From major companies to tiny little start ups, niche marketing seems to be the “bandwagon” everyone is jumping on these days. But there are ways to get into niche marketing that can quickly get you lost in the crowd and turn your dreams into just another “cookie cutter” nightmare and a total wast of time.

Niche Marketing, in essence is marketing. No matter what store you go into, there are niches down every aisle. You have your home goods, hardware, sporting goods, cosmetics, etc.

So niche marketing is nothing new by any means. Its been in existence since the very first marketplace opened up somewhere during the early days of human civilization.

Not surprising then that its become such a big hit on the Internet where specific information is the name of the game.

The Search Engines are positioned to glean the most benefit from the niche mentality. People come to them to find specifics based on their keyword queries. So they’d be more apt to create the best algorithms and the most conducive environments to deal with these specifics or niche situations.

You as a marketer then, would be putting yourself in the best position possible by aligning your sites to take advantage of the search engines’ algorithms.

Then why do so many try to sneak around them and still expect a good result?

Part of the whole niche algorithm scenario is to provide finely tuned specific information on any given topic that might be searched for. However, this is only part of it.

The other part is about the age and uniqueness of the information provided.

So the search engines try to tap into sites they can get information from that are constantly being updated with fresh information on particular subjects, because they know that if someone comes looking for something chances are they’ll come back to find more. And the more they come back to find freshly updated information that wasn’t available before, the better their searches will appear to be.

Now you need to ask yourself, “Are my sites conducive to providing fresh content that the search engines can constantly come back to?”

If you’re using those ready made niche package templates the answer would probably be no, because even though these packages come with hundreds of articles included, they inevitably share one characteristic.

They’re all static.

Static, or never changing content is not good in an environment where new information is being sought after, obviously. In fact, having old and duplicate content about a specific subject might be seen as equally irrelevant as if you were talking “apples and oranges.”

But then how does one break into a new niche market with fresh content on a site that’s constantly being updated all the time?

One problem that arises out of all of this is that niche marketing has never been a big money maker for a single niche. Sure there have been a couple instances where someone taps into a niche and creates an explosion of sales, buys a big house and retires off the revenue. But for the most part, niche marketing is about making a little money from a lot of niches and letting it all add up to making a decent living.

So how does a marketer create lots of niches and constantly keep them updated without having to give up the rest of their lives activities, like eating and sleeping?

After all, if you had to actively update hundreds of niche sites every day you wouldn’t have time for much else, right?

The trick would be to have a site that other people update for you, which is totally possible if you owned an article directory that self moderates itself.

The problem is that most article directory scripts are set up to be multiple category sites that cover just about every topic ever searched for, and for the most part, they’re not self moderating.

There is one article directory script that can be tuned to a specific niche topic and does self moderate, meaning that it accepts or rejects articles automatically based on category and keyword choice.

It’s been designed with niche marketers in mind and overcomes all the shortcomings the other article directory scripts have had for niche marketing.

It’s called Niche Master Directory. Easy to install, adaptable to just about any webpage template, and can be set up thousands of times on different sites and different specific niches.

Most importantly, Niche Master Directory works with the search engines rather than against them!

So for the time it takes to set up those pre-packaged niche templates, and for a one time cost rather than a monthly subscription you often have to pay to get the packages, Niche Master Directory is a much better option.

When the term “submission” was mentioned among the Internet Marketing groups in the past, the first thing that came to mind is the old practice of submitting urls to the search engines in order to get indexed. Perhaps the second thing is when we all used to submit our classified ads to those huge FFA sites. But now a days, all the talk is about submitting articles to the article directories.

Unfortunately, many people who are now submitting articles fail to realize that it’s quite a different type of submission process than back in the “old days.”

Now we have keywords and key phrases to contend with and page rank and back link popularity as well. And even the objectives are different than simply getting someone else to see what you’ve submitted.

Today, we have the issue of branding and portraying oneself as an expert in one’s field. Plus the information people go looking on the Internet for seems to be on a much more sophisticated level than before.

Yes, marketing goes far beyond the simple submission of urls, classifieds, and banners. People want to know that the information they get is real, and that it comes from someone who knows what they’re talking about.

Here’s some tips on how to achieve a successful article marketing career that’ll keep you up with the times, and assure yourself that people will read and believe what you have to say . . .
1. The Times They Are A Changin’

Marketing has changed and you need to change with it. You can’t just throw your information out on the web and expect it to be picked up. Article marketing is vastly different than merely submitting a url to the search engines.

Now your information has to be informative, well written, authoritatively convincing, and most of all targeted.

So you have to know what you’re talking about, say it in a way that people will respect as knowledgeable, and put it where people who might find it interesting can locate it.

This takes research in both your topic and in finding just the right place to lay it out in. For the most part, the first, research, is your hurdle to jump over. However, most article directories make targeting easy by providing lots of categories to place your article into.

These categories are your first line of keyword placement. If a person wants to know about sports, they’ll go to an article directory and look in the sports categories. So it only makes sense to make sure your article about sports make it there for them to see.

Putting a sports article in a health or cooking category would spell certain doom for any chance that sport enthusiasts would find it.

It’s really sad to see articles that were obviously well researched landing in irrelevant categories on the article directories. A true waste of precious time!

Do yourself a favor and take the extra few seconds, when submitting your article, to put it in the most relevant category you can find. If a good category isn’t present on a certain directory, you’d be better off to skip your submission and write to the directory owner to request the category be added, than to submit just anywhere on the site.

Wipe out the old thinking that all you need to do is get your submissions out there. Target, target, target for the best results.
2. Be The Teacher

This brings us back to research. A teacher is respected when they can dole out information that their students didn’t already know. A teacher is also respected when that information is doled out coherently and in an understandable fashion.

So to be respected as a teacher, or as we like to call it in the marketing world, an expert in your field, you need to make a point and make sense when you make it.

Pick a topic that you know something about and learn something else about it that you didn’t already know. Chances are, unless you’re brand new to the business, if you learn something new, it’ll be new to most of your readers too.

Draw a map from point A to point B so your readers can clearly see how you’re building up the knowledge in a logical and complimentary process.

Be accurate in your statements. Don’t make stuff up, because it’ll come back to haunt you. If you come up with a brand new approach or idea for something, treat it like any scientific hypothesis. Test it out before you launch the concept on others. Make sure it’ll work for you first, or you’ll be laughed right out of business.

And finally, make sure you don’t turn people off by your spelling or misuse of the vernacular. Most people will be instantly turned away if your grammar is off. Spell check, have a friend read your article first before submitting, spell check again, read it out loud, and most importantly, spell check.
3. Make Your Mark

There are many novelist who are well known for a particular style of writing. Take Ann Rice for example, who’s Vampire Chronicles defined the new age of horror. Her name is synonymous with her genre!

But did you know she also writes romance novels? Most people don’t because she uses a pseudonym when she ventures beyond the Vampire Lestat and his cohorts.

The point here is that, as Ann Rice, she’s branded as a horror novelist and, in order to maintain that branding, she uses another name for her other styles of writing.

To be an expert in your field, you too need to brand yourself so that your name becomes synonymous with what you write about. To do that, you need to stay within a particular field and only that field.

If you want to write about other things, then use a pseudonym like Ann Rice and so many other writers do.

The more you write about a specific topic, the more people will see you as an expert on that topic. The wider range of topics you write about, the less knowledgeable you’ll appear to be in any one of them.
4. Make Each Article Count

To summarize, take your article writing and submitting seriously. You wouldn’t write a resume haphazardly or send it to employers who had nothing to do with your line of work, would you? Use your keywords and especially your category choices wisely.

When you write, teach, when you teach, know the subject you’re teaching. And before everyone else, teach yourself what to teach about.

Stay within your realm of expertise and the world will regard you as an expert!

There’s been a lot of talk about duplicate content lately, and as often as its talked about, another script or software product comes out as a remedy.

But is it really a big problem that you should be worried about?

And if you avoid duplication at all costs, could you actually be hurting yourself?

First of all, it’s impossible for you to write an article and completely avoid duplication. When you add an article to a directory, or you send it to an email group, it’s understood that your article will be used by other people as content on their sites.

In addition to this fact, it’s also understood that whomever uses it must leave it intact.

So to think that you should avoid duplication, in this regard, actually defeats one of the biggest reasons why you’d want to write and submit articles in the first place. That is, to get other people to add your articles to their sites to increase back links for you.

And while we’re on the subject of back links, let’s look at why they’re so important . . .

When the search engines index sites, one of the things they look for is other sites they’re linked to. The purpose for this is they’re looking for popular information that a lot of people are using as a recommendation to their readers.

The more sites linking to a particular article or other web page, the greater the popularity of that article or site appears to be to the search engines.

So if an article appears on hundreds or even thousands of sites as a good reference, the search engines will also deem it good information and use it more readily as a listing during a search inquiry for related keywords.

But now the problem with changing an article over and over so that a different version appears on all other sites, is that each version would be considered a different article. So rather than a thousand sites all linking to one apparently very popular article, you’d have a thousand articles all being displayed on one site.

Considering that each appearance of an article on another site is like a “yes vote” to the search engines in their quest for popular information, which would you rather have?

A thousand articles all saying basically the same thing with one “yes vote” each? Or one article with a thousand “yes votes”?

Which would you think the search engines would pay more heed to?

So the bottom line on this train of thought is, if you want a lot of exposure from your articles, it would be better to write a number of good ones that teach or explain something different and get them posted to all sources.

Wouldn’t you say?

These are just a couple of facts that seem to bring the “duplication problem” some problems of its own.

So before you listen to those who teach that you need to concern yourself with it, it might be best to do a little research and a lot of logical thinking on your own.

To find out more about the duplication issue that no one else seems willing to talk about, go to:
http://doubleheadspecials.com and get the free report, “Don’t Get Duped About Duplication.”

There’s been a lot of talk and concern about duplicate content and what it means to your site’s relationship with the search engines. Many of the stories you might have heard are simply rumors and are not founded in any of the documentations the search engines provide.

To set matters straight, we’ve put together a free report that you can get at:

http://doubleheadspecials.com