Niche Marketing for The Future
This is something we’re hearing about a lot lately: here’s my take.
The simplest and most obvious change we’re experiencing at the moment (and this has actually been happening for a long time) is the evolution of what is considered quality in the eyes of the search engines.
Where the goal of niche marketers was once to impress the search engines, every day it becomes less about that and more about impressing PEOPLE.
This is common sense stuff.
It’s been said many times that the search engines make changes every day to have the results they’re showing in their rankings be the ones that are the highest quality, meaning the ones that real human beings will find the most valuable, the most entertaining or the most informative.
While I have no doubt people still make money with spam pages, content scraping, and other techniques that involve getting low quality pages and sites into the search engines in large numbers, I also have no doubt that their days are numbered – to a lot of people, their days are already gone.
I’ve heard horror stories of people spending figures like $20 000 on mass campaigns like this to spam huge numbers of quality sites onto the web and having one flick of the Google switch rendering their entire investment worthless.
Even if you’re not creating low quality sites and content on that level, the same applies. If you’re putting up a blog trying to get search engine traffic and there is no inherent value for a real human being, your site isn’t going to last long.
That’s what works, that’s what lasts. Sites and content that have real value for real people. Who do you know that’s made big money online without providing value to anyone? What popular website do you know that provides NO value for anyone?
When you’re writing content or creating niche sites, ask yourself – in what way is this content/site valuable to the people I’m trying to target. If the answer is “It isn’t, I’m just trying to get good SE rankings”, forget it. You may as well not make the site.
And valuable content sites aren’t difficult to make! Even with the model I originally taught of, using blogs to promote products as an affiliate… If you write a review that helps a customer to make an informed decision on a purchase, you will make a sale. If you write a sales pitch or a poor english pile of fluff of an article, you won’t make sales even if you DO manage to get traffic.
Point is, think QUALITY. Whatever you can do to increase the quality of your site will always make you more money. Think about human needs and what people want. Is your site satisfying some human need? The need to be in the know, the need to be entertained, the need to avoid pain or gain pleasure… If the answer is yes then your site will be providing value.
