Niche marketing is extremely useful way to surpass your competitors. There are a lot of different niche markets but it is very important to find the one that will offer you the most chance for success because most of them are not profitable enough.

If you are going to spend your time and money you need to figure out which niche to target. I’ll describe 4 most important factors for long-term success with niche marketing.

1. Motivation

If you are not interested in niche don’t even choose it because you will not be able to update your site on a regular basis during two or three years or longer without motivation.

Think about niche. Is it really interesting? Will chosen niche be profitable?

Sometimes it may look like you have a great motivation and you may feel like you can target any niche you want. Wait for a few days and see what will happen. If you are not that motivated and don’t even think about this niche - think about something else.

Finding right marketing niche always takes time. It’s much better to think and analyze before than wasting your time and money on niche that will not be profitable.

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SEO is constantly changing but some basic things are always the same. Here is my list of basic search optimization tips that always were effective for me.

1. Content is the most effective linkbuilding tool

Your posts should be interesting, useful and unique. You can get tons of quality backlinks from hundreds and thousands of sites absolutely for free only by writing posts. Otherwise your visitors will not subscribe to your RSS feed, Twitter or Facebook updates and they will never come back or even remember your site or blog. Writing useful texts takes a lot of time but it worth it.

2. Update your website on a regular basis

You can experiment with updating your blog and find which way works for you. For example I feel comfortable to write posts on my blogs about 2-3 times a week.

3. Write posts only when you are motivated

That’s my golden rule. I write blog posts only when a feel that motivation for doing that. If I don’t have motivation I don’t write anything. It’s much better to do something else - go for a walk, read websites or magazines, watch movie, listen to the music, etc.

4. Use relevant keyword in meta tags, title and first sentence of blog post

When writing a blog post always use relevant keywords in it’s first sentence and title. Also use it in meta tags such as title, description and keywords. That way your post will become relevant to your keywords and you’ll get better rankings in search engines.

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Todays guest at MikeShakin.com - Gerald Weber, president of Search Engine Marketing Group in Houston, TX. You can also follow him on Twitter - @the_gman. I appreciate that Gerald took time to answer my questions.

Gerald, please give our readers a bit of your professional background. How did you get into Search Engine Marketing?

I started out working for a local search marketing company doing sales. I was actually doing a pretty good job at selling SEO/SEM services to business owners, but the company I was working for kept changing the commision structure every time I started to hit the goals. In other words, they were trying to make sure I didn’t get too much money so they could keep their own wallets nice and fat. In December of 2005, I had enough of this treatment and decided to hang my own shingle and here we are today.This is the point I decided it was time to learn SEO

How many hours do you work daily and what are your daily tasks?

Well this varies really, but generally speaking, I try to keep my work day in the normal business hours range i.e. 9am to 5pm CST(about 8 hours). However, it’s certainly not uncommon that I find myself doing work at very odd hours. That’s the life of an entrepreneur, and I like it that way.

The way I keep myself on track is by making daily to do lists. I write out all of my tasks the day before, and then I just go through and check off each task as it’s completed. This keeps me focused and meeting my daily goals. Too many entrepreneurs overlook the importance of getting organized. Being disorganized can kill your business, no matter how good you are at what you do.

My daily tasks generally consist a large percentage of link building, Adwords management and communicating with my staff to ensure that other tasks are completed in a timely manner.

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Long-tail keywords are extremely useful for SEO. Basically long-tail keywords are opposite to head (or popular) keywords that more frequently searched by users. For example, “real estate” is a head term, but “affordable real estate in Brooklyn” is a long-tail keyword.

Long-tail keywords are especially effective in large ecommerce sites, where thousands of pages are indexed by Google and other search engines.

If you optimize your website pages for long-tail keywords, you should very quickly begin to see results from it in sales and traffic because this strategy is good for selling products. The important thing about long-tail that many niche products have a potential to generate a huge volume of sales. The long-tail keywords help to realize this potential for website owner.

Just take a look at Amazon or eBay. According to Chris Anderson’s research, Amazon.com makes 57% of sales from keywords outside of “head” terms. Search for some niche products and you will figure out that long tail keywords are really helpful for selling.

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