10 Jan 10 How to Find and Qualify a Niche to Serve

What is niche?

A niche is a subset of a subset of a market made up of individuals who share the same need and have the same desire concerning the category in question.

In simple words, a niche is a collection of individuals that shares the same need. It is different from segment in the concentration of focus of individuals in a niche. For example, heath could be a segment consisting of niches like weight-loss, cure for heart disease, yoga, etc.

How to find a niche?

Finding a niche is easy, but finding a niche that is profitable is slightly difficult. Just look around and see what people are talking about, what they are buying, selling, aspiring for, or what they are doing, and you have a niche to start with.

Ask the following (and related) questions to gauge the need:

What people are going crazy about?
How long will they continue thinking the way they are doing right now?
How sensitive they are to price?
What social change has brought about the particular change in attitude?
Can it be served?
Will it last long enough to be a business?

How to qualify a niche?

For a niche to qualify as a business, it should have the following traits:

Serviceable: A niche should have a serviceable need, which means it should not have needs that cannot be served using the current level of technology.
Actionable: A niche should be sufficiently big to provide adequate return on investment (ROI) on the capital investment in 6-9 months. A niche that consists of total 100 people cannot be actionable.
Profitable: A niche should have scope to sell product for money. A niche consisting of free services cannot be profitable.
Durability: Building a long-term business around any 4 or 5 days sports event cannot be qualified as a niche, as the business will be close as soon as the event ends. For a niche to be profitable over the long haul, it should not get affected too much by seasonality, fad, or taste swing.

Most importantly, find a niche that has any relation with your view about the world or has any relation to things that you like. This will make the niche more attractive.

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Tags: 9 Months, Adequate Return, Attitude, Capital Investment, Concentration, Days Sports, Durability, Fad, Heart Disease, Heath, Long Haul, Niche, Niches, Return On Investment, Scope, Seasonality, Segment, Sports Event, Subset, Term Business

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08 Jan 10 7 Steps to Setting up a PPC Campaign

PPC (Pay Per Click) is the most important form of online advertising. You can find PPC campaign running virtually everywhere. From Google to Microsoft to Yahoo to most of the niche blogs to websites to forums, everyone give prominent space for PPC campaign.

To be successful a PPC campaign needs to bring four parties together:

Advertiser
PPC programs (like Google AdWords, Yahoo Publisher Network, Microsoft Adcenter, Adbrite, bidvertiser, etc.)
Online publishers (owners of blogs, websites, forums, etc.)
Target audience

How to create a PPC campaign

Creating a PPC campaign is a seven-step process that begins with searching a good PPC program and culminates in publishing the ads. The steps are given below:

Open a permanent advertiser account with PPC programs of your choice, deposit the money, and set a daily budget.
Conduct a keyword research to find the keywords to use for the campaign.
Make a list of keywords according to its conformity to the set objective.
Bid for the keywords, ad placement, etc.
Write an advertisement copy that works followed by copy testing.
Create a landing page that the visitors will see once they click on your PPC advertisement.
Place the advertisement.

The process does not end here, rather it begins from here. The process of reviewing the performance, analyzing the result, tweaking the weak parts, and calculating the ROI (return on investment) kick starts as soon as your PPC campaign goes live.

Tags: Adbrite, Advertisement Copy, Advertiser Account, Adwords, Bidvertiser, Budget, Conformity, google, Google Yahoo, Keyword Research, Microsoft Adcenter, Money, Niche, Objective, Pay Per Click, Publishers, Return On Investment, Roi Return On Investment, Target Audience, Tweaking

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14 Nov 09 Online Advertising Vs Offline Advertising

I was once a blue-eyed MBA guy who believed in the power of big companies, and those silky legs and sultry pouts of glamour models in glossy print ads. I also believed that skin-revealing outfits will make me sell insurances, adhesives, and god knows what not. But, this love affair with mass advertising ended sooner than later. I was disillusioned, disoriented, after all my education appeared to be based on false ground. And I later realize that the principles were right, and we messed it up in execution. Hence, I moved on to online advertising. It is more closely tied with the principles of advertising than is offline or the banner ads displayed on the Internet.

Some key difference in online and offline advertisings

Online advertising is measurable, but its older cousin (mass media advertising) is not.
Online advertising has many result-producing tools at its disposal, whereas, mass media offers just a handful of useless tools.
You cannot calculate your return on investment for the advertising dollars you spent in mass media, but you can easily calculate what you got for every single dollar you spent online.
With mass media advertising, you cannot say for sure who watched your advertisements, but with online advertisements, you know whom your ads are being served.
By large, online advertising is contextual, while mass media advertising cannot claim the same.
Online medium inspires communications, whereas, mass media just dictates.
Online medium offers an option to instigate two-way communication (interesting dialogue), whereas, mass media communication is always one-way (boring monologue).
Your audience can interact with this medium, and the only interactivity offered by mass media advertising is flipping the page of magazine or changing TV or radio channel.
When using online advertising, you pay only when you get result, and in mass media ads, you pay and pay and pay, regardless of what the result is.

What do you think about this issue? Do you agree or disagree?

Tags: Adhesives, Advertisements, Banner Ads, Cousin, Dialogue, Glamour Models, Glossy Print, Handful, Interactivity, Love Affair, Mass Media Communication, Mba, Media Ads, Media Advertising, Monologue, Pouts, Print Ads, Radio Channel, Return On Investment, Silky Legs

Filed in Marketing with 1 Comment

10 Jan 10 How to Find and Qualify a Niche to Serve

08 Jan 10 7 Steps to Setting up a PPC Campaign

How to create a PPC campaign

14 Nov 09 Online Advertising Vs Offline Advertising

Some key difference in online and offline advertisings

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