Up till now, you have been freely exploring the various marketing strategies and tactics to apply to your business. Now is the time to apply a dollar amount to each of your proposed marketing strategies. Unless you have really deep pockets, likelihood is that you will start to tweak the tactics to suit your budget.

Think Low Cost High Impact Marketing At Onset

Make it a conscious habit until it becomes subconsciously part of you. That way you need much less tweaking on the budget. Imagine how much ad money you have to spend in order to achieve at least 7 times to be seen or heard before you can influence a buy on your product. There are however, ways to achieve Low Cost High Impact Marketing.

Include Social Networks as part of your overall small business marketing strategies such as launch your marketing campaigns via Facebook or MySpace. Leverage on Twitter as a marketing platform, create a credible image and persona to successfully market your products through this channel. They are comparatively effective, efficient as well as cost efficient. The key reason is the extensive and explosive reach of potential target audience.

More Could Be Less. Niche Your Market Segments

Yes, focus on select potential target segments which your product directly maps their needs. What is an ad message when it has extensive reach but appeals to less relevant targets? Would you rather that you focus your ad message to the relevant and willing target segments? And, with a direct need for your product, you are reducing the rejection reasons they have about buying your products. Selling to these groups hence becomes easier with lesser objections.

Collaborate, Don’t Compete

This is especially true if you run a small business which has limited resources both financially and physically. Forge strategic alliances with other small businesses of similar nature or become a major link in their business supply chain. This gives you stronger bargaining power and potentially opens up new distribution channels for you.

Member-Get-Member Scheme

Referral plans or whatever you term it, it still is word-of-mouth marketing. Not just the Banks do it. And you can do it too! But it has worked since time in memorial. Why? Because people believe people whom they know, who have tried and test your product and genuinely recommend to one another the goodness of your product.

So put on your thinking hats and start to churn out low cost high impact small business marketing strategies.

A recap of the last segment, we discussed the process of Finding Demand of Niche Markets via the following steps :

• Collate the Functional list of your niche using Google Adwords Keyword Tools
• Measure the Profitability of your Niche Market via a 2-step process of firstly measuring the volume of your Niche Market via Google Adwords Kywords Tool. Thereafter, evaluating the number of ads in SpyFu for profitability analysis
• Search for Profitable Affiliate Programs related to your Niche Market to sell

Notice a simple natural reaction whenever you need to run a quick research on a topic. You would remind yourself to “Google” the topic. When evaluating supply/competition, we do exactly that. Let’s run through the process.

Evaluating Supply = Competition

• “Google” your selected niche by inputting the keyword or keyword phrase.
• On the top right corner of the bar separating your search bar and search returns, you will find the total number of search returns and this number becomes the Supply or your competition. Do this in “Quotes”.

Note that the total number of search returns ie. the supply/competition will give you an idea of how much information or providers are out there competing to win over the potential niche customers.

However, that is not to say that when Supply runs into the millions the niche is too competitive. We must evaluate the supply against the demand before we derive our conclusion. Go for any number less than 20,000 to 50,000 competing pages.

No one has ever definitively set a benchmark figure for this formula, and neither will I here. The reason being that different niche markets behave and yield different results. There have been instances, albeit rare, when I entered more than usual competitive niches, thinking that the survival rate would be akin to nil, but surprisingly, I managed to pull through with interesting results. And the vice versa is true.

And more importantly, do share the results with all our readers out here. I would really appreciate it.

Next Stop brings us to to investigating Key SEO ideas at 6 Steps to Effective SEO for Online Niche Marketing Domination.

And for a recap of Part 1 of this series, check out Finding Demand of Niche Markets.

We will adopt market accessible free software tools whenever possible but there will be suggestions to explore paid versions should the need arise. But I will share with you a very efficient tool which will cut your keyword research time by 90% at the end of this series.

I am a strong advocator for starting things right at the start. So First Things First, let us go through the following step by step

Define “Niche Market”

Firstly, I would provide you with a simple description of a “Niche Market” as follows:

A niche market defines a small group of people with similar and very focused demand for a certain product or service. This demand is currently met with little or ignored amounts of supply .

This reason I qualify niche market with “demand is currently unmet with little or ignored amounts of supply” is to ensure that as we proceed, you will find that your supply will meet the demand profitably, with little competition.

Find “Demand” – Look for Search Count

We proceed to find the niche segment keywords. You would probably have a niche in mind.

Step 1

Find out the functional list of keywords by going to Google Adwords Keyword Tools , a free software by Google. Note that you should start with a niche with a exact term or phrase and narrow down. If you are comfortable with the amounts of keywords sufficient as writing topics, proceed to the next step.

For building Micro Niche Sites, 1,000 < Search Count < 2,000.

Step 1 Part 2

Purpose of this is to explore the CPC from Google advertisers’ perspective. This is especially important if you are searching for niches words for Google Adsense. The higher the average cpc the better because this would imply that the higher your adsense reward.

Alternatively you could go to Google Adwords Keywords Tool which gives you the average searches of your niche on a monthly basis. Check the drop down list as exact search count. Click to include Est CPC, and Search Trends.

The real objective of part 1 and part 2 is to Derive the Demand via Search Count and hence the potential profitability of your niche from the keywords derived so as to make things worthwhile for you when you finally decide to embark on the chosen niche.

Monetising Your Online Niche Marketing Site with Affiliate Programs and Adsense

As a niche market product or service marketer, the onus is on you to seek out the most effective affiliate program, evaluated from the perspective of a potential user. Hence, exploring the spread of affiliate programs offerings in the market is essential.

The following listing would give you good coverage although not exhaustive – ClickBank, Commission Junction, Associate Programs and popular CPA networks are PepperJam, Affiliate.com, Revenueloop, just to name a few. Note that there are other successful “undercover” affiliate programs not in the mentioned list, yet to be fully leveraged, if only you look hard enough.

A Parting Note… for this Segment

Check out the the next session where we approach the topic of exploring supply, or rather, evaluating your competition for online niche marketing.

For more in depth understanding to identify which online niche marketing approach is most appropriate for you, check out Keyword Driven vs Emotive Online Niche Marketing