With “Niche” channels, we will now focus on websites that are targeted to a particular industry or topic; for example, a blog, directory or search engine that strictly shows information for electronics only. A niche channel is another area where you can find targeted prospects for your business. The ideal strategy to use is to combine local and niche channels together in your marketing.

So if you’re selling furniture in Texas, then you would want to target websites that are locally in Texas and are about furniture.

Here are different niche channels which you can utilize to market your business online.

Niche Directories

Niche directories are directories that only allow submissions from businesses that are related to the niche. For example, if your business sells classic cars, then you should submit your website to directories that specialize in classic cars only.

The benefits of submitting to niche directories are:

1.  Search Engine Optimization

Major search engines such as Google and Yahoo rank the niche directories high for keywords related to the niche. Since the directories have a link to your website, the latter will rank high for the keywords also.

So if your business sells accessories for vintage classic cars and it appears in a classic car directory under the category Accessories, then you may rank higher compared to other businesses for the keywords “classic car” and “accessories”.

The number of related websites with links to your business website affects your ranking in the search engines. The more the merrier.

Your task is to find as many niche directories as possible, and submit your business website to them. A lot of these directories are free so the only cost is your time for the submission process.

There are some niche directories that accept payment to be listed in them. These directories normally have fewer listings because most business owners don’t want to pay. However, the quality of these paid niche directories are better than the free ones and normally rank well on the search engines.

If you’re considering paying for a listing in a niche directory, spend some time and look at the directory you’re considering. See if the Google™ Page Rank is high compared to the free Niche Directories. Page Rank is Google’s way to show that a website is an authority in its industry. A Page Rank of 4 or higher is good.

To check a website’s Page Rank, you can install the Google™ Toolbar at http://toolbar.google.com

Alternatively, if you don’t like to install an extra toolbar on your browser, you can check a website’s page rank at http://www.prchecker.info/check_page_rank.php

If the niche directory has a good page rank (i.e. 4 or higher), then you can also check to see if it gets many visitors.

For a rough estimate of how much traffic a website has on average, you can use the Alexa tool at http://www.alexa.com/ Just type in the URL of the website and get an estimate of how much traffic the website receives.

Next you can do an online search for the niche directory and read about other people’s views. You will know a lot about a directory based on other people’s feedback in forums and blogs.

Based on the PageRank, traffic and other people’s comments, you can justify to see if it’s worth paying the money to be listed in that particular paid niche directory.

Here’s a list of niche directories:

• Web Directories (http://www.web-directories.ws/Niche/) - Contains thousands of niche directories
• Incoming Links (http://www.incominglinks.com/)
• Directory Critic (http://www.directorycritic.com/niche-directories.html)
• Submit2Please (http://www.submit2please.com/niche-directory-submission.html)
• Niche Specific Directoires (http://www.directoryarchives.com/index.php?c=4)

Alternatively, you can use the search engine and type in <<NameofNiche>> directory e.g. camera directory.

2.    Getting Found By Targeted Visitors

If your customers want to find accessories or spare parts for their classic cars, then no doubt they would have spent a lot of time searching on the internet for information. It’s very likely that they would have visited a classic car directory during their search.

By listing your business website in the targeted categories of the directory, you are exposing your products and services to targeted buyers. Think about it.

People who visit a niche directory and have dug deeper within the categories, are there for one reason only. They have a need and they’re looking for a solution. They’re looking for businesses that specialize in what they want. Plus they want to buy.

When they see your business listed in a certain category, you have a chance of making a sale. It now depends on the decision of the buyer, whether to purchase from you or your competitors who are also listed in the same categories.

Their decision will depend upon whether your business is located near them, if you have a telephone number they can use to call someone, the prices of your products and services, and the professional way on how your business is described in the listing.

Niche directories are very important for listing your business websites. They can get you targeted visitors to your website and help you rank higher in the search engines for your keywords.

The best part is submitting your website to niche directories is cheap and free most of the time, an excellent way to market your business online in an affordable manner. Great for all budget ranges.

New blogs are created every day and they’re a goldmine waiting for you to tap into. Local blogs are very targeted, and the subject of the blogs could be general or focused on a particular area. For example, Japanese food, cell phones or digital photography.

The difference between local blogs and normal blogs is that local blogs are targeted to an area such as a city or a state. In fact, sometimes these local blogs are called Hyper Local Blogs. This means that the blog is strictly related to the blogger’s home town or particular area. Hyper Local Blogs are on a rising trend as their readers are targeted and fanatical about them.

Examples of Hyper Local Blogs include:

• Gothamist (http://gothamist.com ) Contains a network of hyper local blogs targeted to New York
• Capitol Hill (http://www.capitolhillseattle.com ) A neighborhood in Seattle
• Shanghaiist (http://shanghaiist.com ) Targeted to Shanghai
• Place Blogger (http://placeblogger.com ) Network of local blogs
• Directory of Los Angeles (http://directoryoflosangeles.com ) Part of the Blog Network Association and SearchDirectoryOf.com

So with a local blog, readers will be much more interested in the information since it is ‘tangible’. Readers can actually visit the businesses and places mentioned in the blog since they are within travelling distance.

So if you’re selling 2nd hand cars and your website is mentioned in a general blog, then the majority of the readers won’t be interested in your business since the readers may be in different countries or a day’s drive from your business.

With a local blog, the readers will be in the same location or near your business. They are much more likely to pay attention to your products and services.

You can use local blogs to market your online business in several ways:

1.    Contact the blog owner

You can contact the owner of the blog and ask if he or she can blog a review about your business.

You can offer your products for free so that the owner can test it out and review it. The blog owner now has content to write about and has a free product to use and keep. A win-win scenario.

If the owner is not too keen on reviewing your product, then you can offer a commission for every product that is ordered via their blog.
e.g. 15% or other commission per sale.

By offering a favorable review for your product, this local blog owner will be able to send targeted visitors to your website. These visitors have a good chance of becoming your customers because they are within travelling distance to your business.

2.    Buying advertising

A lot of the local blogs offer advertisement space on their front page. Take a look and see if you can buy an advertisement space for a monthly fee.

For your advertisement, normally you would place a banner or some text, with a link to your business website.

There is no set price for a blog advertisement but it normally depends on the amount of traffic the blog receives. Just because a blog charges more than average, doesn’t mean that they necessary get more traffic.

You need to do your research here by asking the owners how much traffic they get per month. You can also search in forums to see if anyone has experience in advertising with the particular local blog you are enquiring.

3.    Commenting on the blog

Within the local blog, you can make comments under the blog posts with a link to your website. A subtle advertisement for your business. Try to make an interesting comment with a link to your website when you submit your comments.

People reading your comments on the local blog will notice your website and may visit it. This depends on whether your comment on the blog post was valuable and if you sounded like a professional.

4.    Guest Blogging

You may also contact the owner of the blog and ask if you can be a guest blogger for a day. This normally involves you creating a post that is packed with good information that the owner will agree to placing on their blog.

The blog readers will notice your insightful post and see you as an expert in your field. It’s very likely that they’ll visit your website after reading the post, too.

To find out what blogs there are in your local area, you can search for them using local blog directories where they link local blogs sorted by area.

Here are some examples of local blog directories:

• Search Directory Of – http://www.searchdirectoryto.com
• PlaceBlogger – http://www.placeblogger.com
• FeedMap – http://www.feedmap.net
• Outside In – http://www.outside.in
• Topix – http://www.topix.net
• Technorati – http://www.technorati.com

With each of the local blog directories, search for blogs within your local area. However, depending on where you live, not all local directories will have blogs within your area.

Once you have your list of local blogs, contact each blog owner and ask them to review your products and if you can be a guest blogger. In addition, you can also start commenting on the blog posts to drive traffic to your website.

Examples of mobile applications are games, online utilities or applications that provide online news and search capabilities. While the numbers of mobile applications are increasing, they are still not common enough to make a huge marketing impact compared to SMS (Short Message Service) text messages and other online marketing methods such as pay per click.

However, the trend of mobile applications should not be ignored. You should actually jump in now and start using them while they are not mainstream, so that the costs are lower. Get your feet wet and learn the ropes now to start getting a firm foothold on these types of applications for your business growth.

You can market your business using mobile applications in 2 ways:

1.    Creating the mobile application

You can outsource a project to a freelancer to create a mobile application for you such as an online game. If you’re selling computers, then you could design a game where people can answer questions on computers and get ranked globally on the number of correct questions answered.

Here are examples of websites where you can find a developer:

Elance (http://www.elance.com)
Scriptlance (http://www.scriptlance.com)
Rentacoder (http://www.rentacoder.com)

The mobile application can be offered as a free download so that you can get as many users as possible.

The way you market your business using this application is by promoting your website on the application’s download page. When people visit your website to download the free application, they will get to know your business website. This is your blatant advertisement that cannot be ignored when people download the application.

Furthermore, you can also market your website by displaying your advert on the mobile application first, every time they play the game. You can also update this advertisement to everyone who has downloaded the game whenever you have a new promotion.

2.    Advertising on mobile applications

Another way of marketing your business with mobile applications is to buy advertisements on the applications that are near your area. What this means is that the application will only show your ads to people who are locally in your area.
These are very targeted advertisements. People who read your ads will be within traveling distance to your business, and hence they’ll have a much better chance of becoming your customers.

Additionally, you could buy advertisement from the owner of the game on their download page. I.E. reach out to extend your own reach.

Note: you may need to do a little research to see whether or not certain mobile applications you’d like to consider using, can offer you advertisement options that are strictly for your local area. Not everyone offers this.
An example of a well known local mobile application is Yelp (http://www.yelp.com). They are a review site which has a section specifically designed for mobile applications at http://mobile.yelp.com . The website allows their users to submit reviews on anything from restaurants to barbers and more in the local area, specified by the user.

People using their mobile devices can search for reviews on the go, too. If they are travelling to the city or visiting somewhere, they can search for the best place to go for food, shopping and where to go for a spa.  You can market on Yelp by writing a review on your business website under the appropriate category, listed in your local area. This is free advertisement for you which appears in mobile devices using the Yelp application.

To maximize your local search optimization, it is suggested that you have a search-friendly WordPress blog to publish your company information, news and enable two-communication with customers through feedback, comments and other ways.

A local search engine basically means that the search results that are returned are targeted to a particular location. So if you’re looking to buy a computer, you would only want to see search results of computer shops that are in the area in which you live.

There are now more and more specialized search engines which you can use to narrow down your search results such as:

1. Yahoo Local Search Engine (http://local.yahoo.com/)

Yahoo has a powerful search engine which return a list of websites that are located in the area you specify such as the address, city, state or zip.

2.    SearchDirectoryof (http://www.searchdirectoryof.com)
This is fast becoming one of the big players in specialized search engines. You can search for results within your local area and in targeted categories such as Entertainment, Hotels etc…

3.    TrueLocal (http://www.truelocal.com)

4.    Yell (http://www.yell.com/)
Dedicated to finding local businesses in the UK.

5.    Genie Knows (http://www.genieknows.com/)
6.    Info USA - http://www.infousa.com/
7.    Localeze – http://www.localeze.com/
8.    SuperPages - http://www.superpages.com/
9.    OpenList - http://www.openlist.com/

On the whole, local search engines are supported by advertisements from businesses that want to display their own details in a prominent area when the correct keywords and location are being searched by the user.

For example, a Manhattan pizza restaurant may want to place an ad with one of the local search engines if the keywords “pizza” and “Manhattan” are being searched together.

Their listing will then be featured at the top of the search engine results, which means that the bulk of the visitors searching for those terms, will more than likely visit their website first.

You may consider paying to be featured as a paid result in the local search engines. The visitors you get will certainly be very targeted, but you need to justify the cost for this type of promotion with the results you’re getting, and calculate whether it’s worth paying for these advertisements with the amount of return on your investment (ROI)

You can monitor how much you’ve paid each month to the local search engines versus how many clicks, leads and ultimate sales are referred from using this method. It’s a number’s game here, too, calculating your ROI to see what works and what doesn’t.

If you don’t want to pay for the featured listing, then you can improve your ranking in the local search engines by doing search engine optimization such as blogging with relevant keywords and linking the blog posts to your website, placing the keywords in the Title and Description tags and within your content, and placing anchor text links to your website.

To be ranked high in the search engines, you need to have a lot of relevant websites linking to you, plus a lot of relevant content. This is the art of search engine optimization.

There are many types of digital channels and one of them is what we call the “Local” Channels. These are ways in which your prospects search for businesses that are near their region.

Since major search engines such as Google™ basically return results that are worldwide unless you add local keywords to the searches, the average business person seeking only local results may prefer a better means of attracting targeted traffic. This is where local channels can help.

Localized web and mobile channels generate very targeted leads and provide free and low-cost options to extend your reach. You’ll want to start with these first, then extend your reach through all of the other options.

Local Directories

Local Directories have replaced the traditional hard-copy Yellow Pages as the best source to find local businesses. Even the famous Yellow Pages are now online and are being used by thousands every day (http://www.yellowpages.com).

Search engines such as Google™ and Yahoo, like online local directories and rank them very high in their search results. This is because local directories are very targeted towards a specific location (region) and contain a lot of relevant links to business websites.

Business owners are starting to realize that they can get targeted traffic to their websites if they are listed in these local directories. And submissions of their website links or URLs to these local directories sometimes need to be manually approved by a human being.

Submitting websites to these manually approved directories means the submissions are less likely to be considered spammed. And manual submitters can clear up any inaccurate information during the process, to aid in keyword and other targeted search info, another main reason why general search engines rank these type of local directories higher in their search results.

SearchDirectoryOf is an example of a good local directory where you can submit your website to a category under a relevant location, along with a brief description of what your website is about.

The local directories also allow you to enter your contact details such as telephone number, fax and email address.

The submission of your website is normally free of charge. However, some directories do require a fee such as the Yahoo Directory (http://searchmarketing.yahoo.com/dirsb/index.php) which costs $299 a year.

The benefit of submitting your website to a local directory is so that real buyers will have a chance to check out your business products and services before making their decision.

When a prospect goes through the process of searching in local directories and digging deep into the different categories to find out what businesses can serve their needs within their local area, they are generally looking to purchase something, fast.

For example if you list your website at a very specific category such as

Business and Economy >> Shopping and Services >> Health >> Fitness>> Personal Trainers >> Online Training

…the people who find your website under that category will be looking at exactly what your website is offering. Hence this makes it worthwhile for you to list your website in the local directories.

An additional advantage of listing your website in the local directories is “search engine optimization” (SEO) which is a method to rank your website higher in the search engine results. In a nutshell, it’s making sure your content: tags, articles and all, are focused or optimized around your main targeted keywords.

Search engines consider the information on local directories to be accurate and of good quality, thus rank them high in the search results. This will make the ranking of your website in the search engines improve as well, since the local directories have a link to your website.

This is one of the reasons why some local directories charge a fee for a listing in one of their categories, with the Yahoo Directory being an example. These directories know that inclusion will improve your search engine rankings, and that you’ll get good targeted visitors to your websites.

Here are some examples of local directories that you can submit your website to:

• Yahoo Directory - http://search.yahoo.com/dir (Paid)
• SearchDirectoryOf – http://www.searchdirectoryof.com
• Best Of The Web’s Regional Directory - http://botw.org/top/Regional/United_States/
• Local Business Guide - http://www.localbusinessguide.com.au/
• Local Directory UK Business Finder - http://www.local.co.uk/

You can find more local directories to submit to by going to Google™ ’s search engine with your country’s extension, e.g. co.uk for UK, .com.hk for Hong Kong, .au for Australia etc… and type in “local directories.”

Start submitting your website to as many local directories as you can find. It is recommended that you pay to get listed on Yahoo’s Directory since many people have confirmed that it has improved their search engine rankings.

“This learning module is filled with original reporting that will help you learn about the innovative community news initiatives that are cropping up around the United States - and securing grants from foundations that have not traditionally supported journalism.”

The guide has great interviews with local bloggers / jounalists who are making things happen for their sites and partnering with foundations for support:

“In the case studies and accompanying videos, you’ll meet citizen journalists who have launched news sites in Boston; Deerfield, N.H.; New Haven, Conn.; and Chappaqua, N.Y. And you’ll learn how professional journalists have launched news initiatives that either partner with or supplement their metro news outlets.”

They also feature a searchable database “where you can see the kinds of news ventures that foundations have supported since 2005.”

Toolkit download page.

From the report:

Highlights & Assumptions:

• Operating income (EBITDA) for the framework, year three: $1.3 million.
• Operating income for hyperlocal businesses, year three: Large, $66k; medium, $32k; small, $26k.
• In this new ecosystem, we envision a mature market of 5 million people supporting 99 small, medium and large blogs.
• Hyperlocal news organizations are viable without the framework, but are more profitable with the ability to sell ads across a wider network.
• Likewise, the framework can scale to other cities and become more profitable. For ease of projecting, we’ve limited that company to one metro market.

Read more…

Damian Ghigliotty reports the next day on clarifications of the study and assumptions employed in the data.

Hyperlocal Revenues, Yes, They’re High

Microlocal news site EveryBlock has been acquired by MSNBC.com. EveryBlock offers hyperlocalized community news for 15 of the biggest cities in the U.S., dividing city news by neighborhood, ZIP code, or municipal district. MSNBC plans to leave everyday operations of EveryBlock in the hands of the current management, but the company does plan to expand into other cities. MSNBC.com’s investment came at a convenient time-EveryBlock had been operating on a Knight Foundation grant for the previous two years, but that grant ran out June 30.

(www.everyblock.com, www.msnbc.com)

Now, unless you have several million to invest in one of these local site networks, the only alternatives are go it alone (good luck) or join a network that is actively recruiting for new territories.  That would be Blog Network Association.

Click here to learn more. AOL and MSNBC see something in this industry.  We do too.  It’s no coincidence that sites and networks focused on local and hyperlocal areas are getting snapped up quick and will continue to do so.

The way to get your piece of this boom is right here.

Yahoo is bulking up its local search network and Google continues to woo local businesses to its database by introducing tools to help them to make sure their listings are correct and up to date.

It’s still a big “portal” world out there - hardly hyperlocal

Though the big sites are finally working on local search accuracy and relevancy, there’s a big hole in the market of local search.  That is “hyperlocal” news, events, and reporting.  With the demise of the newspaper industry as we know it, surfers are looking hard for good sources of hyperlocal reporting.

The big sites are proud to have the most complete, or at least the largest databases, however incorrect and dry the data is.  What’s missing is comprehensive “local flavor” networks, especially global ones.  The data and news for local areas all but dries up once you get outside North America, and many would argue it’s not too “wet” here at home in the first place.

People on the ground

Our model is putting people on the ground.  Putting domain owners directly in charge of finding and aggregating good local content, news, events, and business reviews.  Along with a heavy dose of original content in the form of photo tours, videos, and articles found nowhere else.

Untapped opportunity

Because we’re one of the few networks who even come close to hyperlocal reporting and local business directories on a global scale, we’re positioned to take over the market, or a serious chunk of it.

We’re looking for bloggers and publishers interested in taking over their local area for a piece of the coming profits in local search advertising.  If you are interested or want to learn more, check out our network today!