you values for the effectiveness of your keywords (KEI). KEI is just a numerical comparison of how large your market is, versus how much competition there is in that market. There are a few tools like this out there, including the paid version of Wordtracker, but I use the full version of WebCEO. You can get a free trial version by going to WebCEO. You can use the trial version to research some of the other sites out there, and then move up to the paid version to do your deeper keyword research in the next step.

Really brainstorm at this point. If your trying to find a niche to get into, and your first idea doesn’t have a lot of searches on Google, YaHoo! or MSN, or if the competition is too tough, think of another idea. You want to be in a field you can succeed in. The one exception to this is if your website is an extension of your brick and mortar business. In that case, spend more time checking to find products that are not being supplied to your base market by other merchants, and searching for keywords that your competition may have missed, but that get a fair amount of daily searches. For example, one online store that sells supplies for horse owners made a huge profit selling an informational guide on dressage (an Olympic event featuring “dancing” horses), in the six months leading up to the olympics. The market for products related to dressage is relatively small, but the prices and profit margins are high, and this market was not being well served by the existing online merchants.

Informational products, especially those that can be delivered digitally via downloads, can be very profitable. After the initial cost for software to securely deliver them, they can pay anywhere from 50-100% profit, depending on whether you own the product or you’re reselling it for the author. This can also include audio books and videos, and many of these types of products are only available online. If you can write a short guide or report that would be helpful to your prospective customers (or obtain the rights to give away one that is already written), you can ask for an email address from visitors to your site, and set up a page that will allow them to receive a free download of the report, in exchange for receiving an occasional newsletter or sales flyer from you. There are several services that allow you to set all of this up automatically, and a search for “autoresponders” will give you plenty of options to choose from.

Whether you’re looking for a new market to get into, or you’re looking to expand your business online, this step allows you to define or re-define the scope of your business, and the customers that you’re going to be trying to attact. Here are a few tips to make sure you complete this step effectively. Use some of the free tools available to make this step easier.

• Try to both broaden and then narrow your focus
• Small, under served niches are usually easier to compete in, and more profitable
• Even large, well served markets can be profitable, if your product is unique and people are looking for it
• Explore good quality informational products, especially free ones you can use to build a mailing list

Now that you have a more focused idea of what your market is, you need to have a very broad idea of how thay will be searching for what you have to offer. This leads to the next step, which is finding which keywords they will be using to find your website.  Continue to Step 2…