Niche marketing is hot these days. Membership sites pop up everywhere inviting you to make tons of money. All you have to do is find or buy the highest paying Adsense ads and add them to your pages filled with automatically generated content. That’s NOT niche marketing, that’s Adsense marketing. It’s a numbers game and it’s dangerous. I’ll explain that below. How did this so called Niche Marketing develop? Solid niche marketing advice already existed for some time. Very often you were advised to follow your passion or expertise and set up a site for that. Then, RSS feed techniques lead to software programs that scrape content from directories. You have to do absolutely nothing but entering a bunch of keywords and presto … thousands of new content rich pages are automatically added to your niche site. And when Joel Comm presented his Adsense Secrets showing how he went from $30 a day to $500 a day – mind you, a good book with solid advice, no doubt about that- suddenly we had three variables that are responsible for the hype: 1. niche marketing, 2. content generating software and 3. high paying Adsense keywords. Let’s have a look at each of these variables in reverse order. High paying Adsense keywords. Suddenly someone discovered that there are certain keywords that are of great value. Advertisers paid a lot of money to have their products displayed on pages using these specific keywords. It was said that a keyword like ‘mesothelioma’ or derivates would pay 50 to 70 dollars a click. I just entered this in Google Adwords, bidding 90$ per click and it returned with an estimated number of clicks per day of 6.2. Now, these figures are just estimates, but if this is true, with a 1% click-thru it means you would have to wait about 16 days to earn my 90 dollars! Again, just assumptions, I only want to make a point. Adsense is a numbers game. You’ll need thousands of visitors AND good click-thru’s to make decent money. To get thousands of visitors you either have to buy traffic (Adwords or other PPC’s) or create search engine friendly pages. Now, type in ‘mesothelioma’ in Google and observe the PageRanks of the resulting pages. PR 5 or higher! Hard job to beat them! That means … work! To get great click-thru’s you’ll have to test where you place your Adsense code. Dang, even more work! But there’s something else, something more important. Read this carefully … Do you really believe … that advertisers are going to pay that much money only … to have their expensive ads displayed on … automatically generated content pages? Huh … do you … huh? OF COURSE THEY WON’T! There’s a fine line you have to follow playing the Adsense game. And generating content automatically, no matter where it comes from, is like walking an elephant over a paper bridge. It kills the system! Now, let’s have a look at … Content generating software I’m sure in the past you have used the search engines to find information about a specific topic only to find that if you click the resulting pages … you’ll see another ‘search-engine’-like page. That was the work of a niche marketer (specific info) scraping search engine result pages (SERP’s) with ‘page generating software’ to quickly generate thousands of pages about the topic. Search engines don’t like that. You see, they are looking for great, valuable and original content. That’s what they want to provide to their users so they keep coming back. And here’s another biggie … they want SATISFIED ADVERTISERS! The last thing they’ll need is another copy of their own pages. And that’s exactly what this software will generate. Mind you, the software IS good, it does exactly what it promises. I’ve used one of these packages long time ago and that one certainly DID work. But this kind of software also leaves fingerprints for the search engines who are getting smarter all the time. Eventually they will discover automatically generated content, ignore these pages of even penalize them. That’s why I stopped using such software long, long time ago. The only way to use this kind of software in a responsible way is to change the templates that come with the package. And to do that right means … (a lot of) work. And that’s something that wasn’t included in the deal! These days this strategy has changed into scraping articles from directories. All you have to do is enter a keyword and presto … an article containing that keyword is placed in your page. That won’t work either and for the same two reasons: fingerprints and copies. Search engines don’t like duplicate content and that’s exactly what this software generates. The latest trick is software that uses a thesaurus to change article content on the fly. Apart from copyright issues, I’ve seen results of that and they were just hilarious. If you want to use reprint articles for keyword rich content, you have to at least add some unique content to the page. You could write a review or your own opinion telling what you think is good and bad about the article that you posted below. Dang, work again! Publishing a reprint article every now and then won’t hurt you, but it does when you do nothing else. And the article content better fit well into your pages and even into your site. If it’s way of topic, you won’t get far. Here’s a great tip: find unique Public Domain Software! Go here: http://www.anownsite.com/products/public-domain/ Now, let’s go down to the core of the business … Niche Marketing Let’s define a niche first: A niche is just a tiny, (highly) specialized marketplace. A marketplace means that there’s demand and supply. Basically there are two ways to enter a niche: 1. follow your passion (supply) or 2. follow the money (demand). If you follow your passion it will be easy to develop content: you’re the expert and you do what you love. But you still have to find out if the passion you’re following is profitable! And if you follow the money, you’re already on the right track, but you will have a difficult time to develop content. Recently I found one on Ebay. But I didn’t do a thing with it. Know why? Cause I don’t know squat about millinery! (THERE you have it! a niche market!) In order to follow the money, you have to develop some … passion for the niche otherwise you can’t fill your site properly. So, either way you have to do something extra. Now, let’s redefine a niche. Let’s define a … profitable niche! A profitable niche is a highly specialized marketplace with few competitors, high demand and money to pay for that demand. That’s what you have to find out. “Gheesssss Case, you really make it sound like … eh … work!” Not necessarily. If you have no idea how to do that, read my article about niche markets. http://www.anownsite.com/articles/niche-markets.shtml It’s just to give you an idea. Right now I’m working on a special guide on how to find profitable niches, so stay tuned. If you don’t want to do all the work to find profitable niches, just have a look at the 50 hot niches that were selected by niche expert James. B. Allen. http://www.anownsite.com/products/niches/index.html Or, if you act quickly, you can join what looks like a very, very promising and brand new niche site where everything already is done for you called Niche Site Special. http://www.anownsite.com/cgi-bin/u.cgi?nss Now, if you really have found your niche and you’ve found profitable affiliate programs that you can gently pre-sell, then and only then you can consider adding Adsense to your pages. Provided that you deliver unique, high value content! You CAN add some reprint articles, but most of your content should be yours. And you’d better use a search engine optimized website for that! (Right now I’m developing such a system, so again, stay tuned.) Bottom line: you still have to do some work or buy the results of such work! THAT is the right way to perform niche marketing! Have fun! Case Stevens