One way to guarantee failure of your Internet business is to try to be everything to everybody. Unless your pockets are incredibly deep, the broadbush or 'mall' approach won't work for your small business. The cost to advertise to people across a large number of interest categories is prohibitive; and untargeted, unfocused visitors don't buy products. To attract focused, interested visitors, you yourself must become focused and interested in your subject matter. First you pick a topic, and then refine it. And then you refine it some more. And some more.

Let's say that you're a sports enthusiast. You know that millions of people are also interested in sports, and you'd be willing to bet that 'sports' would be a lucrative niche and search term to advertise, right? Well, you're right on the first count, but you'd lose money on second. Let's check out the demand using Overture's search term suggestion tool:

Overture Search Term Suggestion Tool

Although Overture reported over 800,000 searches for the term 'sports' in April 2003, and you can have the top listing for the term for a 'mere' 21 cents, how many sales might you expect to generate with that popular term?

Not many!

Even if only one percent of that 800,000 searchers visited your site, and you had the top listing at twenty-one cents, my guess is that you just wasted $1,680.00. The term 'sports' is just too unspecific. If while doing keyword research using the search term suggestion tool at Overture, you looked one line below 'sports', you'd see that the second entry is 'sports car' with more almost 200 hundred thousand searches, or one quarter of all the searches that included the term 'sports'.

The key is to find what people want, and then give it to them. Simple, eh? So let's take your interest in sports a step further and define it as particular interest in the spectator sports; baseball, football, soccer and hockey. How about sports trading cards? They're small to store as inventory and inexpensive to ship, which makes them a good mail order product. A quick peek at Overture reveals that searches in April 2003 for 'baseball cards' exceeded 42,000, 'sport cards' had 10,338 queries and 'sports memorabilia' was searched for 10,649 times. Come up with a list of highly targeted keywords and you'll soon reach that lofty number of 800,000 .... but all of whom have a specific focus, and a PROVEN interest in your product.

Set yourself apart even further.

Rather than competing directly with ten or twenty advertisers at Overture who also sell trading cards, you could write a report or small ebook called "Collectors Secrets Revealed: How to Make a Fortune with Sports Trading Cards". Not only would you sell the report from your own site, you could also joint venture with some of those other advertisers and have them promote your report on their sites. Everybody wins!

After the ball is rolling on your sports card trading site, it's time to build another niche site in a non-competing topic. And then another. The key to success for small online businesses is to build a number of highly targeted sites across a diverse array of topics. Therefore, if one topic experiences a seasonal or market-induced drop in traffic, the others will continue to generate income.

Yes, the niche marketing method requires somewhat more effort than building one site with a hundred banners, but it's also the method that makes a profit. Either way takes work - you might as well make your work profitable.

What could be better than an opportunity to make money using the power of affiliate marketing, while avoiding the hassle of having to build a site or pay to host your domain? Wouldn't it also be wonderful to have someone else do the work of sending traffic to your site? Basically, you just sit back and wait for those huge commission checks to roll in. Sound too good to be true? Good, because you guessed it. If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

I'm referring to affiliate 'links' opportunity sites that are becoming increasingly popular. 'All' you have to do is promote the site. In these schemes, you are given a free site into which you insert your affiliate link. That link becomes the 'featured link' on your site. Featured link? Picture a site like Yahoo!, then try to pick out one link as being featured. Can't do it, can you? As the owner of a fr*ee site, you also earn a paltry commission when you sell one of these sites to someone else. Earning a commission on the sale of a product or service from which no one benefits sounds like ML*M to me.

Now here's the good part. For a 'small fee' the company promises to do 'all the work' of building masses of traffic to your affiliate site. Oh wait. Before you can earn commissions from those links, you'll have to JOIN all those programs first. Until then, the links belong to the person who gave you the fr*ee site, and any sales made from those links will be credited to him, not you. Considering those sites typically consist of hundreds, and sometimes thousands, of links to various affiliate programs, it's starting to look like you're going to have to do some work, doesn't it?

Do you really want to pay the 'small fee' of fifty or sixty dollars a month for the privilege of generating commissions for someone else? Instead, you could buy a web site template for twenty bucks that looks a hundred times nicer than the affiliate links site design. Then you pay ten bucks a month to host your own site and join all the same affiliate programs. Actually, you probably wouldn't want to join all the same programs. Many of these affiliate links lead to sites and products that you wouldn't want to buy yourself. Do you want to risk your business reputation by offering them to your site's visitors?

Don't forget that the same offer is made to thousands of people every day, each of them looking for the same magic bullet - the quick and easy business opportunity. That means that there are copies of 'your' site all over the web, and more coming online everyday. So much for being unique. Not having a niche has another disadvantage. How many surfers will find your flea market affiliate link site when they are searching for 'handheld computer' or 'treadmills'? Approximately none. Niche sites get ranked by the search engines while flea markets don't get found.

All in all, these 'opportunities' are a waste of time and money, and benefit only the scheme's originator. Real affiliate marketing opportunities abound, and many have excellent potential for earning serious income. Thousands of affiliate marketers enjoy very large incomes by promoting merchant programs and products. While they avoid the hassles of carrying inventory, order processing and customer service - super affiliates do not avoid effort. They know that success comes from investing time, effort and the forging of one's own path.

In other words, do the work, reap the rewards.

About the Author

Rosalind is a recognized expert of affiliate marketing. Her recently released ebook, the "Super Affiliate Handbook: How I Made $436,797 Last Year Selling Other People's Products Online" is receiving rave reviews throughout the I-marketing community. Check it out at: http://superaffiliatehandbook.com