HOW TO FIND YOUR NICHE MARKET ON THE WEB

Written by P J Chandler


FIND YOUR NICHE MARKET ON THE WEB

by Phil Chandler

With over 30 million web pages competing for attention, what chance doesrepparttar small business promoter have to get their share of visitors and - more important - paying customers?

The answer lies not in trying to be everything to everyone, but in carving for yourself a neatly-defined niche in this huge marketplace.

As a small player, it is a waste of your precious time and energy to attempt to compete withrepparttar 121373 Big Names onrepparttar 121374 web. Don't bother setting up a site selling books and going head-to-head with Amazon and Barnes & Noble. If you really want to sell books, choose a specialist subject area that nobody else has covered - that way you stand a chance of pulling in some traffic when surfers search on your subject.

The more specialised your product or service,repparttar 121375 more important it is to target your message carefully and accurately to potential customers.

Whatever you sell, it will appeal most to that percentage ofrepparttar 121376 web population who stand to gain clear and direct benefits from their purchase. They are your target market and time invested in finding out everything you can about these people is well spent.

So think about what you are selling. What benefits are you really offering? So your Stop Snoring Spray works on 90% of people tested - great! But who benefits from using your spray? Mayberepparttar 121377 snorer - but more likely whoever is sleeping with them! Your customers may not berepparttar 121378 snorers themselves, but their partners. Here is your niche - find ways of reaching people whose partners keep them awake at night with their snoring.

The same applies to information products. Let's say you have written an ebook aboutrepparttar 121379 postage stamps of Brazil. Who are your customers? Stamp collectors, obviously - and more specifically, those who specialize in Brazilian - or at least, South American - stamps. They may be few in number, but they will be so grateful that you have takenrepparttar 121380 trouble to provide them with what they need that you can probably charge a premium for your ebook to make up forrepparttar 121381 relatively small number of sales.

Top 10 Biggest Mistakes of Website Design

Written by Scott Whitney


Author: Scott Whitney Contact: swhitney@whitcom.com Website: http://www.whitcom.com Word Count: 1404 (including resource box/author info) Title: "Top 10 Biggest Mistakes of Website Design"

Description: This article details critical mistakes made during website design, development, and deployment.

Publication Rules:

Copyright 2002 (c) Scott Whitney, All Rights Reserved. Permission is granted to reprintrepparttar following article, in your publication or website, as long as no changes are made torepparttar 121372 copyright info, andrepparttar 121373 author information is also included with repparttar 121374 article. Minor editing torepparttar 121375 article is permitted.

~ You may not use this article in UCE (Unsolicited Commercial Email). Email distribution of this article must be opt-in email only. ~ You must forward a copy ofrepparttar 121376 ezine or newsletter that contains repparttar 121377 article inside torepparttar 121378 author at: swhitney@whitcom.com ~If you post this article on a website, you must setrepparttar 121379 links up as hyperlinks, and you must send us a copy ofrepparttar 121380 URL whererepparttar 121381 article is posted.

==================Begin Article HERE======================== Top 10 Biggest Mistakes of Website Design By Scott Whitney Copyright © 2002 All Rights Reserved

Here's a seemingly easy question: What isrepparttar 121382 goal of EVERY website inrepparttar 121383 world?

Ask this question of most website developers, andrepparttar 121384 answer will berepparttar 121385 same; "Uh, that depends on what you want, Mr. Cu$tomer."

The *real* answer, however, is quite clear:

The goal of EVERY website inrepparttar 121386 world is to increaserepparttar 121387 probability of engagement (withrepparttar 121388 visitor, so you can sell, support, or tell your story), and decreaserepparttar 121389 risk of exit (from repparttar 121390 site, resulting in competitive engagement).

To that end, there are three (3) areas of interest that must be addressed when developing and maintaining a website:

~ Technical ~ Design ~ Marketing

Technical Mistakes --------------------------

1. Not taking advantage ofrepparttar 121391 medium (or, I Can't Breathe!). Surprisingly enough, some ofrepparttar 121392 BIGGEST Websites inrepparttar 121393 world fail to actually putrepparttar 121394 technology available to them to work. What do we mean? Specifically, DOES THE SITE B-R-E-A-T-H-E?

A Breathe-able site is one that is able to automatically reformat its content to fit a user's screen, regardless of their screen size. When designing a website, in order to makerepparttar 121395 experience pleasurable and as user-friendly as possible, make sure that regardless ofrepparttar 121396 visitor's screen size,repparttar 121397 contents fits perfectly. In other words, if you design your site for a user with a 640 x 480 screen, anybody with a bigger screen (800 x 600, 1024 x 768, etc.) will be forced to look at a BUNCH of white space.

Interestingly enough, folks who come fromrepparttar 121398 desktop publishing world create many ofrepparttar 121399 sites that do this. And while they often make pretty Websites, theirs is a world where a dynamic, re- sizable "page" didn't exist. Well, it does today, so if you REALLY want to makerepparttar 121400 experience a pleasurable one for your visitor, takerepparttar 121401 time to make your site BREATHE!

2. Forcing a visitor to scroll from left to right Have you even been to a Website where you found yourself having to scrollrepparttar 121402 screen left to right to read allrepparttar 121403 content? Chances are, you have. Chances are also that after a while, you decided against doing much of it. This is mainly because, while it is intuitive to read down a page, it's less so left to right.

The visual distraction of having content cut offrepparttar 121404 right side is very disconcerting. You'll see a great many sites do this forrepparttar 121405 simple reason thatrepparttar 121406 developer forced an absolute size width of his web page, instead of allowing it to fit withinrepparttar 121407 users screen (see #1). Bottom line? If you make your visitor scroll from left to right, they'll likely stroll to another site.

3. Dead Links There really is no excuse for this one. Every Website development environment worth its salt hasrepparttar 121408 ability to checkrepparttar 121409 integrity of all its internal links. And although it may not be able to checkrepparttar 121410 integrity of links that lead a user somewhere outside of your site, if it's important enough to link to, isn't it important enough to see if it exists?

Design Mistakes ----------------------------------

4. Ransom Note Design Sites that suffer from this mistake fall into three categories;

~ Sites that spent time on creating a nice home page, but forgot that a visitor might actually go beyond that page,

~ Sites whose webmaster is determined to use every color, font, graphic, and animated logo and cool Flash movie he can get his hands on, and

~ Sites that fail to use a consistent formatting technique.

For those folks inrepparttar 121411 first category, you're simply setting up your visitor to be VERY disappointed once he ventures beyond your opening screen. It also implies a lack of follow through and continuity, which does not reflect well onrepparttar 121412 Website owner.

Cont'd on page 2 ==>
 
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