Affiliate Marketing Research, Kindle And Automation

Sometimes when you’re launching a new business, especially online when you’re doing it all alone, it can feel overwhelming not knowing how to find the best path to profits. You have to know how to research niches and products and people and keywords to decide where you want to grab your affiliate links. It’s enough to make anyone throw up their hands in frustration.

There are some easy tips that can help you conduct your research online. Researching niches is a piece of cake. What you’re looking for is competition. Some people will look at competition and feel like there’s no way they could go up against the other sites.

But competition actually means it’s a healthy niche – with room for everyone. If you find a niche that no one’s selling in, then it probably means there’s no interest in – and that should set off warning bells for you.

Look on bookshelves in your local Barnes and Noble and see what non-fiction topics have plenty of resources. Glance at the covers of the women’s magazines at the checkout stand the next time you buy groceries.

You’ll see everything from insomnia to nutrition and more. They’re good about showcasing trendy topics, too – niches that are just now growing big enough for major publications to pick up on them.

News sites give lots of good insight into trends within a niche, too. Most major news sites like FoxNews and CNN have categories for science, technology, health and more. Look at those to stay abreast of what’s happening in your niche.

Also, set up a Google Alert so that you get news and information delivered straight to your inbox whenever something happens – or in a digest version if you want to check it sparingly.

Product research is sometimes a bit more in depth. You first want to go to sites like Ubersuggest and see what kinds of things your audience wants to know about the product. Type in the product name or niche topic and get hundreds of results that help steer you in the right direction.

Then, go to the manufacturer’s website and see what the specs are on the product. You can even download instruction manuals to read more details about it and share that with your visitors.

If it’s something you can find locally, don’t be afraid to go into your store and look at the product and jot down some notes. You can even take some pictures or a video to put on your blog.

Researching people is easy if you trace their social media accounts. Look at their blog and the interaction they have with people (if you’re promoting an info product). Look at their Twitter account, their Google Plus and Facebook, too.

Keyword research is a cinch with free and paid tools that are available to you. Ubersuggest again is a great tool, but you can also invest in paid tools like Market Samurai that show you the competition and profit potential of a niche.

How To Use Kindle For Affiliate Marketing Purposes

Kindle is a fantastic resource for affiliate marketers – and the strategy you’re about to learn is one that few affiliates have applied, so the field is wide open. It’s going to require a small amount of product creation on your part, but there are double benefits involved.

Kindle is a platform on Amazon that’s 100% free for you to use where you can self-publish your eBooks and reports to a large global audience. But as an affiliate, your goal is to promote other people’s things.

Affiliates are like all other marketers – they have to produce a variety of content – for their blogs, websites, email autoresponders, opt in giveaways, and more. So creating a short report shouldn’t be too difficult.

Your goal is to create these short reports, load them onto Kindle for sale at a low price point of $0.99, and let the book sell to the masses – with your link in it! The link will go back to your affiliate site, or even to your squeeze page where you promise them another book (only free this time) if they sign up to your list.

So let’s say you had a site that promoted household organization products. You could write an entire series of Kindle creations about how to organize various rooms in your house (and outdoors, too).

Start with a broad “How to Get Organized” book and then branch off into more specific areas. Kindle has a Select program that you can enroll in, too – and this lets you give the book away for five days out of the 90-day period.

During this time, you’ll want to sign up to promote it at all of the major Kindle promotion sites that like to feature free books for the day. This greatly expands your exposure because you’ll get free downloads from all of the people who signed up for notification.

Plus, Amazon Prime members can borrow your book from the lending library if you enable that feature. But you still get paid for the borrow – sometimes even more than what you’d make for selling it at your cheap price point.

If you choose not to use KDP Select, which restricts your eBook from being sold elsewhere, then you’ll have the opportunity to sell it on your website, too. But you might want to try it out first for at least 90 days to see how it works for you.

Make sure you avoid linking to products inside your Kindle eBook. That’s against the rules. You want to link them to your site so that you can capture their name and email address and then promote items in your niche for a long period of time.

Is Affiliate Marketing Automation A Good Idea?

There are many automation tools on the ‘net that supposedly help you free up some time and effort in running your business as an affiliate marketer. There are definite pros and cons that you need to be aware of before you begin using them.

Automation helps you avoid tasks that you dread. This can be beneficial because there are so many little tasks that we don’t look forward to, so putting a few on autopilot helps us continue enjoying the affiliate marketing journey.

Automation helps you do things better than you do manually. Sometimes there are tasks that we’re just not good at. An automated tool might be able to do things faster, easier or more thoroughly than we do them ourselves.

Automation tools mean you get to work on something else. Freeing up time is one of the biggest reasons affiliates utilize automated tools in the first place. It’s certainly a benefit to have less work on your to do list.

But automation isn’t all rainbows and unicorns, either. There are problems that can arise, so it’s important that you recognize where they can hurt your business.

Automation can prevent you from seeing errors that arise. Tools like software and plugins can have bugs in the system. If you have a completely “hand off” system for running your business, then you could go months without noticing that things aren’t working right.

It’s usually only when sales begin grinding to a halt that an affiliate heavily invested in automated tools goes to check things out – and discovers that there’s an issue with the tool, or perhaps a necessary upgrade they didn’t see that keeps it running properly.

Automation removes that human element that makes a connection with your target audience. Most automation tools simply remove a small task from your to do list. But there are those that remove you from your site entirely.

For example, any automated tool that whips up content or automates comment approval means that your site won’t carry your natural voice in it. It will be difficult for visitors to engage with you or trust you enough to click through on your links and act on them.

Automation tools can sometimes get you in trouble with the search engines, too. If they’re black hat tools that do anything illegal, or unethical, then you could find your site plummeting in the search engine ranks. It’s better to approach affiliate marketing from a morally sound perspective so that your profits increase over time and there are many affiliate marketing strategies that are above board.

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