Bill Hicks

Duration : 0:2:42

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Technorati Tags: advertising, Bill, Comedy, Hicks, Marketing

Niche marketing is a term that gets kicked around a lot. And in most cases it’s a term that is used incorrectly.

It’s worth pointing out that niche marketing applies not only to the world of online information marketing and/or Affiliate marketing. Businesses of every model from inventors & product developers to food service companies and fashion magazines are all very aware of the need to niche their marketing efforts.

Regardless of what business you are in, the core idea behind the term niche marketing remains the same. A niche is a tightly focused group of customers who are interested in highly specific products and services.

This marketing philosophy is all about finding these tight groups of prospects, identifying exactly what they want, and then selling it to them.

This is, of course, a simplified explanation. But it captures the fundamentals nicely and if you understand the above statement you are well ahead of most of your competition.

The majority of people who have or want to launch an online business have no real idea what a niche market is. It’s common for people to talk about very broad topics such as dog grooming, health & fitness, automobiles, and so forth when the topic of finding a niche comes up.

In other words people tend to think the term niche refers to a broad market category. This is incorrect.

Dog grooming is an ENORMOUS market. If you were to decide right here on the spot to start a venture based on the idea of selling dog grooming information online you would probably be crushed by the massive competition, unless of course you are an expert with several existing contacts in this field.

On the other hand, if you know quite a bit about applying a special type of nail polish to toy poodle breeds, you might have a valid niche market idea on your hands. Can you see the point I’m making?

True niche marketing is about finding very specific consumer needs and catering to those needs. The more specific the need for a product or service, the tighter the niche is said to be. And note the key words “consumer needs”.

The successful niche marketer wastes no time on guesswork. In fact he or she will not even consider selling a product or service until it’s clear there is a real demand for it.

The first step in any venture is to find out what people really want. Once you have proof that people are willing and able to buy a particular product, you make arrangements to become a provider of this product.

In today’s highly competitive online marketplace niche marketing is without a doubt the best practice for start-ups. At the very least you should understand the basics before spending your time and money on a new venture.

Most new entrepreneurs go about the entire process backwards: They find or develop what they believe to be a “hot” product, and then begin looking for people to sell this product to.

This results in frustration and failure nearly every time. So don’t go against the true grain here; do your homework in the beginning and improve your chances of massive success by huge margins.

Timothy Aaron Whiston
http://www.articlesbase.com/internet-articles/niche-marketing-tips-what-is-niche-marketing-657765.html

Final version now available!
http://youtube.com/watch?v=NLlGopyXT_g
http://mediatedcultures.net

Web 2.0 in just under 5 minutes.

This is the 2nd draft, and I plan on doing one more final draft. Please leave comments on what could be changed or improved, or what needs to be excluded or included. Subscribe if you want to be notified when the revision is released.

UPDATE: I just added this video to Mojiti where you can actually write your comments into the video itself. It is an exciting experiment in “Video 2.0″. Go check it out at http://mojiti.com/kan/2024/3313 and add your voice!

Transcripts are now available as well:
http://mediatedcultures.net/ksudigg/?p=78

A couple of people have noted that the statement, “XML was created to do just that” (separate form from content) is misleading because CSS enables the same effect with HTML. I tried to integrate CSS into the video, but it ruined the flow. Perhaps in the next draft.

My statement on XML is based on the following from xml.com: “In order to appreciate XML, it is important to understand why it was created. XML was created so that richly structured documents could be used over the web. The only viable alternatives, HTML and SGML, are not practical for this purpose. HTML, as we’ve already discussed, comes bound with a set of semantics and does not provide arbitrary structure.”

Thank you all for the comments. With your help the next draft will be cleaned up and hopefully free of factual errors.

A higher quality version is available for download here: http://www.mediafire.com/?6duzg3zioyd Please note that this is the second draft and the final version will not be available until late February after I review all comments and revise the video. Please return for a new download link at that time.

The song is “There’s Nothing Impossible” by Deus, available for free at http://www.jamendo.com/en/album/103/
Deus offers music under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 license, yet one more example of the interlinking of people sharing and collaborating this video is attempting to illustrate.

CC: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/

Michael Wesch
Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology
Kansas State University

Duration : 0:4:31

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Technorati Tags: anthropology, digital, ethnography, hypermedia, ksudigg, web2.0

Content is one of the hottest commodities on the net, but it can be expensive to find. Pay a writer yourself and you’re

going to have to find someone that’s no only talented, but that also works for a price you can afford. Alternatively,

Private Label Rights Content allows you to find the material you need to drive sales and traffic to your websites for very

little cost. What’s more, with the PLR rights, you can also claim authorship of the content

for yourself, and sell it on accordingly. In this article, we’ll look at the top 5 ways you can put PLR content to use to

improve your website and to make you money.

1. AdSense Websites: If you want to make money from AdSense, you’re going to need content. Furthermore, you’re going

to need content that’s valuable to encourage traffic to your site. That way, you’ll be displaying truly relevant ads which

will make you money. It’s a very basic formula – quality content + relevant ads = increased ad revenues. With PLR content,

you receive new articles on a periodic basis, meaning you can always keep your site fresh and up to date for visitors. By

establishing yourself as a source of information in a particular niche, you’ll be the first port of call for your visitors,

and your ads will be the first they click.

2. Ebooks: PLR content can quickly and easily be packaged as an ebook. All you need to

do is design a 3D ecover, knock up a sales letter and promote your product. What’s more, after you’ve sold one, you’ll have

a detailed list of your customers contact info, so you can easily promote your next batch of PLR content with a very high

chance of success.

3. E-Course: With PLR content, you truly have a free reign. Why not divide up the content into an online course? In

fact, it would be fairly easy to set-up an online training center or university to promote your ‘courses’ month on month.

What’s more, an e-course can be marketed as a more expensive product that a book, or than a collection of articles, meaning

you can increase your return on investment.

4. Content For Your Website: PLR content looks great on your website. By constantly uploading fresh content to your

site, you can keep your website relevant and feed the search engines with exactly what they’re looking for – keyword-rich,

deep content. PLR content is by far and away the cheapest method of boosting your website’s readability and rank-ability.

5. Sell Articles With PLR Rights: With PLR articles, you also have the benefit of

passing on the same rights you enjoy to your customers. That way, you can sell the right for them to make money from the

same content, which will always be a popular choice.

Allen Maxwell
http://www.articlesbase.com/article-marketing-articles/what-to-do-with-plr-content-139139.html

PPC search engines: In search of quality traffic? Here it is.

Solid targeting, flawless click-fraud detection, exclusive traffic sources, and good customer service! All this and more from our Pay-per-Click services! – www.ppc.abcsearch.com

Over the next five years, we estimate the paid search industry will grow at a 37-percent CAGR [compound annual growth rate] to more than $33 billion in 2010, and Google is expected to capture the lion’s share of that revenue and grow faster than the market as a whole,” Rashtchy wrote in a Google research note.

There is so much to search engines than just Google.

The top PPC search engines:

• Google AdWords

• Overture

• ePilot

• SearchFeed

• 7Search

• ABCSearch.com

• Search123

• FindWhat

• Kanoodle

• PageSeeker

• Enhance Interactive

Any company or organization needing to generate cost-effective leads or sales online finds PPC search engines as a way to generate the traffic. Hitting the bull’s eye in paid search is a daunting task and doing this right is the underlying challenge for both big and small PPC search players alike. Many marketers say that nothing matches the control, measurability, and ROI they get from paid search marketing campaigns. There are a few PPC search engines ruling while others take a back seat. What’s the difference? It mainly attributes to the quality of clicks from PPC than quantity. The ‘click to conversion’ traffic is what really counts.

What is it to search engines?

PPC Advertising is the sole revenue model for all top search engines and is the advertisers’ key to targeted visibility and great ROI. They have a steady flow of income for partners or affiliates and have the best model for focused search strategy which translates to quicker results. On the whole, paid search now accounts for 50% of all online advertising spending.

Market Share of Searches: August 2006

The chart below shows the percentage of searches done by US web surfers in August 2006 that were performed at a particular web site or a network of web sites:

What is PPC with www.ppc.abcsearch.com?

With industry leading quality control, ppc.abcsearch deals with over a thousand direct advertisers and a thousand distribution partners that syndicate or partner to. The company comes across around 15,000,000 queries a day on its network. The search marketplace is constantly changing and progressing. More and more issues are witnessed with click fraud in paid search and the key to overcoming this is by identifying and blocking the fraud with state-of-the-art technology, which ppc.abcsearch.com is currently implementing. This is precisely where their patent-pending click detection solution “ClickShield” comes in. It captures the sources of traffic and helps understand that this traffic is valid or not. User behavior patterns, monitoring Ips, search to click measures, etc are well monitored. Its mechanism completely eliminates the clicks an advertiser really shouldn’t be paying for.

It taked trusted partnerships to deliver quality leads to advertisers. Ppc.abcsearch.com’s credible partnerships foster the best targeting and visibility to your brand. Example: blogsearch.com represents the current panacea among the net surfers of the blog craze. This means the very potential traffic from the field is to be of quality. Likewise, partners represent sometimes a certain sect of focused target audience or a variety of related audience who could be your immediate prospect. The result – high quality traffic.

PPC: Wise doubts

• Understanding how much priority to place on paid search

• The budget

• Key campaign settings: budget settings, ad rotation, geo-targeting, and more

• The sector search seasonality, trends in purchase behavior

• Bid Strategy – bidding to ROI, to establish position, competitive jockeying and bid management, etc.

• Combating Click Fraud: Main sources of click fraud and seek the leading tactics for discovering and eliminating

• Landing Page Testing, Site Architecture, and Conversion Rates. The best practice of conversion rates from a click to a sale

• Contextual Advertising: What to Avoid. Knowing contextual ad programs, and settings to control, measure, or opt out of bad traffic, etc.

PPC.ABCSearch.com: The Credentials

The PPC.ABCSearch.com advertising program allows advertisers to list their websites as search results across their network of smaller search engines and strategic partnerships. Advertisers choose keywords that are relevant to their websites while selecting the precise amount they wish to pay for each click on their listings by a consumer.

Site listings on ABCSearch are ranked and determined according to the highest bidders. Signing up for the PPC.ABCSearch.com advertising program does not guarantee that any or all of the search terms submitted will be accepted by ABCSearch.com or that such search terms will generate any traffic to Advertiser’s site. ABCSearch.com reserves the right to reject and/or remove any search terms submitted by Advertisers.

Clickshield: The unique click fraud detector

• In 2006 at least $500 million in pay-per-click online advertising expenditure was wasted through click fraud.

• By 2008, Click fraud is estimated to grow to $1.6 billion , an increase of over 45%.

• Corrupt affiliates of ad networks account for 85% of all click fraud.

What is ClickShield?

• ClickShield was developed to aid Pay-per-click search providers to end the threat of click fraud.

• It is important to us that your advertising dollars go towards converting traffic, instead of being wasted on fruitless clicks. By monitoring network traffic patterns, we block the traffic that we know you should not be paying for. Period.

• ClickShield optimizes all ABCSearch network search traffic automatically, ensuring all clicks are free of fraudulent symptoms. each click gets scrubbed against natural user behavior patterns among other proprietary statistical methods.

All you have to do is…well…nothing!

Click fraud has been a part of the PPC advertising scene since the earliest days of the Internet. The simplest type of click fraud happens when a publisher accepts PPC ads on his site, then clicks on them himself or has others do the dirty work. This can be one of the hardest types of ‘insincere clicks’ to spot, especially if it’s kept to low levels. It isn’t always, though.

Therein lies one of the biggest hurdles in the battle to eliminate – or at least effectively deal with – click fraud. The companies that manage PPC advertising – Google, Overture and other search engine companies – have a clear conflict of interest in resolving disputed clicks. This conflict sometimes even extends to the terminology used to refer to fraudulent clicks in either community. Google, for instance, collects from advertisers for ‘actual clicks’ and pays publishers for ‘valid clicks’. That’s led to speculation that Google may be collecting from advertisers for some clicks for which they don’t pay publishers.

If quality leads is your aim, then quality search engines have the answer!

Micheal Turner
http://www.articlesbase.com/SEO-articles/ppc-search-engines-in-search-of-quality-traffic-here-it-is-138482.html