By Doren Aldana

If you market to everyone, “your client will be no one.” This is an old saying that is as true today as it was when it was first spoken. Mortgage professionals waste an immense amount of their marketing dollars on ineffective advertising that blasts their general message to the entire marketplace. This is commonly referred to as “spraying and praying” in the marketing world.

Your Solution: Find out how to narrow your marketing focus. The result is a more effective use of your precious marketing dollars and a much higher prospect to client conversion rate for your mortgage business called Niche Marketing.

Why Niche Marketing?

Niche marketing allocates a smaller portion of your marketing budget on building a list of likely prospects and then investing the rest on converting those prospects into clients. The result is a more effective use of your precious marketing dollars and a much higher prospect to client conversion rate. The end result is a significant increase in referrals.

By definition, niche marketing is narrowing your marketing efforts to a group(s) of prospects that have a high likelihood of being interested in purchasing your product or service.

Basically, there are three types of niches, (1) business occupations such as revenue property owners or general contractors and (2) “sub-cultures” such as people who love to play golf or people who love their Harley Davidson motorcycle and, finally, (3) credit scores such as A, B or C business.

Once you come to intimately know the niches you’ve selected to market to, your ability to convert prospects into clients becomes infinitely easier.

Your 6 Step Niche Marketing Program

Setting up your own mortgage niche market software program is simple using the following six step process. Each step in the process is important to the ultimate success of your niche marketing program. There are no shortcuts to niche marketing success.

Step 1 – Choose a Niche

When choosing a profitable niche to market to make sure that it’s one that you can easily contact by mail. A good choice would be a niche in which mailing lists are readily available. If at all possible, your niche should be one that communicates amongst itself through community groups or events. It helps if your niche suffers from problems that a mortgage professional can solve. Lastly, ensure that your niche has the money to purchase a home.

Perhaps the easiest method of choosing a niche is to review your client list and look for groups of people in the same occupation or subculture groups. The beauty of this method is that the niche you choose has already proven that they want a mortgage.

Potential niches that you might consider are self employed business owners, first-time home buyers or people with damaged credit. Each specific niche has a unique set of problems and aggravations that they have to deal with when trying to get a mortgage.

Step 2 – Develop your Brilliant Marketing Message

Once you’ve chosen your niche, your next step is to develop the marketing message that you will deliver to your prospects. To develop your message you’ll need to know: What problems or issues they are facing? What results are they looking for? And what is it about your service or approach that is going to interest them and make them remember you?

Materials you should expect to develop are a lead generation special report or financing guide. The guide can be 5-10 pages in length and should, (1) identify your prospect’s problem, (2) create a mental picture of the negative effects of the problem, and (3) talk about the benefits your financing solutions and how you will solve their problem. This financing guide can be in written form or better yet, a CD or video.

You’ll also need to create two sales letters. One sales letter will be for promoting the free financing guide and the other for leading them to take the next step and complete their application. You should also create a “What People Are Saying” testimonial book that contains endorsements from clients in your niche with accompanying pictures of them standing next to their newly purchased home.

Lastly, you’ll need a brochure. But not a standard mortgage brochure — one that is custom developed for your niche. So if you chose to market to renters and general contractors, you should develop two different brochures that include messages specifically targeted to the needs of your niches. The brochure doesn’t have to be glossy and expensive. But it does need to talk directly to your niche and address their unique problems.

Step 3 – Obtain or Generate a List of Prospects

Your list of prospects is the most valuable element of your niche marketing program. First, look for existing lists of niche prospects. For example, if you’re targeting business owners you might buy a membership list from your local Chamber of Commerce.

If you chose renters and couldn’t find an existing list, consider doing a deal with a local financial planner to do mailings to each other’s respective client lists.

To obtain a list of professions and subcultures to consider in your niche marketing program, send a blank email to nichelist @ mortgagemarketingcoach.com with the subject: “Niche List”.

Step 4 – Contact your Niche

It’s time to assemble your marketing message and send it to your niche market. This will be done in two steps. First, send your sales letter offering your free report or guide. Ask your prospects to respond by calling you to order their free financing guide. The next step is to send the guide to those who responded to your mail out and combine it with a note stating the benefits of taking the next step with an application.

WARNING: The next step is a common area where many mortgage professionals either cheat or skip altogether by just sending a one-step offer to the list. People are tired of one-step, “in your face” marketing. They want to be courted first. By sending good, non-sales type valuable information you’ll be establishing a warm relationship, which will prepare your prospect for your offer.

Step 5 – Follow up

Following up with your prospects is key! 98% of all mortgage professionals rarely follow up after their first mailing yet studies have shown that a prospect needs to see you and your offer at least three times to make a decision.

To dramatically increase response to your direct mailings you should consider following up by phone, introduce yourself, ask if they received your guide, and ask if they had any further questions.

Step 6 – Develop a Niche Referral Program

Now that you’ve taken the effort to establish your niche marketing program you should leverage your efforts by implementing a systematic referral program. Remember when I mentioned that it was important to choose a niche that communicates amongst itself? This is why! If you’ve created a happy client they will begin to talk to others in your niche.

For example, if you’ve targeted business owners in your city, they will start to talk about you in their monthly meetings and informal get-togethers. You can multiply this by rewarding your clients in some way when they tell their friends.

Be sure to make your referral program “systematic” so that it is an established process in your business that gets measured and for which people get rewarded for closed deals.

For instance, you might consider awarding a free dinner for two certificate or move tickets when your clients write a personal endorsement letter to two friends. You provide the endorsement letter template and they share their testimonial with two of their friends.

Conclusion

There is a misconception that if you narrow your target market that there will be fewer prospects to market to; however, you’ll find the opposite to be true. Once you begin to tailor your message to the specific needs of your niche and you begin to receive word-of-mouth advertising within your niche, new clients will come out of the woodwork . In fact, your client base will actually expand.

To be competitive in today’s economy you need to consider new methods and marketing techniques to reach more high quality prospects. Niche marketing is a proven way to uncover new prospects, increase closing rates, and boost referrals.

Doren Aldana, the nation’s leading Mortgage Marketing Coach, is dedicated to helping mortgage professionals attract more clients with less effort. Aldana is also the author of a 21-part Audio Seminar, “21 Secrets of Superstar Mortgage Brokers and Loan Officers!”

To pick up your copy of this special free resource visit: http://www.mortgagemarketingcoach.com

Article Source: Ezine Articles.

If you are an entrepreneur and wish to make some money online, you need to decide which will be the most lucrative type of site to have. Niche content sites are usually the most popular on the internet.

Why is this?

Because the primary reason why users go online is to source information! If you have a site containing all the necessary information you are more likely to get a lot of visitors.

The good thing about having a niche site is that the search engines really like them! This is because search engines love content, and that is what niche sites are full of! If your site contains keyword rich content it will move up in the search engines and receive more exposure. Refresh and update your content regularly in order for the search engines to index your site. This is an excellent SEO strategy! If you are going to be successful in your internet marketing efforts you need

Another way that people are making money with niche sites is through Google Adsense programs. If you have a good, popular niche site you will have lots of people wanting to advertise on your site. You can make money off their advertisements and it will be even more beneficial with regards to links if the ads are related to your specific niche. Using affiliate marketing programs will also earn you some extra cash on your niche site. This is when you promote another company’s products or e-books on your site, and provide links to their site. You will normally make commission off sales that occurred due to your referral. Ensure that whichever web design company you work with knows that you will be using Google Adsense and Affiliate Marketing campaigns.

The important thing is to get your site running successfully, with a steady amount of visitors each month. Ensure your content is correct and informative, but also interesting enough to keep the viewer coming back for more!

Something happened to me the other day that really made me wonder why some people find it so hard to achieve any type of success online.

Many people state that all programs are scams or simply don’t offer the right ype of support for your affiliate marketing efforts.

Promoting a home business opportunity is for newbies, plain and simple, unless of course the home business opprtunity is such a high-end program that it makes it difficult to make sales, then it becomes a matter of making those sales while everyone else is struggling to make their first sale.

The reason why niche marketing is so successful as a business model for many people is because it allows you to promote yourself and your sites first.

So, imagine if you had a hobby or passion that you truly enjoyed writing about. The most important part of that preceding sentences is the word “enjoyed”… If you enjoy talking about your passion or hooby, then your site content will be of great quality and honestly, good content is the best form of SEO you could hope to achieve, just by writing well.

Obviously some other factors will come into play for you besides just writing well. You need to write well and optimize your content in such a way as to allow the search engines to find your content. This really isn’t hard to do.

If you need any type of Online Marketing and Internet Business Advice simply do a search for what it is you need to learn to get your sites noticed by Google and other search engines.

There are plenty of blogs and bloggers out ther who are willing to share this type of information with you for free, and plenty of articles from article directories that are doing the same thing.

If you target your niche, sub-niche, keywords, or sub-keywords specifically enough, then you do have a chance of out-ranking other authority sites in the search engines for your chosen terms.

Here’s a tip:

If your main SEO competition has a PageRank 8 site that gets 10,000 visitors a month from all sorts of search terms, you can easily compete with them by getting domain names that specifically target each sub-keyword or phrase.

So, let’s take the avid and enthusiastic passion hobby niche of bird-watching for a case in point. The same crew of sites are ranking well for terms like bird binoculars, birding guides, bird feeders and so on…

I did some reasearch into this niche and realized that the domain names and sites I was up against were going to be tough competition.

So, I devoted one site to bird binoculars, and another to birding guides, and once those have reached the top of the rankings, I will proceed to build another site, and add enough content and baclinks to it to get top ranked for other keywords that I thought it would be impossible to rank well for.

The Niche marketing secret I am revealing to you right now is that no SEO competition is too great for you to tackle and to have your sites perform well against.

All you need to do well with your rankings strategy is to be willing to target specific keywords and make sure your domain names have those keywords in there. At some point when your niche sites are doing well on their own, they’ll also link to each other naturally and you will begin to crowd the first page of the search engines with your site content.

If I decided that I wanted more than just one spot on Page 1 for a certain search term, I could do that easily enough if the right domain names were available. I’ve done it enough times to know that it can be done with the right kind of minimal effort.

So far, the best strategy that I’ve come up with when deciding to target certain keywords is to target product names and if domain names aren’t available for the product name, then I look for the product name + review for a domain name.

If the .com tld is taken for my desired domain name, I will get the .org TLD name, and if that’s taken, then I move on to another keyword that might do well for getting organic natural traffic.

Once I find a good enough domain name, I will set up a wordpress blog on it, and immediately configure it to have the proper ping list. Then I will find an article that I can republish on my blog, and finding one usually takes about 15 seconds. After finding an article I can use for quick content I will publish it on the blog once it’s ready to go, configuration wise.

Then I submit the RSS feed to the blog to a couple of RSS diretories, and even submit the sitemap for the site to Google Webmaster Tools if I am not being too lazy. I don’t think that sitemap submission is overly important any more, but one thing I do know, it’s that submitting your site to the search engines is kind of a waste of time.

It’s best to let Google and other search engines find you on their own since that’s a more natural way of getting noticed, and once one search engine finds you, the rest will follow eventually.

After submitting the RSS feed, I then will create a squidoo or hub page and add some unique content there. I will also add the RSS feed url for my blog to the hubpages so every new post on the blog also updates on my hubpages, which basically adds fresh new content to the hub page and makes it perform better, rankings-wise.

Then, I will write an article to be submitted to my article directory of choice, EzineArticles. The article I submit will have 2 backlinks in it to my main site/blog and to my hub page or Squidoo Lens. Once the article is approved and live on the internet, I will post this to my blog (2d piece of duplicate content).

Since it takes a few days to have an article reviewed, accepted, and published, you can take that time to gather up some more of your keywords that you want to target in future content pieces you write for your site.