May 19, 2008
In the last post of the 20 Reasons you will Fail with Build a Niche Store series, I talked about knowing your niche market. Today, we will look at the various ways you can make sure you feed your niche site visitors the exact content they expect to find on your site.
image courtesy of: http://www.4homeandaway.co.uk/
The one common goal we all share in our niche store building venture, is that we want to earn money! Along the way, we have to make our own decisions about how each of our websites will look and interact with our target visitors as well as finding ways to turn a certain percentage of those visitors into revenue! A very common mistake I not only see, but make myself quite often, is putting up an ad simply because it pays well… regardless of whether or not it’s related to your website niche market and the visitors you have spent all your time, preparing it for!
Targeted Visitors need Targeted Ads!
Imagine for second that you live in Indianpolis and someone approached you later today with the opportunity to make a fortune! All you need to do is paint an advertisement down one whole side of your car for Donkey Rides across the Great Wall of China! For every person that books one of those rides, you will earn $100! Would you do it? Of course, some will say yes… but the truth is, unless you live in a tourist trap near the great wall, (if they even exist) it’s not too likely you will make any sales! Wrong market, Wrong location… just plain wrong! The same holds true for your Niche Stores…
Up until now, you have spent a few hours researching your niche market and developing a website for a specific type of visitor. When it comes time to find alternative advertisements to grab their attention, you should make sure the ads would be something they might be interested in! A great example of a couple bad advertisements is on one of my own sites. If you look in the lower left column, you will see an ad for fine designer shoes! How many people passing through this site are interested in designer shoes? Likely none! While this link area was created as part of a test I am doing, it does absolutely nothing for creating revenue from my target visitors! The BANS ad at the bottom is another bad advertisement on this page that is soon to be replaced! (Site is in redesign now)
Thus bringing up the question…
How Can I Determine the Correct Ads for my Visitors?
This is one of those areas that you really don’t need to do alot of research and a little common sense goes a long way… All you need to do is put yourself in the visitors shoes and “Accessorize” your site with additional items YOU might be interested at the same type of site! How many times have you purchased something online and seen those “You might Also Like” sections at the bottom, where they try to sell you batteries with your new radio? I know that is a very generalized relationship, but your site should do it the same way!
If you have a hard time finding an ad that works in your niche, go to the source, eBay! Find the top seller of items in your niche and promote their store by making your own banner and using the link generator within the EPN to create a link!
One great way to find related items (and more niche markets) is by running through a Google Labs creation called, Google Sets. Type a few general terms into the provided boxes and Google will provide other items that would be expected to return results in the set!
Another pitfall to showing the right ads is the age group of your visitors. If your site focuses on items for children, keep in mind that their parents will likely be the ones making the purchase for them! On my Webkinz site, instead of generating ads for children or webkinz related items, I focused on an ad the parents would be interested in getting as a gift - OneShare allows you to buy 1 share of stock in places like Disney, Hershey etc, as a gift that keeps on giving! While the ads don’t target the actual visitors, they target the decision makers!
How do you target your visitors?
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7 Responses to “Feeding your Target Visitors the Food they Expect to Eat!”
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Seems to me that you’re trying to push pagerank from your PR3 racecar site to the shoe site.
Everything you do is marketing. You setup the blog and other sites to get authority then push that PR out to your stores. It’s genius.
And it doesn’t matter one bit if you reveal your niches because you’ve made yourself the 800lb BANS gorilla. People who copy you will be 2 steps behind you and will easily be left in the dust.
Again, Bravo!
@GBPackers
I have to agree with you and it’s a great technique. It can be refined further my making the anchor text link one of the keywords you are targeting.
You are both absolutely correct!
Just about EVERYTHING I do is done for purpose. The link from the Getaracecar site is actually drawn from a text file on this server, which can be changed in one spot anytime, to promote any site I wish. In total, I use 4 of these text files that are “Included” on 4 separate websites.
In this post, I actually left the anchor text generic and no-followed the link on purpose! Google has always been a wild animal, but here lately, it seems a bit on the extra-wild side!
The GetaRaceCar site traffic has been extremely sporadic at best! I will see 2500-3000 daily visitors for 3-4 days in a row, then go 1-2 days with only 500-1000 visitors… Thus far, I have not been able to determine why, but the difference are the Google driven search engines (Google, AOL Search etc) not referring traffic!
The reason for the nofollow was to avoid influencing the engines with this non-related article.
In regard to the links to the fine designer shoe site, the test has worked perfect so far! The site received a PR1 within 30 days of launch, and all major search engines send traffic and index every day. I will however pull down the text includes with my redesign of a few sites.
Mark
One way I get ideas for related ads for a bans store is to go to Amazon! Look up the products you are featuring in your niche, and you’ll see below the products a listing of what other people bought that were interested in, or purchased that product. When I see the same types of products showing up a lot, then I’ll make an ebay ad for that for my bans store.
Great Tip Adrienne - I never thought about that!
Mark
>>If you have a hard time finding an ad that works in your niche, go to the source, eBay! Find the top seller of items in your niche and promote their store by making your own banner and using the link generator within the EPN to create a link! <<
This seems to be a no-brainer BUT I sure didn’t think of it. I have two BAN sites I’ve been struggling with to come up with an ad for. Thanks Mark!