How to Dominate Your Niche

Online marketing is great and getting high rankings is always nice, but how would you like to absolutely dominate your field? How would you like to be known as the go-to person/organization for your niche either in your local area or nationally? You can.

Dominating your niche isn’t just about getting high rankings in the search engines, though that’s certainly part of it. Dominating your niche is about making it so wherever people go; they just keep running into you. When you dominate your niche, you can even start to transcend the need the high rankings as people become familiar with your name/brand and simply go to your website because you are the main source in your niche. This isn’t just a business thing. Churches, schools, ministries, people, who/whatever can all dominate their niche. So, how can you dominate your niche?

It Starts and Ends with Your Website:
Your website is the heart of your online presence. A heart pumps blood out to your organs, but then draws the blood back from those organs. Similarly, your website the source of much of the content you will produce. You will send that content out to other places (social media, blogs, search etc.), but all those places will send traffic back to your site. So, your website needs to have a good design and quality content. It will be very difficult to dominate your niche if people are turned off by your website and even if you are still able to dominate, you will lose conversions if your website isn’t good.

Search Engine Optimization:
Search is still the primary way people find things. So, it’s important that you optimize your website for the search engines and target as many relevant keywords as you can. When you are starting off, you probably won’t rank well for all of your keywords. You may only rank well for a few, but by getting your site optimized, as you start to grow your online presence in other ways, your rankings will improve as well.

Authorship:
Authorship is quickly becoming very important for a variety of reasons. It’s helpful for search rankings in Google (and possibly other search engines), which is great, but when you want to dominate your niche authorship has another even more important role. It establishes who you are. You and your organization can become known in your niche. People can see you on Google+ and your name and picture will be displayed right alongside your search results. This is extremely powerful. If you’re not yet familiar with authorship, check out, “Don’t Think You’re an Author? Well, You are Now?”

Blog:
Quality content is key. Not only do you need to have quality content on the main pages of your website, but you need to be regularly producing new, quality, original content. A blog is the perfect way to do that. A quick tip for creating your blog…Your blog really should be on your site. As easy as it is to install WordPress these days, there’s no reason to have some blogger.com blog somewhere off your website.

Video:
I can’t say enough about the power of video for establishing yourself in your niche. For now, however, let’s look at four great benefits to video.

1. Video creates a connection audio and print just can’t. You can see a person and get a sense of their personality. Video is like having a conversion with someone. Don’t underestimate the power of the feeling of connecting which video can create.
2. All the major search engines display videos in their search results. So, they can get you showing up in the results for keywords your website can’t.
3. There are several video sharing sites that are very popular (can anyone say Youtube?). So, videos give people more places to find you which is key to dominating your niche.
4. People tend to be attracted to video. People who otherwise wouldn’t click to read an article, may be willing to watch a short video.

And don’t think that video is too expensive or too difficult. You can get a great HD webcam for under $100 and videos don’t need TV quality editing. As long as you are engaging and have interesting, quality content, a simple webcam video can do very well.

Social Media:
So, you’re producing great videos and blog posts, now you need to let people know about this quality content. So, you have to post that content to where the people are. Facebook has about a billion users, so that’s a good place to start. Twitter, Google+, Linkedin, even Pinterest. You need to be in these places and don’t just use them to push your content. Social media is about connecting people with people. So, engage and connect.

Other People’s Blogs:
What’s a better endorsement than someone giving you their platform (their blog) to talk to their audience. That’s exactly what guest blogging is. The more you can guest blog, the more audiences you can reach and the more people there are endorsing you. Start by connecting with other bloggers in your niche. Comment on their posts and reference their posts in your posts. Once you’ve formed that connection, offer them some unique, quality content you’ve produced for their blog.

Everything Else:
These are just some of the more important ways you can start to dominate your niche. There are other places you can be participating to further establish yourself in your niche. Find important forums where you can engage people and answer questions. Answer question on question sites like Yahoo Questions and Quora. Encourage members and customers of your organization to post reviews about you. Write up press releases or be a source in new articles. In general, just look for places online that are important to your niche and be there.

The Secret Sauce:
This all sounds like a lot doesn’t it?  It is…and it isn’t.  If you do all of the above yourself manually, it will be too much.  So, the three secrets to being able to dominate your niche are…

1. For everything you do, you need to create an efficient process.  Take the time in the beginning to develop the process.  It will save you tons of time in the end.
2. Only do what you have to do, outsource and automate the rest.  The great content of the a video will probably require you in the video, but you don’t have to edit the video, transcribe it, or post it to Youtube.
3. Leverage everything.  A video can be uploaded to Youtube, posted on Facebook and posted on your blog.  That’s 3 uses for something you created once.  A couple of blog posts can become a whitepaper.  A forum post response can become a blog article.  I’m not suggesting you become overly repetitive, but usually a piece of content can be used in a few different contexts with little to no overlap.

Start Dominating!
There are really three key aspects to dominating your niche:

1. Produce interesting, useful, quality, original content.
2. Be everywhere. Whenever someone looks for something related to your niche, they should come across you.
3. Create a unified identity across the web and connect with people. Don’t have a different username on every website. Don’t use different pseudonyms/personas on different platforms. Don’t use impersonal avatars. Use your name, use an image or video of you, have one username for all the sites, and reference your organization consistently.

By consistently doing these three things, you can establish yourself and dominate your niche.

Share Your Thoughts:

• Do you want to dominate your niche?
• What else would you add that could help to dominate your niche?