Choose Your Niche

How do you begin?
It’s actually easier than you might think. Look within you: what are you absolutely passionate about? What do you find interesting enough to share with others? For me, music is a passion, always has been. I chose to make it the focus of my toolbar business. If you’re going to deliver something, it should be something you know well and that you’re good at. Do something you love doing. It might be a cliché but it’s true nonetheless. If you do what you love, you’re more likely to be good at it.

Here are my tested and proven methods for choosing a niche that will online profits. Follow them step by step to build your own money-making toolbar.

• Start a little research
  ist all your know-hows, professional skills, hobbies, interests. This could have something to do with your profession, your studies or hobbies. After you look within, look around. Ask your friends and family to share with you their opinions on how good you are at the things you listed.
  
  
• Search for keywords
  Type your keyword (skill, hobby, profession) in overture’s Keyword Tool and check-out the results. How many searches have been conducted during the last month on that particular subject? How many on related topics? This is a great way to see what’s in demand on the market.
  Another recommended site to check out is Google Trends. There you can find the hottest, best selling topics of the hour. Check out your passion: is it trendy?
  
  
• Take a reality check
  The next step is to check what the world says about your passions. Are they in demand? Haw many people will be ready to download your toolbar? Remember, you have to create something the market is interested in. Spending a month building a toolbar nobody cares about is a complete waste of time and energy.
  
  
• Join forums
  Find the groups on the internet discussing the topic you’re passionate about. Join their forums to see what they’re discussing.
  By addressing like minded people you’ll soon find out what kind of issues need to be tackled. Ask them what kind of questions they think need to be answered. Listen carefully to what they say: these are your potential customers. You are just discovering your own niche. While you’re at it, why don’t you make a habit of writing down your ideas? Get a notebook, keep it within arm’s reach and jot down your insights and ideas real time.
  
• Collect and grade your findings
  Compile all the info you collected and start grading it. Use any scale you wish and just grade it as per your desire to be involved in this kind of project. I found this method very easy to do and very effective.

• Think of the toolbar as a web portal
  If you could build your own web portal in 24 hours, what would it be about?

• Remember: Usability = Download - Usability is key to online profits from your toolbar. The more value-adding it is to your users, the more downloads you’ll get. Make yours a killer toolbar by including popular components such as search box, a radio component and useful links related to your niche. Build it so that it would be hard for your users to give up such a great service.

• Address a wide niche, but not too wide
  Select a niche that would attract as many users as possible. There are plenty of wide niches in which the chances of success of an effectively built toolbar are close to 100%.

Promote Your Toolbar

If you intend for the masses to use your toolbar, if you want your toolbar to rank high in the search engines and most importantly, if you want to promote it so that it could be a reliable source of income, this section is for you.

• The Keyword is Key Decision
  Keywords are considered the lifeline of any successful toolbar. Your toolbar’s name will have a direct impact on the traffic that your download page gets. Make sure the name you give it is descriptive yet simple. Include the keywords that potential users would type in search engines.
  When I built my first toolbar, I named it Netherlands Radio, as it contains over 100 Dutch radio stations. After a quick search in Google Trends, I found out that in Dutch it’s spelled Nederland Radio. I found huge differences between the number of searched for The Netherlands Radio and Nederland Radio – in the Dutch spelling. So obviously I changed the name according to the correct Dutch spelling. After all, I had Dutch speakers in mind when I built this toolbar…
  
• Submit to Search Engines
  I warmly recommend you to submit the URL of your download page to search engines as soon as you can. First submit to Google, MSN and Yahoo. If you don’t mind spending money on it, you could buy a domain, or use Conduit toolbar hosting service free of charge.
  
• Submit to Freeware and Shareware Libraries
  Minutes after you finish building your toolbar with Conduit toolbar building platform you’ll get a unique binary file, which turn you into a toolbar author overnight. This means you can start distributing your software. There are thousands of sites which would love to get details about the toolbar or software you’ve just created. Freeware, Shareware and open source libraries are all highly effective promotion channels for your download page. Submitting to them is a proven method to have hundreds of web pages with your links. These libraries provide you with a download page which contains file description, a link to your site and a direct download link. Needless to mention, these links are also very significant for SEO.
  
  For the advanced toolbar publishers, building an XML file containing the libraries’ standard requirements (PAD file) is the most efficient way to go. I prefer using PAD Generator which enables creating such a files easily and quickly submitting it to the different libraries.

• PR #1: Spread The Word
  PR #1 stands for Public Relations. You have to tell the world about your toolbar, otherwise how will you make money from it? Create your own press release. List all the highlights of your toolbar, its’ advantages and benefits. This is neither the time nor the place to be coy, but too many self-given superlatives could make you lose your credibility. So try to make it an interesting, well written item. There are countless places you could distribute your press release to. These could be magazines, news sites, blogs and forums that discuss your niche, computer columns etc. Even if a small percentage of the media publishes your news, the recognition you get is priceless.
  
• PR #2: Boost Your Page Rank
  Get incoming links easily by link exchange with websites in your niche.
  Follow this tip and see for yourself how by boosting your Page Rank (that’s PR # 2) you’ll instantly increase your site traffic. It’s quite simple: Google figures that when one page links to another page, it is effectively casting a vote for the other page. The more votes that are cast for a page, the more important the page must be. So my tip is to advertise in Websites and promote their links in return. It’s a win-win solution: You provide them with traffic and they increase your PR and link popularity. The more link exchanges you engage in with other webmasters, the higher page rank you’ll receive. All the outgoing links are from the toolbar.
• Create a Lean and Mean Advertising Campaign
  Targeted traffic equals qualified prospects which in turn will equal profits. A targeted campaign in Google Adwords can achieve excellent results. It doesn’t necessarily have to empty your pocket. Go for the lowcost keywords and key phrases that match these search terms. If you build a radio toolbar like I did, choose the names of specific radio stations as your keywords. Usually, you won’t see much competition there.

These tips will generate not only increased traffic, but also milestones for building a successful online brand.

Make Money with your toolbar

It’s not by chance that making money via toolbars is a proven method. There are all sorts of toolbars: Google Toolbar, Yahoo Toolbar, MSN toolbar, and then there’s your money making toolbar.

What makes the toolbar an online money maker?

As a fast growing medium, the toolbar provides a few unmatched benefits. My toolbar network strategy is based on the toolbar’s multi advantages:

• More face-time – That’s every affiliate marketer’s dream. The toolbar enables you to stay connected to your users, right on their browsers whenever they're online.
  
• Turns users to captive audience - A well built toolbar in a popular niche guarantees turning your users into captive audience. Once the users download my toolbar, they’re exposed to my mini-banners, placed right in-front of their eyes.
  
• Generates Stickiness – Stickiness is about making it hard for your users to give up such a great service. And the toolbar does just that. The goal is that users will regard your toolbar as an integral part of their online experience and keep it installed. When my users first told me they found it difficult to get along without my toolbars, I knew I got it right. That’s exactly what I had in mind: I aimed for an addictive little tool, or a mini-portal, if you will, which provides relevant content. If you build a good toolbar there’s a slim chance of uninstallment. It’s there to stay.
• Increases Traffic - Since the toolbar attracts visitors by its’ nature, (due to high degree of usability and value adding features) it’s like a vessel that contains and traffic and sustains it. A toolbar on your site turns bypassing visitors to permanent users once they download it. If I have 5000 visitors a day, and 10% have downloaded, within a month’s time I’ll have 500 X 30 = 15,000 toolbars installed. More users will follow after getting recommendations.

• Builds Loyalty – A loyal user’s recommendation is priceless, so keep your user base enthusiastic about your toolbar. Loyalty has a financial aspect: Your users are your marketers, your growth is in their hands. Their satisfaction and loyalty is the key to making your toolbar virally marketed.
  
  
• Saves Time, Money & Resources - Conduit’s innovative toolbar hosting solution enables web publishers to support the toolbar’s entire life cycle (building, deployment, promotion, maintenance & analysis) within a web environment. This outstanding service is fully managed within a ‘point and click’ interface, making it the most effective toolbar solution.
  
  AND last but not least:
• Guaranteed to Make Money - The toolbar medium is ideal for affiliate marketing. I chose to market also general programs which enjoy daily usage, such as e-bay, amazon and skype, so naturally, they yield more. The best thing to do is to choose useful affiliate links. The affiliate network’s generous cookie period provides with constant earnings, makes this business even more lucrative even if my users type the URLs manually (outside the toolbar).
  
  In short, the toolbar profits keep flowing in… So create your toolbar now and start earning big time.

Build Your Toolbar

Building a toolbar is a win-win invention for publishers and users. It’s the best way I found to make online profits and it allows your users access to what they want, whenever they want it, instantly from their browser.
Before I created my toolbar empire, I checked and compared about 10 products.
I was eager to make money online and wanted to be confident about the right toolbar provider. After reviewing the pros and cons of each, I finally voted for the Conduit toolbar building platform. My extensive research taught me that there’s a world of difference between Conduit and the other the toolbar alternatives such as: BestToolbars. These are the main advantages I found:

• Unlike other companies, Conduit is web-based and doesn’t require any software. Ease of set-up is a big plus.
  
• Conduit enables dynamic toolbar updates - a huge advantage for toolbar publishers. This means I can change links and the changes will automatically be updated in realtime on my users browsers. It’s a truly amazing advantage.
  
• Only Conduit offers a radio player – a killer component which is the focal point of my toolbars.
  
• A wide range of toolbar components are easily adjusted to the toolbar niche, e.g. Radio UK toolbar has RSS feeds with news from UK.
  
• Finally, all these goodies are at absolutely zero cost. It’s free of charge

Choose Your Niche

A successful toolbar depends on a successful niche. Being focused on a specific target market (what marketers refer to as segmentation) is key in making money from your toolbar. Choosing a niche that you’re passionate about is a great way to start the process. I believe it’s crucial to come up with ideas that play to your interests and strengths. This is the most important phase in the process, so put some time and thought into it.

What’s a toolbar niche?
That’s the area you’d like to devote 100% of your efforts toward a segment of a market, instead of the whole market. Choose a toolbar niche that’s perfectly suited to you. Basically, it’s where you’ll be able to succeed and thrive.

Think of your potential users when you look for a niche. A toolbar targeted at “Camel Shepherds in the Sahara Desert” won’t get much downloads, regardless of your efforts to update the useful links. Not even if it could help any camel shepherd, anywhere.

Making Money on the Web is Easy

Have you heard that before?

So Have I…

The Internet is full of “making-money” scams, “making-money” e-books which promise to make you rich by the time you’re done reading them and fishy MLM programs. I used to fall for them myself, so I understand and even encourage skepticism.

You won’t be hearing any tales about making a fortune overnight from me. I will tell you that it takes time to enjoy steady online profits. It’s possible and it’s based on a proven method. The best part of using my methods as your source of profit is that once you finished the set-up, your software will work nonstop for you, and will keep increasing your passive income.