Affiliate Marketing
Introduction: Finding Your Niche and Niche Research
|
Your choice of niche
is the most important step of your affiliate marketing business.
Choose
the wrong niche and it will be like trying to sell ice cream in
antartica.
NO MARKET!!
Below is a guide to help the newbie find and
research a niche
|
The Big
Question is 'how do
I find a profitable niche [ie topic to build your campaign around]?'
The best topics to
research and publish
on are
Topics you are
excited about eg your hobbies!
Topics you know about!!
Topics you want to
know about!!!
When selecting topics
you need to be
specific.
So for example Chinese
dolls from the ming dynasty [if there
is such a thing!] rather than toys.
Sea rescue helicopters
rather than
aircraft.
Select
three topics then research if they are potentially profitable by
finding out
- What is
the demand for this topic ie how often is it searched for online
by Internet users. If your selected topic is only searched for 10 times
a month then it probably is not going to be very profitable.
- What is
the supply of my niche ie how many websites are providing a
service in my chosen niche. If you type in 'affiliate marketing' on
Google, you will notice that there are 42,700,000 sites that are
indexed for this search phrase. That's over 42 million websites to
compete with!
- What
products related to my chosen niche are out there that I can promote
using my website and get paid per sale
To answer the demand and
supply
question, the following are worth looking into
FREE OPTION:
This first option is free but very effort intensive. The
other problem is that the webpage doesn't always load up.
However if
you are new to researching keywords or keyword phrases, this is
probably a good place to start.
The product is Yahoo search marketing
[also known as overture]. Click Yahoo Search marketing
to visit the website. Once there click on the Keyword Selector tool.
A
new page pops up and you just enter your search phrase into the search
box and click enter. This returns the number of times your chosen key
phrase has been searched in Yahoo during the previous month.
So that
tells you the demand.
It is also a neat tool because it tells you how many times variations
of your search term have been searched in that time frame
For supply, just type in your keyword into the google search bar
and near the
top right side of the page, Google tells you how many sites are indexed
for the term
PAID
FOR OPTIONS:
Wordtracker: This tool searches the major search engines over the
previous 90 days to find how many times your keyword or phrase was
searched for by Internet users.
It
also gives you results for
alternative but related keywords.
Wordtracker
also tells you what the
competition is and gives you an analysis of profitability.
It
costs
$271.34 a year but has options for weekly, monthly or yearly
subscription.
There
is also a free trial offer.
Click
Wordtracker
to view the free trial and website
Keyword
Elite [Highly recommended if you
are serious about affiliate marketing!!]:
This
software helps you
generate huge keyword lists, analyze the competition, create adsense
targeted webpages and discover what keywords are making your
competitors money.
It
costs $176 with free lifetime upgrades.
The
products website says this price is for a limited time only.
There
is also a 60 day money back guarantee
Click
Keyword
Elite to
view the website
To find what products are out there in
your chosen niche, you can either go to an affiliate program provider
or to individual companies affiliate programs.
Some reputable affiliate
program providers are
Clickbank.
This has
over 10,000
digital products available. Digital products are products that can be
downloaded eg ebooks and software. The advantage of clickbank is that
the commissions are high [50% to 75%]. The commission is the portion of
the cost of the product that you get paid per sale!!
Clickbank
also allows you
to view the products pitch page, the commission rate and the gravity.
The gravity is an index of how popular a product is. The higher the
gravity, the more popular the product is. This can actually work
against you. If the product is too popular, there will be too many
other affiliates promoting the same affiliate product resulting in an
over competitive marketplace.
By far the best way to use click bank is to market your own digital
product on it.
Click
here to view clickbank. Its free to join as a promoter
Commission junction:
By far one
of the most
successful affiliate providers out there.
Commission junction provides
affiliate marketing opportunities in companies like Lloyds, last
minute, Argos, Adobe, HP [the computer not the sauce], Ebay
Advantages
include
- Free to join. You want to join as
a publisher
- Largest affiliate marketing network
- Products of high quality in
virtually every
niche
- Email updates from the program you
join
The only
disadvantages I
can think of are
- They have so many programs you can
easily get
distracted
- You cannot view the programs they
have unless you
register. Example of the programs are Capital one, Blockbusters,
Lloyds, HSBC, Lastminute.com, Thomas Cook, Match.com.
On the top
right corner of
their page select the country that is most
appropriate to you
Kolimbo open network:
A
subsidiary of Kowabonga,
this affiliate program provider is one of my
favorites.
It has a
user friendly page
layout.
A great
tool with Kolimbo
is the KBZone. This allows you to register
with several merchants, build a catalogue and with one piece of HTML
code have these programs banners rotate on a preselected area of your
website using an RSS feed. All this done in a few clicks. This means
that instead of having several banners cluttering your website, you
have one periodically changing banner. Pretty neat.
Go
directly to merchants own affiliate program:
Some
merchants do not use affiliate program networks and manage their own
affiliate programs inhouse.
To find these programs go to the google search bar and type in
affiliate program + Niche/keyword. [Put your chosen niche or keyword
inplace of niche/keyword]
Disclaimer
Privacy Policy
|
