AJN

Well I’m back from my holiday and ready to get back to business!  I notice that my Alexa rank has risen up again past the 150,000 mark!  Which is great news.

This site is now up to 143,556 as of the 21st of July 2008… Let’s hope it keeps rising and rising for the rest of the year as well.

It only hit me quite how good this ranking is when I went and visited the Forestry Commission of Great Britain’s website which is ranked at 145,107.

Note: not everybody likes alexa as they don’t believe it is a reliable ranking method.  Having said that, it’s still one of the best and only methods on the net at the moment.

You may or may not have noticed my special deal of the day offers on the right hand column of the site. I would like to explain what it is and what it is for.

I discovered the deal of the day offers at deal dot com. The offer is specially selected and then reviewed before going live to the public for quality.  There is never a bad product offered for on ajn1.com

Whats so special about them?

This deal is special because it is available for only 24 hours until the deal expires.  If you like the product you need to buy it asap because when it’s gone it’s gone.

If you don’t like the deal but like the idea of advertising it on your own website you can get a widget from maxblogpress.

Before you begin selling information products on the Internet, you want to make sure you’re targeting a niche that will be profitable for you in the short and long-term. A niche just means your target audience.

You will discover that some niches are much more profitable than others. You will have to examine your audience to make they are willing AND able to spend money in order to solve their problems.

For example, golf is a very expensive sport. Typically golfers have money to burn if they believe you can help them improve their score or beat out their friends (competition) on the links.

On the other side, a target market of single moms on a budget may not be willing to let go of $67 for your eBook on how to get organized. Sometimes, though, it depends on which of their problems you are trying to solve. They would like to get organized, but they need more money. Targeting this exact same niche of single moms, you might find that many are willing to pay $47 for your eBook showing them how to make more money working from home.

A good place to start exploring your target markets is with online groups and forums. You can find many at iVillage, Yahoo, Google or Boardtracker and determine which groups have the most interest. Men’s pages such as AskMen might give you some insight into the information needs of this group that might be provided at a profit.

You aren’t just looking for any broad group of people to cater to. You need to find those groups who have a lot of problems and are looking for easy solutions. In the beginning, you may want to build a series of products that all focus on one niche. This allows you to benefit from your own increased knowledge, as well as potential repeat customers.

In some cases, you will locate one large niche market but then realize you need to develop your product line toward a more targeted, narrow section of that niche. For example, parents have many problems you could potentially address. Raising smart kids, dealing with discipline, saving money and preventing drug use might be some.

But you can then narrow that niche to moms or dads and dig deeper by focusing on parents of multiples or parents raising kids with physical ailments. Just remember that an information product is not really a product at all - it’s a solution, so it needs to be marketed as something that will improve lives