Wes Cutshall

If you have an idea for an online business you often are faced with the option of designing your website for a broad market or a niche market. Do you want to sell Sporting Goods or exclusively Football Equipment? Just like in the real world, there are benefits of each option, but online has a different set of issues that will factor in your website’s success. Whether you are selling an actual product or simply building a website of information, you need to consider whether a broad market or niche market is the way to go.

In researching our competition I often find that they have decided to go for a broader market while still serving the same demographic that we do in our niche market. In most cases I find that they are less successful in marketing to a wider market than we have been marketing to a niche market. For example, Fido Finder which was built to market to “lost dog” owners has been more successful in than other “lost pet” website (and also more successful than any “lost dog” website). We get more animals registered per day than even the top “lost pet” websites. We learned early on that there is a benefit to marketing to a niche market when it comes to online marketing.

For most new websites your traffic will come in this order: online ads, word of mouth, and search engine results. Due to the Google algorithm, natural (free) Google search results will be one of the last ways that you get traffic to your new website. In the end, natural search results will be the king, but it takes time to get there, often many years. Up front you will be paying for most of your visitors and then enter a pattern of paying for something more like 15-20% of your visitors while getting the rest from word of mouth and natural search results. Your goal should be to end up with the majority of your traffic coming from word of mouth and natural search results. Niche marketing can get you there.

Online Advertising

Any new website has to advertise to get started, period. You’re not just going to be on the news after a week of having a website. Using Google Adwords as a model, the cost of your ads will be determined by the popularity of the keywords that you want to see your ad next to. If you decide to sell Sporting Goods you have to compete for space on Google’s search results with every other sporting goods website. Some of these websites will be willing to spend much more per click than you are willing to spend on your startup. If Dick’s Sporting Goods, Sports Authority, and Academy are all bidding $0.30+ a click you’ll have to bid up there with them in order to get a decent volume of visitors from your ad. Conversely, advertising for “football equipment” produces a different subset of advertisers. East Bay, a large catalog company, is the only big company competing for that keyword. You can now bid for the number two spot without losing money on each customer acquisition. In general, niche Pay-Per-Click (PPC) keyword marketing will be cheaper than broad keyword marketing. Since online ads will be your first source of traffic it’s much cheaper to start a successful niche website versus a broad market website.

Word of Mouth

Links from Facebook and other social websites have become a top source of visitors to all of our websites over the last 2 years. Having a Facebook presence (page) definitely helps, but word of mouth via social networking is a very good source of traffic without having a popular Facebook page. Having Facebook users, bloggers, and people on Twitter talking about your website all fit under Word of Mouth as far as online goes. Having a niche website actually increases your chances that users will start talking about your website with their friends, online and offline. Although your market might be smaller, the passion of your customers is usually higher. Everyone knows that one friend they have that is in 5 football fantasy leagues, but rarely do we know that we have a friend who plays 5 different sports. People who are passionate about one specific thing tend to discuss it more often, with a higher energy, than those who have a more rounded interest. Getting links from football-related Facebook groups is much more likely than getting links for a general sporting goods website from a general sports-related Facebook group, for example. Online forums fall under this category as well. Most online forums are built for a specific niche. Becoming a well-known website within those niche forums could garner a great deal of traffic. It’s just more likely that your startup will spread like wildfire through word of mouth around these niche markets than in a broad market.

Search Results

Once your website is established there is no doubt that search engine results are the king of traffic. The most important thing you can do for your new website is focus on becoming #1 for your keyword. It’s going to take 1-3 years for most websites to even have a chance, but you should do the work to get there. It’s a lot of work to get the #1 listing but if you get it it’s worth every penny. You’ll get 2-5x the traffic from being #1 versus #5 for the same search term. This means you’ll spend less money on online advertising as you’re getting so much free traffic. A high website ranking is based on your website score. Good Search Engine Optimization (SEO) will greatly increase your chances of being in the #1 spot.

In SEO you optimize your website for a specific keyword or set of keywords. When people search for XYX you want your site to show up. This means you have to have this keyword all over your website as well as have this keyword in or around all the links that link to your website. If you decide to build a Football Equipment website all the links to your website will have “football” in them, and often “equipment”, “gear”, or some other keyword accompanying “football.” This will make your website rank very well for “football equipment” if you get enough links and perform all the right on-page optimization techniques. If instead you build a Sporting Goods website and want to rank well for “football equipment”, “basketball shoes”, “baseball bats”, “soccer balls”, etc, you have a lot more work to do, and are frankly less likely to be successful at ranking for all, or any, of those keywords. A website that is strictly SEO’d for “baseball bats” will usually rank higher than the baseball bat section of your sporting goods website. In some markets it’s much more likely for a person to actually search for the niche keywords than the general category.

Online it’s much more important to have a website that can do well with SEO techniques than a website that mimics a real world store. If your website concept does not SEO well you will always be paying high dollar for advertising and have a hard time ever getting “free” visitors. The most valid site for a keyword will always show up at the top of the list. For example, although we all know Amazon is the king of online books, etc, Barnes & Noble actually shows up first in the natural search results when you search for “books” in Google. This is because all of their website content and links to their website focus around the keyword “books”. They get all that free traffic for ranking well for “books” while Amazon has to rely on other methods (word of mouth/advertising/brand recognition).

Unless you have a large marketing budget it’s going to be hard to get your broad market website to get the same amount of traffic as the #1 site for a subcategory of products you sell. For example, although my company could have created a Lost Pets website, it is more successful to develop a Lost Dogs (FidoFinder.com) and Lost Cats (TabbyTracker.com) website separately because of the factor of search engine traffic. Each website does better in registering a high volume of dogs and cats, respectively, than any other Lost Pets website does. The same goes for our website Naming Force. Although other websites offer product naming among their slew of crowdsourcing options (logo design, copywriting, website design, etc) we get more naming projects than any of our competitors do. When you search for “crowdsource naming” we come up first. Our website also appears before our competitors for other keywords such as “business names”, etc. We focus strictly on naming businesses, and Google knows that.

This is a good except from Wikipedia about niche marketing online:

“An often used technique for affiliate marketers is Internet-based niche segments of larger markets, referred to as niches, a website can be developed and promoted quickly to uniquely serve a targeted and usually loyal customer base, giving the affiliate a small but regular income stream. This technique is then repeated across several other niche websites until a desired income level is achieved. A bigger niche is harder to market to as the expense of online advertisements increases according to the popularity of the keywords used (on Adwords, for example).”

Conclusion

Online niche marketing is the fastest method of growth for a new business. Getting a business off the ground is more important than the overall potential to serve a business has. Just because you can do everything doesn’t mean you should market yourself as being able to. If you never make a profit it doesn’t matter how versatile your website or business was. Online, niche marketing is the way to go for rapid, affordable, marketing of a business. If you decide to expand on your initial product offering, the way Amazon has, that’s fine, but starting out by being known for selling one thing, or one group of things, is much a cheaper option and gains traction much quicker. This will increase your success rate ten-fold.

Full Tilt Poker has an affiliate system that allows you to get paid on new player registrations. I won’t get into the affiliate payout structure in this blog, but it can be profitable to be an affiliate if you can successfully convince players to register and deposit money on Full Tilt. This blog post is specifically dedicated to one of Full Tilt’s affiliate tools, the private affiliate tournament. I ran into some issues when I tried to create my first tournament so I thought it would be helpful to share some information that you can’t find on the Full Tilt affiliate website.

Tournaments as an Affiliate Tool

The concept behind the private affiliate tournaments is that you can offer a private tournament that you can advertise on your website. Affiliates can use this tournament to entice players to register on Full Tilt in order to play in their special tournament. Because your goal as an affiliate is to get new players to sign up, one of the best ways to use tool is to offer a freeroll tournament where you fund the prize pool. This will entice new players to register with intentions of playing in your tournament with no risk. After they have a good time playing in your tournament the hope is that they consider depositing money in order to play in other tournaments hosted by Full Tilt. This is where you can start to make money as an affiliate.

Create Tournament

After you create a Full Tilt affiliate account you can request an affiliate tournament through the affiliate console. Simply sign in and click the Online Marketing > Tournament Request menu item. You have a few options when requesting the tournament such as game type (Texas Hold’Em, Omaha, etc) , Turbo/Non-turbo, 6-max, etc. This part of the setup is straight forward. If you are hosting a freeroll be sure to click “Money Added” and enter your Full Tilt username. You will need to have the amount in your account at the time that Full Tilt gets your request. Be sure to click “freeroll” or else the tournament will need a buy-in amount. After you have requested a tournament and are contacted by Full Tilt you will have a decision to make. Choosing a registration format is where the headaches began for me.

3 Tournament Registration Options

Tournament ID and Password

Full Tilt offers affiliates 3 ways players can register for private tournaments. The first option is a tournament ID and password that you share with your potential players. This sounds like a very secure option but I assure you it is not. I found out the hard way that there are websites dedicated to listing nothing but freeroll tournament ID’s and passwords. Players (or someone else?) leak tournament details to these websites and you can have hundreds or thousands of uninvited players register in your tournament. Since you can’t make money off of already registered Full Tilt players, this is not what you want as an affiliate. I don’t recommend this option for registration as it seems to have a large hole in the security. My first tournament had 500 (what was set as the max) players register overnight before I could even fully advertise the freeroll to my potential players. I’m not sure who leaked the information, but the first registration process definitely didn’t go as I had planned. Luckily I was able to have Full Tilt recreate the tournament with a different registration method. The Full Tilt support was good but most responses took 24-36 hours.

Affiliate ID Registration

Full Tilt offers a method of registration tied to your affiliate ID. This sounds like a great feature, but it’s implemented in a way that makes it not very useful. Since this type of registration is web-based, I assumed that only players who had clicked my banner ad, and therefore were assigned my affiliate ID in their cookies, would be able to register. This would prevent tournament ID and password scraping on other websites since the way these websites work is that they have their own affiliate ID’s that they are trying to push with their list of stolen ID’s and passwords. But, this is not what this type of registration is. Affiliate ID registration instead restricts the registration to only players who were associated with your affiliate ID when they signed up with Full Tilt. So this tournament can only reward people who have already signed up for Full Tilt after clicking your banner ad. Although it would be great to be able to fill up a tournament with 100% newly registered players, offering a freeroll tournament only to people who are willing to set up new accounts probably won’t show much success. I feel that it can be much more successful if you offer a freeroll to anyone affiliated with your website and just hope that a percentage of these players will have to register in order to play. Host a tournament that appears to be a reward for a long relationship with your website instead of looking like an out-right sales attempt.

Username Registration

The most secure method for registering players for your affiliate tournament is for you provide a list of Full Tilt usernames to the Full Tilt private tournament support staff. You will have to collect usernames and email them at least 24 hours prior to the tournament. Luckily when you request an affiliate tournament the staff does contact you through email so you will then have a way to contact them if you have any questions, or when it is time to supply your player username list. This is the registration method I now use because of all the problems I had with the other methods. If you can, send the list in a full week early so that any mistyped usernames can be discovered and corrected before the tournament.

Suggestions

The affiliate tournament request form allows you to request a standard tournament where players pay their own entry free or a freefoll tournament that is funded by your Full Tilt account. I can see how a website or business with tens of thousands of dedicated fans could run a monthly tournament where players are expected to fund their own buy-in. Maybe this is related to some type of poker league, or maybe a special bounty on an individual is offered each time in order to entice players. For most websites they will have to offer a freeroll tournament in order to get people to play in their special tournament. With the availability of tournaments at any stakes on Full Tilt you’re going to have to offer something special in order to get players to play in your game. I suggest putting a bounty on yourself and advertising this bounty to your players. Since your goal is to get new sign ups, and not necessarily to win the tournament, offer a $100 bounty for whoever can knock you out of the tournament – encouraging all players to gun for you. Find a creative way to inform your players of your Full Tilt username that they will need in order to gun for you. I recommend integrating Facebook “likes” in order to reveal your username so that you can get dual benefit from this tournament. Not only do you get a chance to sign up players for your affiliate account, but you can increase your website exposure through a bunch of new “likes” in your Facebook page from people looking for your username. You’ll need to learn a little bit about Facebook development to implement a fans-only tab, but it’s not that hard.

I just got some of my websites set up in Google Ad Manager and it’s pretty cool what you can do. Previously I had all of my ad networks running directly on the websites, simple cut and paste of the network’s code. If the ad block was Google AdSense, I had the ability to load alternate ads if Google couldn’t find ads for the keywords on the page. This increased the number of ads being run, but I didn’t have a lot of options for really maximizing my ad revenue. For example, one of the networks, Advertising.com (owned by AOL), only pays for impressions / clicks from U.S. visitors. Without subscribing to an IP geolocation database, which I’ve found to not be accurate – at least at the city level, I didn’t have a way (or reason) to limit ads to displaying to U.S. visitors only. So although I was registered with ad networks that allow me to monetize non-U.S. traffic (CPX Interactive), if my ad block is for a U.S.-only ad network I was showing ads to thousands of people a day who I cannot make money off of. With Google Ad Manager I have the ability to set certain ads, which can be ad network JavaScript code, to only show for certain geo-targeting settings, and when these values are not met other ads can show in the same ad slot. And in a reverse scenario of what I described earlier, if the goe-targeting settings (for example) restrict an ad network’s ad from showing for a user you can allow AdSense to show ads in its place.

The main purpose of Ad Manager is to allow you to accept direct ads from advertisers and run them on your websites, among your ad network ads. This too is a feature I want to take advantage of, but even without utilizing this (yet), using Ad Manager for managing your ad networks is a pretty awesome if you want to maximize your ad revenue.