Niche Marketing Resources and Tools

By Ed Akehurst

This page contains an ever-growing list of resources and tools that will benefit the niche marketer in particular, and any marketer, especially an internet marketer, in general. Many of these resources are free, but some are paid services. In some case, free tools are just as good as ones you pay for, such as doing submissions. In other cases, such as autoresponders, you get what you pay for, and the advantages and benefits of the paid ones far outweigh what you could do with a free one.

Social Network Bookmarking

This, for the most part, will consist of free websites. If you are not familiar with this concept, I will be doing an article on it very soon. Stay tuned for an in-depth look.

For now, I recommend everyone go to OnlyWire and set up a free account. Once inside, join each bookmarking site listed and then in the future, you only need to make one easy click to get your sites bookmarked (or to bookmark others). This is an incredible free tool that will boost your recognition significantly.

Education

There are many places to get and improve your skills in internet marketing (niche marketing in particular) and while I highly encourage you to go to as many of these resources as you can, you would be very remiss if you did not at least take a look at Wealthy Affiliate and what they have to offer. This is without a doubt THE best educational resource for this entire genre.

Website Submission

This is an important aspect to any campaign. It is highly advisable to submit manually. Whatever you decide to do, do not pay companies to do mass submission unless you know for certain they are submitting manually. If a company says they will submit to 1,000 Search Engines for $9.95 it is highly unlikely they are submitting manually. Such a service usually runs between $250 and $350 dollars for 300 - 500 Search Engines.

I would try it yourself first. All you need is a good, current list of place to submit, with notes on what they accept or what may be their focus. A great list, in excel format, of places to submit to can be found here. It is a large file, so please allow a minute or two for download.

There are automatic form fillers that can speed up the manual submission process. The one I personally recommend is RoboForm. It is very easy to install and use and will save you hours when filling out endless forms such as search engine submissions. You can download the free version immediately here, or visit their website here for more information. There is also a PRO version that you can get through this link.

Keyword Tools

One thing a niche marketer must learn to do is get good at building keywords. Elsewhere on this site we will be discussing thw advantages of long tail keywords, but for this page, we just want to recommend some good places to go to get keyword research. You can find great information in many places on the net to assist you in this at no charge. this is one area, though, that niche marketers protect. Never reveal your keyword list.

Other marketers will never give you their list, but if they are good, they will teach you how to develop your own. The tools recommended in this section will help you with that. there are some great built-in research tools in Wealthy Affiliate. Yes, I know I keep recommending them, but for about a dollar a day, it doesn’t get much better than what they offer.

Two other good tools are Keyword Elite and Beating Adwords. Keyword Elite is great for finding and researching Keywords, and Beating Adwords is just that, how to find good keywords, but much more, such as how to design PPC ads, etc. If you are doing just Bum Marketing (Article Marketing), Keyword Elite and/or Wealthy Affiliate might be you best starting places, but if you are also doing PPC campaigns, the combination of Wealthy Affiliate and Beating AdWords is a sure-fire winner.

Web Design

There are many tools available to design websites with. The most common I see used today overall is Dreamweaver and for the Internet Marketing community XSitePro, but for most people starting out, they will want to try something online or free.

I have used Weebly and it is an OK place to get a feel for building a web site. Knowledge of HTML is not necessarily required to use Weebly. They say they will host a site also, but I have never used them for this purpose, as I prefer to pay for that service through a company that specialises in hosting (see suggestions below).

What I use and recommend for getting started is Nvu (pronounced N-view). While they claim no knowledge of HTML is needed, I found very quickly that a basic knowledge is quite helpful. There are many places on the net to learn very simple HTML commands, and when starting out, that is all you will need. Nvu is a very powerful website design tool that rivals the paid software that is available such as Dreamweaver and FrontPage. Try out Nvu first, get used to it, and then move on to another program such as Dreamweaver or XSitePro.

XSitePro is the ultimate tool for designing web sityes that are to be profitable. It makes web design much less complicated. Be sure to see all the features and benefits of using XSitePro. The built in Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tools are incredibly helpful and make it a snap to be sure your site will get listed.

Domain Registration

This is an area that is super competitive. I look for price and good customer service. I typically order my domains through either GoDaddy or 1&1 Internet - they are both excellent. use them both if you want - I do!

Web Hosting

There are many web hosts to choose from. Every one is a little different, but they are all very competitive. The ones I like best are listed below:

1&1 Internet. 1&1 is very easy to work with, has great customer support, and they usually have some specials going. For example, right now they are offering up to 5 FREE domains free for the life of your hosting account.

The other company I like a whole lot is BlueHost. They also have good deals and very competitive prices. They also offer unlimited domains in an account.

However, right now, my vote for best overall value and service is HostMonster. Visit the link below for more information:

Blogging

I started this site as a WordPress blog and then changed it to an XSitepro site that I intend to frequently update. That is not what you might want to do, as there is a good advantage to blogging, esepecially with Google liking many of the blog sites. I would recommend looking at a few of the available free blog places and test out your skills. Two of the most well known are Blogger and WordPress.

Also recommended is a site called Squidoo. Squidoo is a whole culture of its own and is definitely worth a look. If you like the look and feel of Squidoo and want to get the most out of it, I highly recommend the ebook Squidoo Queen.

Content and Article Submission

For content, the best method is to become an author and write your own content. Alternatively, you could have someone ghost write for you, you could use Privat Label Rights articles that you edit and attribute to yourself, or you could copy and paste from article sites, making sure to leave in the credits and links of the author and the site from which it came.

If you practice, you can get good at writing your own material. I wrote 90% of everything on this site. Once you do, you  can submit your articles to Article Sites that will publish your article. This is a great way to get search engine ranking, and is covered in depth more fully elsewhere on this site, as this is the crux of what is called Article Marketing.

One of the most respected places to submit articles is EZineArticles. Another good place to submit an article to is GoArticles.

Affiliate Networks

Once you have chosen a market and figured out how to market to them, you will need to get products for them to buy. You have several options to accomplish this.

One way is of course to create your own product. This is alway the best, and usually the most profitable, method. It is not, however, the way for most people to get started. To get started, you will want to find a company that will allow you to market its products and services as an affiliate and earn a commission on everything you sell through your referrals.

Many companies alreadyhave an affiliate program set up. You simply apply to become an affiliate and then promote their products. If a company does not have an affiliate program, but they have the products or services you know you can market, you can always call them and let them know you would like to promote their company and are calling to work out an affiliation agreement whereby you can be paid commissions on what you are able to sell. many companies will accept such offers.

There are also Affiliate Networks. These are companies that handle affiliate programs for a multitude of companies. You join the affiliate network and then are able to market any of the companies within it (or at least apply to them, if they are subject to prior approval).

Here is a list of some of the more well-known Affiliate Networks:

Commission Junction

Clickbank

LinkShare.com