What You Need To Operate A Niche Marketing Site

Before you can sit back and reap the rewards from operating your own niche marketing site, there are a few vital components necessary to create a successful and profitable website:

1) A Product or Service to Sell.

Not just any old product, you need to do a little research and find a hungry market. The secret to making money is to find out what problems people are facing and offer them unique solutions.

Don't try to sell what every body else is, be unique. You need to stand out from the crowd by offering a better solution. Offering a cheaper solution doesn't always work. Any product or service will have a perceived value to it; try to sell cheaper than that and people will wonder what's wrong with it.

2) A Domain Name

Despite what people may think, a well worded catchy .com domain name will enhance your sales. It adds to the perceived value of your product or service.

There are many places to buy domain names and a simple search on any search engine will lead you to many of them. Many hosting packages will include a domain name for no extra cost.

3) Hosting

Before setting up the website on your domain you will need to join a hosting service. There are thousands of hosting services to choose from, and not all of them are reliable. Don't be misled by price, there are many cheap reliable hosting services.

There are two basic types of hosting:

i) Shared Hosting - This is the cheapest hosting but your domain will be hosted with many others on the same server. When your website traffic is low, it makes sense to share the server resources and cost with other people.

ii) Dedicated Hosting - This is more expensive, but your domain is the only one hosted. When your website traffic increases beyond a certain point you will have to consider dedicated hosting.

When choosing a host, take note of their "uptime" which is often shown as a percentage. This is the proportion of time the host's servers are working properly (i.e. your website will be online). Any host who claims to have a 99.99% uptime is lying to you.

4) Website

The type of website you decide to use will greatly affect your sales. The most important point is don't confuse your visitors. If you want to sell a product, don't offer them anything else, just the product.

A website with a single sales page will nearly always outsell a content website with many pages. The reason... a single sales page offers your visitor two choices, buy or leave. A multi-page website offers your visitor many options and confuses them; they will click to a few different pages and then leave without buying.

5) Good Sales Copy

This is the make or break of your niche marketing site. A sales page with poor copy will not sell very well.

Sales copy, what's that?

Sales copy is the wording you use on your sales page. It encompasses:

- What types of words you use.

- The way you use the words.

- The layout of your page.

- How you present your product.

- Above all else, it explains how you customer will benefit from owning your product.

Writing good sales copy is a skill which most people do not possess. It is the area of a niche marketing site which will take up most of your time, and if you're not prepared to study copy writing, is best contracted out to a professional.

6) Sales Processor

The one thing you don't want to do with your niche marketing site is process sales manually. The internet doesn't shut up shop for the night; it keeps going 24/7. If you process sales manually, you'll be doing it at all sorts of odd hours.

To get around this you need to use an automated sales processor. This is simply a system that will automatically process credit cards on your behalf. Your customer simply enters their credit card details into a form and after these are successfully verified, they are sent to a webpage explaining how their order will be delivered.

7) Autoresponder

This is the only optional part of a niche marketing site. You don't have to use autoresponders, but once a customer has purchased something from you they will be inclined to buy more from you. If you capture their contact details you will be able to tell them about future product launches, or fantastic special offers you have put together.

There are many autoresponder services available and even scripts you can purchase to install on your website. Before committing yourself to any particular provider, do a little research. Forums are a great place to learn who are the best or cheapest.