Edge Out Competitors and Become a Thought Leader in Your Niche
How are you coming along with your online business? I encourage you to look into a niche and discover if it has the potential for profits. If you hit on an idea where there are paying customers, then you’ll want to tap into that niche until you exhaust it. Let’s discuss some backend tactics that allow you to edge out competitors and help you to become a thought leader in your niche.
You may have already worked on strategies to position yourself as an expert when you created and launched your first information product. So since your audience is now looking at you as the authority figure, it’s time to provide what they need once again.
This is what’s known as your backend product line. You have an original product and a customer list – so you need something else they can order from the catalog of items your niche may need. Let’s look at a few examples:
Let’s say you chose to tap into golf as your niche. Your first product was Golf for Beginners. It did well, and you developed a following of interested fans who liked how you taught them the basics of the game. What’s your next step?
You’ll want to brainstorm all of the problems that golfers have so that you can create individual products that address their needs. Here are some examples off the top of my head:
· How to Shave 5 Points Off Your Game Around the Green
· Choosing the Best Clubs for Each Shot
· How to Bet (and Win) on the Links Every Saturday Morning
· Gearing Up for the PGA Tour – Taking Your Talents to the Pro-Am Level
Do you see how I’m catering to the audience? Not everyone will be seeking to go on the PGA tour, but some of your readers will. Not everyone will believe in gambling, but lots of golfers put the chips on the table when they tee up as a weekend warrior. Let’s look at another example:
Your first product was an eBook on Maximizing Your Health Over 40. It addressed men and women’s concerns about how to live a healthier life when you’re considered “Over the Hill.” Follow up (or backend empire-building) products could be:
· How to Keep Your Blood Pressure Down Without Medication
· Energizing Your Body by Energizing Your Mind
· Staving Off Arthritis (or Osteoporosis)
· The Cure for Male Pattern Baldness
· Hormone Replacement Therapy Alternatives
Notice some of these would be good for men and women, but some are targeted at separate genders. You can produce narrowed niches within your broad niche all the time. Sometimes the more narrowed niche is more profitable.
For a Writer’s Guide, I could develop other products my audience may be interested in. Since I know they’re writers, then anything to do with that topic could be what they’re looking for:
· How to Write a Killer Query Letter
· Getting an Agent to Say Yes to Your Manuscript
· Promotional Tour Dos and Don’ts
· A Guide to Conducting Interviews
· Contract Negotiations for Writers
Or, since the audience reading this eBook is learning the ropes about Internet marketing, which is in itself an enormous topic, I could write thorough eBooks on every online marketing topic – like blogging, website creation, and affiliate marketing.
You get the point.
A lot of your backend ideas to edge out competitors will come from your keyword research – another reason it’s so vital to your online success. If I see that technical writing has a huge following, then I might create a Writer’s Guide to Technical Writing or something like, “How to Find Technical Writing Jobs on the internet.”
Always be adding to your file of ideas, and when the time comes that your last product is launched and automated with sales, move on to the next idea and follow this guide from start to finish again.
Marketing online is a business that has unlimited potential due to the sheer size of your target audience (global) and the limited number of people who know about online marketing.
Like I’ve said since coming online in 2006… It’s not a get-rich-quick scheme. But you can definitely have the opportunity to tap into a market that delivers financial security like you never knew existed. I continue to be amazed with the wonder of working a few hours a day from home, or from wherever I happen to be in the world with a laptop computer and internet access.
I told my friend one day, when speaking with her about online marketing: “It’s work…but it works incredibly well!” I heard this from one of my guru mentor friends. You can’t expect to launch a shoddy site and not drive traffic to your product, which you created on a whim without any research, and expect to make any sales. Think about your goals and use the strategies I’m sharing here to edge out competitors and become a respected thought leader in your niche.
I’m bestselling Wall Street Journal and USA Today author, marketing strategist, and entrepreneur Connie Ragen Green and I would love to connect further with you to help you to achieve your goals. If you are interested in learning how to optimize the syndication of your content, please take a look at my popular Syndication Optimization Training Course and consider coming aboard to increase your visibility, credibility, and profitability.