Entries fromAugust 2007

Word of Mouth Marketing (WOMM) is a form of promotional campaign which operates through an individual’s personal recommendations of specific brands, products or services.

Like its literal meaning, word-of-mouth marketing spreads from one person to another outside of a formalized setting, without heavy intervention by advertisers.

A recommendation from someone familiar and trust-worthy is the easiest path to a product sale, link or new subscriber. Why? Because recommendations are generally perceived as incentive-free, unlike the obvious motivation of advertisers, who may over-promise in a bid to increase sales.

Niche communities like forums, social networks and even large blogs all start from ground zero with no registered users, visitors or members. Promoting your website and getting people interested enough to join and support your site is a challenge.

I’ve seen many forums and social networks stagnate in growth after a big launch campaign, even if they have attractive site designs or initial promo schemes which appeal to a wide audience.

Community building is an on-going task that requires strategic planning and consistent marketing efforts, even when your community is relatively established.

Her numbers are indeed impressive. 17 years old high school dropout. Made more than $1 million. Earns as much as $70K a month. Owns a website that attracts more than 7 million monthly visitors and 60 million page views.

Her first Adsense paycheck was $2,790 and she has already rejected a $1.5 million buyout offer. I’m referring to Ashley Qualls, the founder of Whateverlife.com, a free MySpace layouts website.

Fastcompany recently published a fascinating feature article on Ashley, a teenage entrepreneur from Detroit who has made a substantial amount of money online by targeting a niche market (girls on Myspace/social networks) and fulfilling their needs.

Creativity and a willingness to experiment are qualities of a successful online entrepreneur. If your website isn’t making you the money that you expect, try operating in a new niche or adopting a fresh business model and monetization strategy that works.

After all, your personal experience and skill sets are transferable. What you are already applying to a specific website or business can be easily implemented in another industry with great success.

So just how do you discover new websites and business models that are profitable?

Starting a new website within a competitive niche can be difficult because you often do not have the ability to compete with other sites for traffic, particularly if they are well established sites which fulfill informational or product needs in an excellent way.

To compete against these type of sites on search engines, you’ll need to get some quality incoming links from other trusted websites, which will build some authority for your domain.

This can be difficult to achieve unless you offer some outstanding products, innovative ideas or attractive and unique content.

Web traffic for most websites drop during the weekend because less people are using the internet to look for information or checking their favorite websites for new content.

This is a natural and inevitable occurrence and a corresponding dip in traffic figures or sales is nothing to be alarmed about.

Jay Wilson recently asked if I had any recommendations to stop traffic from reducing during the weekends and as a matter of fact, I do have some suggestions that might work, although they will require some effort on your part.

I’ve been writing about Get Paid to Websites ever since I’ve started Dosh Dosh, although I’ve stopped tracking the industry for some time, because I’ve developed a greater interest in internet marketing and the building of websites for profit.

New Get Paid To websites are frequently set up by entrepreneurs interested in making some money. While the barrier of entry is low, the GPT industry is already saturated and heavy on competition.

However, some of the early pioneers in the get paid to industry like Cashcrate and CashonTap are still around and their member base has grown considerably. Other less fortunate sites were not sustainable and shut down soon after their birth.

Many experts have claimed that having a clearly defined niche for your site is extremely important when you want to develop accumulative income from all your websites.

We’ve previously looked at how niche markets are related to making money and now I’ll like to deal with the subject of making money without a clearly defined niche.

Before that, let’s take a look at how most people generate income by positioning themselves within a niche. While there are many ways to make money online by going niche, they all commonly involve creating websites for various purposes.