Success is really what you want to make it, if you want to be the next big social networking scene than do it, but you’ve got a lot of challengers. Or, you can just try to be something unique and different all together. Niche markets exist for all areas of life and they’re going to draw a smaller audience than a broad topic but have less competition.

You can be a success in a small demographic more so than you can in a huge demographic. Much the way I chose a college, I could go to a smaller college and be known as someone or I could go to a huge college and be yet another number in a classroom of hundreds. I wanted to stand out without having to break through the thousands of peers. Was I looking for less of a challenge? No, I was looking to be seen for who I was: an individual with desires and motivations in a timely manner.

I’ve found the Internet follows much the same social structures. By picking an area to blog, talk or video yourself you’ll soon become somewhat of an expert in the field: no certification required. If you take it seriously, you’ll learn a ton of information along the way as you prepare your show notes, blog articles and news reporting. You’ll establish a small community of like-minded individuals that, hopefully, enjoy the content you are providing. You’ve got your niche and you’re ready to take it to the next level.

Now, you can establish relationships in your area of “expertise.” When you seek advertisers or look to establish partnership with others in your industry you’ll find plenty of great opportunities. If you run a show about beer cozy’s, you’ll be able to affiliate with folks making custom cozies, labeled cozies or beer products expanding beyond the cozy. You may not reach Coors Brewing Company’s attention, but who cares? You’ll find plenty of smaller businesses and individuals trying to make it in the industry, like yourself, by grouping together with like-minded folks.

You may find a person that can produce custom glassware, a shop looking for some promotions on their home brew accessories or small/local cozy manufacturers. One by one your circle of relationships grow and each one makes your brand stronger than the last. But, why would they want to work with you?

Because your community, the viewers of your content, want to know what you have to say. They’re not random readers, they are people that are interested in the topic you’re working in. They are the perfect eyes and ears to promote products and advertising; the industry is learning this quickly. Why bid on a google keyword “cozy” hoping someone will find your ad, click on it and be interested enough to buy it from you. Furthermore, what if they’re looking for a “cozy place” to vacation? Wrong audience.

However, had that cozy been talked about on a show by a host that’s passionate about the topic, someone you can relate to on a personal level (as often happens with viewers) then the game changes. Your community will get to know you, even if you’ve not met them all or communicated with them. You see this behavior all the time with celebrities who have tons of fans talking to them as if they’re their best friends – complete strangers! If you run a website, video podcast or audio show your fans will feel much the same, only in smaller quantities and with less insane fervor.

Do you trust a google ad or the word of someone you’ve grown to watch on internet shows, audio shows or a frequented blog? Most people won’t click a banner ad and those that do may still not purchase the product. You and your brand are more important than ever to these advertisers looking to spend their cash for the “biggest bang for the buck.”

In this down economy advertisers want to make more with less. Focused niche markets are a great place to experiment with little cash in hopes for a big return. You start a website about tea and write about tea for two months and you’ll probably find tea producers asking to ship you products so you can review them on your website or Internet show. You get free products, they get virtually free advertising and your community gets to learn about a product they may never have heard about otherwise.

It’s a win win situation. You win relationships and you win great content for your brand.

Podcasters track their downloads, watch for trends and do all they can to promote their show. That might be using SEO style techniques to get brand awareness in google to social networking with friends and strangers. If you google the keywords: gaming podcast you’ll notice my property: gamingpodcast.net arrives near first if not right at the top (depends on the day). Was that a coincidence? No, not really. Now google drinking podcast and you’ll have similar results: my properties arrive first.

That was key number one: free advertising via google for people looking for podcasts related to gaming and drinking (not always going hand-in-hand of course). Two years went by with almost no user feedback in my gaming podcast, but each episode was going from ten downloads a week to twenty, and thirty and fifty then one hundred and so one… but who was listening? Silence.

I was #1 on my google search terms which brought an expanding audience but still very little in terms of feedback. The first major barrier is finding a topic that elicits a lot of feedback. The drinking podcast receives very little feedback and I’m not expecting it to grow too much in the next year. The show is more for entertainment value and learning but doesn’t ask a lot of questions. In 20+ episodes we received, probably, three e-mails about the show. Not a stunning reception.

But, the audience continues to grow, the RSS feed statistics rise and we get more downloads minutes after posting than ever before. For this podcast I have relied on my instincts as to which direction to take each episode – a drinking podcast doesn’t bring a lot of feedback but if the audience rises instead of falls I know I’m doing it right. If you’re driving in the dark and never hit a tree than you know you’re doing some pretty awesome driving.

The gaming podcast was a personal challenge, how do I grow an audience of interactive gamers. A few guidelines that have worked well for me:

Build a Blog

If you don’t have a website as a landing page for your podcast audience than you need to get one yesterday! WordPress is a great launching point because you can get a blog up and running in under an hour with a comment system and spam protection. This will be where you’ll post your show notes with open community comments.

Initially, you’ll want to post content on your blog to build up content on the site and get google to start chewing on it. If your podcast is about cats, you’ll want to blog about cats, post silly cat images, link to cat related websites and click the links to hit their site and bump their referral logs (so the author sees you). “Work the room” with people and their cat interests and let them know you’ve got a website and audio/video podcast. Post on your blog three times a day for at least three weeks to build up a bankroll of content.

I used this post method on everydaydrinkers.com and started receiving alcohol from PR people to review along with accessories. Heck, I even got a portable beer pong table because, with all my editorials, I became an expert in the drinking industry. Not too shabby as a method to start a landing site for my audio show, eh?

Setup Forums

Setup some forums, if you’re using wordpress I suggest Simple:Press from YellowFish. They will link to the user accounting system within WordPress so commentors that sign up on your blog can post forum topics immediately. Post forum topics, get your friends to post some topics and populate the forums. Don’t expect to build a 1,000 user audience overnight or even in the first few years. But, if you make it available someone may use it and you can use that as feedback for your show.

Contact Us and E-Mail

Don’t post your e-mail address on your blog if you don’t want a lot of spam – but you can setup a contact us form using WordPress and the Secure and Accessible Contact Form module. This will give your audience another way to contact you. If you’re creating a podcast you can use your e-mail in the audio since spammers aren’t that smart.

Promote Your Podcast

You can promote your podcast in a number of easy and affordable ways. After you’ve got three episodes you can submit it to iTunes. You can google “podcast directories” and create an account on all the directories then submit your RSS feed. I suggest tying your RSS feed to Feedburner so you can track statistics in one of the more industry standard methods. Each directory that accepts your podcast will also automatically link back to your website because it’s part of the standard iTunes complaint RSS feed (which Feedburner will standardize for you). That increases the chances google will rank you well.

You can also use a very low cost advertising method as I have done for my shows at ProjectWonderful. For a few cents a day you can splash your podcast banners on all types of sites that focus on the demographic you want to capture. That might be personal blogs, business, food and drinks, lifestyle, home gardening and many others. Don’t expect people to find you, find them first and do it on the cheap.

Ask Questions

There are a few ways to get your listeners to submit feedback. You can ask questions in the podcast that you think people may have an opinion on or you can discuss things that people just cannot afford to let pass, usually dealing with politics, international affairs or anything you’ve had past heated discussions about on a personal level. Some folks will go out of their way to demand feedback by just being over the top controversial, you’ll get hate mail but it is, in fact, feedback.

Do It

Do setup a website, do keep the content fresh, do post consistent episodes on a regular schedule and give your audience many outlets to respond to your podcast you’ll get some traction. We received roughly four comments on our Gaming Podcast until we setup gamingpodcast.net and built out a forum. and comment system

Many people are shy and don’t want to compose an e-mail to a stranger. Others are paranoid and don’t want their email being spread around. Some folks post on forums on a daily bases and find that the natural way to comment while others will blindly and anonymously post in response to a blog entry. Feedback comes in many forms and everyone seems to use their own technique. This is why we choose to include forum posts, blog responses and e-mails in our “feedback” section of our gaming podcast. Some users may not have submitted it thinking it would make the show, but we pick and choose to make sure gamers realize they too can talk back.

At first, you may have your own friends write in or simply make up questions from people that don’t even exist. Perhaps that “imaginary” writer has something controversial to say and it could elicit more feedback from real users. Once you start a trend others will feed into it and chat on a normal bases.

Lastly, you may notice that every podcast has its own set of responders. From Buzz Out Loud form CNET to The Daily Giz Wiz by Leo Laporte to GameSpots podcasts and language learning podcasts, there is a set of “regulars” that write in constantly and keep the show interesting. Everybody needs a few regulars, just like a bar or a restaurant — you’ll know them by name and they’ll add a new dynamic personality to the show.

Once you’ve got a few regulars consider your job done. Most of your audience is listening to an audio podcast because its a nice passive way to get through their day. They don’t need to write in to show their support because their downloads and impressions are left on the show through the shows yearly growth.

Have you ever called into an FM radio show? Probably not.

No matter how great your writing is, no matter how awesome your site looks, you may still have issues gaining traffic to your site because you’re on page 99 of google’s search results. Let’s face it, if you’re on page-3 of the google search results you might as well be on page 300. I’ve had plenty of pages arrive on page six and seven and I’ve had some clicks… but it’s never relevant. If they’ve not found a site to service their needs in the first five pages… you’re probably way off from what they are looking for, or a re-hash of something they already don’t care about.

Problem One: Effort

You’ll have to put in a lot of effort to receive page-1 or even page-2 results in google. It doesn’t happen over night, so be patient. In a highly competitive keyword space it also won’t happen on a single blog post.

Here are two scenarios, you are considering a site to write about “video games” because you know a lot about them, or “baby carriages” because you’ve recently had a kid and you feel you know enough about them to write articles involving baby transportation in the way of a carriage. Which one will be more profitable?

The average cost-per-click for a video game keyword ad is:

The average cost-per-click for a baby carriage ad is:

So, technically you’ll make more money on the keyword baby carriage as long as you realize the total searches are going to be much less (almost half says adwords traffic estimator). I don’t think it’s any surprise that more people are interested in search for video games than they are for baby carriages.

So, video games is the place to apply all our efforts, right? Maybe not. Do a quick search for video games and you’ll see something like this:

If you do a search for baby carriage you’ll see something like this:

You may discover, as I did, there are many less competitive pages for baby carriages, 323,000 compared to 799,000,000 for video games. Judging your competitive marketplace you’ll see it will be far easier to rank on page-1 on google for baby carriages and they’re going to give you better ad pricing (in general) using adsense.

What does this mean to you, the blogger? The market space is less competitive for baby carriages and thus you’ll have an easier time ranking on the first page of google’s organic search results. Less people are searching for baby carriages, however, you’re more likely to be the one getting clicks if you try hard enough because ranking for video games on any of the initial google page results is going to be a rough road. In the end, you’re effort will pay off much higher for something with less search results.

Problem Two: Luck

There is some luck involved with organic search. Some days people won’t do that many searches for your content, or, if it’s season dependent, some seasons may receive less organic search results. The next nature of luck… are the competitive sites trying to rank for your keywords any good at it?

To change your luck, you can do some deeper research and check the top ranked sites to see if they use the meta-keywords field or have content that’s really relevant to the search keywords. You can take what could be random luck and focus it into a well thought out plan and avoid having to rely on a lucky roll of the keyword.

Luck also plays into the niche field you’re getting into when writing content. You can start writing about a topic that’s rarely talked about on the Internet and then, one day, it becomes a huge hot button topic and you find yourself getting traffic you never though you’d get. Luck can be awesome at times.

Problem Three: Google Magic Sauce

How organic searching works is a mystery, a well-understood mystery, but it’s still a mystery none-the-less. SEO experts have found ways to “game the system” by making your content more relevant to google; crafting your text in a specific manner…using good keyword density but not overdoing it, is a good example of some basic SEO practices. You can take their advice and follow it like the SEO bible and google can change their sauce at any time and all your effort goes to the gutter.

Luckily for you, google tries to make subtle changes to their system and not revamp their organic search system from the ground up. Some subtle changes may indeed change how you rank in search results but those are the issues a Search Engine Optimizer deals with on a quarterly basis (usually google updates their ranks and such every three months, “big changes” will probably come at this time).

Problem Four: Relevance

Your content will have a specific relevance when it comes to how google views your site since an automated system is scanning your words, not a human. When writing content focus on what your site is about and less about other random stories. If you’re making a blog about baby carriages you probably want to shy away from talking too much about products outside the space or writing articles about other industries.

If you start changing your topics you may start arriving on page results not truly pertaining to your overall content. It will be hard to keep subscribers coming back if they think you’re about one thing but you’re really a site about something entirely different. And, adsense will start giving you ads that aren’t related to the keywords you originally did research on. You don’t want ad’s that are low pay CPC when your research ads that are high CPC.

Problem Five: Patience

Don’t expect to rank the day your site opens up. It may take a few weeks or a month before you see a single organic search arrive on your site. Using google analytics or 103bees to monitor your organic searches will allow you to see what’s going on in terms of search traffic. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, patience is key to so many areas of a good blog or website.

Google likes sites that grow slowly, over time, they also give higher weight (or so people say) to sites that are well aged, so your competitors whom have been around for six years or more will usually show higher than you for the same keywords. That’s okay, people don’t always click on the first result in google, they’ll read the meta-description that google presents before clicking (usually) or at least the title of the result. They also may click on many of the first page results while doing research.

Keep at it for six months or so and see what you can do with your site. Watch the search results to see how people are finding your site and focus on what’s working. It’s important to realize this may not be what you want to work in all cases, but making money sometimes requires you to do things you may not want to do (in moderation anyway).

Problem Six: Niche Market

This is, by far, the most lectured topic in search engine optimization and web marketing in general. Selling a product someone else already has market dominance over is going to be frustrating and if you’re a low-budget shop (or have little time) try sticking to something that’s not so overdone…baby carriages for instance. If you’re not passionate about the topic you can look around for something else or do some research and learn the topic anyway, perhaps you’ll grow fond of it.

If you really want to do video games or something like that, pick a specific genre of video games (Role Playing Games, Racing Games) or a single video game fan site and dedicate your time to it. Just remember, if you grow bored of that video game you’re still going to have to maintain the site if you want to bring in ad revenue. As a blogger who writes about video games I’ll tell you up front: it’s a long frustrating road before you gain any type of search hits that net you revenue.

If you want to write about “news” on your topic make sure their is a lot of news going around because you don’t want it to dry up and go stale. News sites also require much more effort and consistently daily blogging (hourly is best) to keep people interested. News, on the Net, doesn’t last long so you’ll always be searching for the next hot story.

You can pay USD $5,000 in consulting fees to learn this, or take my word for it… targeting a niche market is going to be the difference between making some money and making nothing. Affiliating with a niche market is also a great idea if you don’t plan on selling products yourself and play to rely on ad-revenue to make a dime (more dimes with affiliating + ad’s than doing only one). Provide niche market content to help your readers make an intelligent decision about a product and continue to update it to keep those fans coming back for more.

Have Fun!

If you want to write daily content you must enjoy it or it will grow more like a “real job” that you hate to commute to each day. Enjoy yourself, have fun writing content and be smart about what you’re doing.

Good Luck!

A podcast requires very little storage, can be produced in mono and vary in total length. Many of my podcasts range from 20MB to 55MB in size for an hour or more of content. Podcasting does require a few key ingredients to make a professional sounding blog:

• Patience
• Practice
• Recording Software
• Recording Hardware
• Post Production
• A Neat Song

You can practice podcasting with friends on Skype to get a handle on everyones personality and prepare to lay down 30 minutes of conversation or create the recording alone. You’ll need some patience if you’re new to recording and you’ll need to spend some cash (usually) to get a microphone and some software for mixing and recording.

A cheap headset, free software like Audacity and some recording hardware (probably the PC or Macintosh you’re more than likely reading this on will do) and you’re ready to start. You can publicize your podcast on iTunes, of course, and a number of podcasting directories around the Web, all which are free!

The details of podcasting is beyond the scope of this article, but you can contact me if you want to know how I do it. The advantages of podcasting can be one of satisfaction as you build an audience or one of personalization. What better way to get returning visitors than to connect with them at a more personal, audio, level.

A website is just a jumble of text while a podcast is a totally different experience. You can share your tone, your personality and life experiences in your audio show which may not translate well to words or could become boring to read.

Develop some show notes and put it into vocal words and get in touch with your viewers from another angle. You can write your show notes after each episode (for additional SEO tactics and content) or you can follow up on what you’ve talked about in the podcast within follow-up articles.

As your podcasting, by yourself or with others, you may come up with other ideas that you can write up in editorials. The podcast may be a vehicle to get your juices flowing for quality content so you can go to town as a blogger. You’ll have to set aside some time for podcasting and post-production so only consider this avenue if you’re serious about putting in some time and effort.

My 1-hour podcast takes about 2-hours to post-produce, add intro/outro sounds and publish on an RSS feed for directories (and iTunes) to pickup. I also rely on libsyn for one of my podcasts because it has a high bandwidth storage solution for a cheap price (USD $10.00 a month) and pretty graphs. The only issue I have with libsyn is their inability to keep their statistic tracking engine online and running, when it is running the statistics are well composed and easy to understand.

A blog is a great start and will develop an audience and a podcast would complement it and bring a third dimension to your writings and personality. People can get to know you for who you are and keep your website and agenda on their minds while at work, at home, commuting or relaxing before bed.

Podcasting can be a great tool to build a loyal fan base along with helping to build your googles organic searches regarding your site. Do a search for gaming podcast or drinking podcast and you’ll see mine on page one. Why? Podcasting isn’t big enough to be too challenging to rank for in google results if you try hard enough – every episode submission is potential google search content.

For instance, on everydaydrinkers.com I saw a few search hits coming in suggesting users were looking for seasonal beers and gift packs. This was an exciting point of realization for me because it meant I could use a few keywords like “holiday”, “gift”, and “christmas” in my posts about great holiday gift ideas.

Rather than simply blog about a beer type, a review or some history of a beer I decided to come up with a top-6 list of great beer gifts for the holidays. A day later google was presenting my blog in it’s results about gifts for the beer drinker, gifts for vodka drinkers, gifts for brandy drinkers and so on. At first I only blogged about gifts for beer drinkers but other recent blogs I had composed were about brandy, vodka and red wines.

Google isn’t smart enough to realize your front-page isn’t about gifts for red wine drinkers, it just knows you had a good time talking about gifts and had a lot of relevance to red wine. Upon seeing these search results it only made sense to write about Merlot being a great holiday gift or giving the gift of wine. Now, I’ll show up for those beer gifts and continue to show up for gifts about wines because I strengthened my grip on the keywords by actually targeting the ones I was getting traffic for anyway.

Is this a scam? Not at all. Every blog was well thought out and designed page of actual content searchers will find interesting. I’m not writing random words just to get hits because that just creates users that stay on your site for three seconds before clicking the magic back button. Like a good salesman I opted to give the user what they want, relevant content pertaining to what they’re searching for up-front.

I found a need for people searching for holiday gifts and did some research for them and blogged about it. Now, they don’t have to do the research themselves, they can work off the data I have already gathered. Their thanks to me? Perhaps they’ll find an ad on my site that’s pertains to their needs and click on it. Otherwise, oh well, it was a fun writeup non-the-less.

Life lesson, be dynamic and ready to write about topics people are looking for with creativity and an informed eye. Don’t try to scam the users, do their research for them and you’ll get a good hit of seasonal organic searches.

Just don’t expect them to continue querying google for these editorials in January. Perhaps they’ll find them again next holiday, be ready to start blogging about the next big season and ready yourself for another wave.