Targeting Niches Part One

April 26th, 2011

The first and what I consider the most important task when doing marketing is to target your market. The more narrowed your scope, the better chance you have at striking your potential prospects and buyers chords. When using too broad a scope you then have to be everything to everyone. You end up not satisfying or providing anything of value to anyone. I might add, marketing to everyone can also be mighty expensive.

I always like to use niches that are subsets of broader niches or some that have a very common thread. Let’s say you are marketing a health and wellness opportunity and products. This in of itself is a very large industry, and some would even say saturated. I would approach it by using the premise that people who are health conscious buy supplements, nutrients, and vitamins items that enhance, prevent, and increase their health. That being said, they probably would buy items such as water purifiers, air purifiers, exercise equipment, health club memberships, travel packages, etc. Finding people and companies that market these products may already have a huge list of past customers and/or people on their mailing lists. What’s to stop you from mutually sharing each others lists, and/or even proposing them to join you in your business. This would be another revenue stream for them that is not in direct competition with their products. Be creative.

The relationships between niches is similar to the 6 degrees of separation. I’ll explore some of these relationships next time and open the world of possibilities.

Part Two

Monday Workout

October 11th, 2010

Well there’s no hiding that I’ll be watching the Vikings game tonight. I’m not only a Vikings fan for as long as I remember but I get to vicariously live my life through the oldest quarterback in the game today. Brett Farve is good due to his longevity. But this is a team game and the cast of characters he has surrounded himself this year leaves something to be desired. The Vikes even brought back a an old recluse in Randy Moss. We will see.

But sitting at the boob-tube hanging on every snap won’t do a thing for my body. So before the game I’m off to the park to do my 3x weekly grueling workout. I’ve measured off 80 yards on an outfield fence. I bring my kettlebell. So here’s the drill. Do a set of 10 kettlebell swings, set it down, take a breath, sprint 80 yards, walk back to start and do over. I do this 8 times. What I find is that it isn’t the kettlebell or the sprint that gets to me, it’s the walk back. If you haven’t used a kettlebell, they require a rock solid core. You mid section is flexed as hard as it can. The 10 swings take about 40 seconds. The sprint for the first 65% of the way is a breeze, then the lactic acid starts burning and and last 35% is sheer determination. During the walk back, the heart is pounding as hard as it can and by the time I’m to the start, I can breath OK. They say that it’s not necessarily how long you keep the heart rate going, but how short a time it takes to recover to get back to normal. The faster the better.

Anyways, off to the park.

Work hard.
Take your vitamins.
Play hard.

Historic Proportions

June 25th, 2009

Recently over at Facebook I had as a comment in the “What I was thinking today” section at the top the following, “Chris. W. Kilber is thinking that today is a day to make some history! What are you going to do today that you will remember for a long time?” I’m not sure what was in my coffee this morning or it must be the new vitamins I’ve been taking recently that has really fired me up and made me optimistic about a lot of things. Nicole Sundene then replied that it was empowering and a tall order. That may be, but was it the cost of success? Anyways, so then I happened to hear something on the radio dealing with the saying, “historic proportions”. It gave me an epiphany. I was thinking of something that could make a historical impact upon your online business, especially if you are just starting out or you started out following the wrong advice. Here is what I came up with.

There’s a lot of information written on online network marketing. There is so much in fact that it’s hard to separate the grain from the chaff. We as online marketers need to steer or coral potential business partners or customers into a position where we can educate and inform them to the services and offerings we have. How do we do that? We create a “marketing funnel” and attract people NOT by being a salesmen and touting the benefits of your product, but by building “YOU INC.”! I would bet that 98% of the products out there are being marketed by 1000’s of people. How can you be the one whom customers come? What you need to do is differentiate yourself from the others using attraction principals and move them into your funnel.

A successful entrepreneur will build their marketing strategies around processes and systems. They will build their own lists of prospects, customers, and partners by offering real world value. This may be in the form of information, how-to’s, time saving methods, insight, motivation, and other things that your list will value. As your list grows and they begin to gain your trust the potential products and services that you may market to them, which may be the same as others are offering, will have a better chance to be purchased from you. As time goes on you could even develop lists that number in the 10’s of thousands. By setting up your funnel properly and using an auto-responder you then have the ability to build your relationship with them with one simple email. As long as you continue to provide value, they will stay on your list.

It is imperative that you set up your marketing funnel as the basic marketing tool in your arsenal. Your possibilities are then endless once you know how to use this basic business building principles to grow your organization on the internet. By using “YOU INC.” as the attraction to your marketing funnel you will be able spin income streams with a variety of products and services. Once you understand this thoroughly and put it into place you will transform your profitability online. We all know that success begets success and imagine what you could do with 50-100 new opt-ins each and every day. How much would your business grow?

In closing, seek out what you need to learn, study it, implement it, and you will increase your online marketing success tremendously, maybe even to historic proportions. You can then thank Nicole for inspiring me to write this. What are you doing today that will be historical?