Clarification or definitions please?

[jkgourmet]

What is the difference between:

A niche site
A microniche site
A landing page that contains the the sales pitch, the call to action and a way of purchasing the product (like so many of the info products use with the yellow highlight text, bad graphics, run on sentences, very old school.)

[Lynn Terry]

A niche site basically defines any site on a particular topic. Even as general as sports, or love.

A micro-niche site is focused on a very specific topic, like Michael Jordan Basketball Shoes instead of just "shoes".

A landing page is the page visitors are taken to from an advertisement or recommendation. That term is used loosely.

A squeeze page is a web page with ONE objective: to get the visitor to submit their email address in exchange for something (an ecourse, report, etc).

A sales page is a web page with ONE objective: to sell a product.

[jkgourmet]

So a newbie who is trying to.sell hard products thru AM would *most likely* be successful with a micrniche site, yes?

[Lynn Terry]

A micro-niche site is great for affiliate marketing, yes.

I tend to be an overachiever and for broader niche marketing. Like "sports" vs "basketball shoes". But you're right - yes.

[jkgourmet]

How about a broad niche with multiple blogs or websites that are microniche?

Using your shoe example, is it better to have separate sites or blogs, each promoting something slighting different. Like one for women's sandals, women's dress shoes, men's shoes, sneakers, running shoes, children's shoes, infant shoes, boots, hiking shoes, flip-flops, etc. Maybe even have links pointing to each of the related sites?

I'm feeling like having one big site for shoes would just be overwhelming to me and will never get any kind of ranking, and therefore no sales. Maybe somebody who knows what they are doing and really knows SEO would be able get that google ranking on a very broad topic site, but a newbie???

I recognize that could be a lot of websites, but wouldn't that set up have a better chance of getting some google ranking versus one single site for shoes? Especially for a newbie? I would think that is also something that I could start myself on WP, with pages dedicated to products and blog entries for content and product reviews/recommendations.

And as one learns, isn't the an opportunity to combine them all into one big site later on, and redirect from the old sites? And at that point, maybe get it off WP and onto something else (probably requiring somebody else to do it.)

Or am I overcomplicating things. . . (which I'm definately prone to do!)

[Lynn Terry]

It's a good question.

What you're referring to with all of the smaller sites interlinked... is what we used to call the "James Martell method". It got fried in the search engines with one of those "google slaps" because people were creating a network of sites to create their own source for inbound links - which G saw as intent to manipulate PageRank.

You also have two other things: site theming & authority. Larger sites can become "authority sites" and of course more pages on the topic lends to the site theming. Both good things.

So if you're going to do an online shoe store, do that all on one domain. But if you want to specialize in Jimmy Choo's - that's cool too.

[jkgourmet]

Maybe I should start a thread on this, with specifics, on the elite brainstorming forum, BEFORE I try to start building another amazon.com?

[Lynn Terry]

Yeah, you don't want to do that :)

Niche marketing usually refers to choosing a very specific niche. Amazon is cool because they are the best, and they were one of the first. And they have the means to do it right.

But in general, creating an "online general store" is NOT a good idea.

Target a specific market.