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Niche Marketing Tips For Affiliate Marketers
Niche Marketing Tips For Affiliate Marketers
Every marketer worth his or her salt knows what the most popular niches are – weight loss, pet care, making money online, survival, baby care, etc. are extremely profitable niches with billions of dollars being spent yearly.
These astronomical sums are enough to make many affiliates salivate and want to take a bite out of this pie by promoting products through their affiliate links and this can be a very lucrative affiliate marketing strategy.
Niching Down
While you can make money in these niches, it’s imperative that you niche down to a level that you can compete in. For example, weight loss is just too competitive.
As an affiliate, you’ll struggle to go up against the big boys who have lots of money to spend on building websites, advertising and more.
In some cases, it’ll be next to impossible. But what if you targeted women’s weight loss? Now the market is smaller but it’s still too tough.
What if you niched down further and targeted weight loss for women above 40 who have diabetes? Now, you’re talking! This sub-niche will be much more manageable to target, and you’ll be able to find long tail keywords that you can optimize your blog posts for.
It’s be easier to rank for the low hanging fruit and your marketing efforts will be much more streamlined. The truth of the matter is that the same products that are marketed to the general weight loss crowd will also work with the audience in the sub-niche.
It all comes down to how you slant your content and show that the products will help the reader. If you can do that, your readers will become buyers.
Questions To Ask
Before even picking a niche, you’ll need to plan your attack. Is the competition manageable or is it beyond you? Are there products to promote? Will you be able to find places where you can drive traffic from?
All of these are very important questions that you need to ask yourself before diving into a niche. Jumping in blindly will mean wasting time and effort on a niche that’s either unprofitable or too competitive.
You’ll also need to search on Google to see what sites show up for the keywords you’re targeting.
Are there any affiliate sites? If there are, you have as good a chance as them of ranking. How optimized are their sites? Could you do better than them?
What’s their traffic like? Are there ads being displayed on their sites? What products are they promoting?
All these questions are market research that you should be doing before you even get started with your niche sites. By getting answers to them, you’ll be able to formulate a marketing strategy that will give you your best chance at succeeding in the fastest possible time.
Strategizing For Success
Take notes while doing your research for easy reference. Do not rely on your memory. Try to bulk your tasks. For example, when looking for affiliate products to promote, find as many as you can at one time.
If you’re doing keyword research, spend a day or two compiling as many keywords that you could rank for. By batching your tasks, you’ll be much more productive in the long run. Once you get started, you’ll have everything you need at your fingertips.
Study your niche before you start your affiliate marketing in it. The extra time you spend beforehand will give you a much better picture of how to proceed or if you even should. This is something all experienced affiliates do. Now you know it too. So, do it.
Niching down is just one of a number of affiliate marketing strategies, but do you really understand what affiliate marketing is all about on a basic level?
Understanding Affiliate Marketing To Succeed At It
On the surface, affiliate marketing looks like a very simple concept. You find a product for sale and you recommend it to others who might buy it. In return, you get a percentage of the sale as a commission because you’re associated with it. It’s so simple.
Just like how it is with insurance agents, door to door salesmen and real estate brokers. Affiliate marketing is all about sales and commissions.
But here’s something you should know – simple and easy are two different things.
Trust
When you’re selling online, in most cases, you’re not face to face with the prospect. The human element has been removed from the equation. Visitors to your site can leave with a click of the mouse.
Someone who doesn’t like your email can delete it and unsubscribe in seconds. Selling online while highly profitable, is a slightly different ballgame.
For starters, people come online looking for information or to be entertained. In other words, they’re looking for ‘infotainment’… and even if you’re in a niche like gardening, golf or woodworking, the same rule applies.
Your content not only needs to help the reader, but it must hold their attention… and guess what? Social media sites, instant notifications and a short attention span are all waiting to rob you of that sale.
Door to door salesmen never had it this tough. There is much more rejection online. The only difference is that it’s not so obvious.
So, always make your content relevant, entertaining and useful. The goal is to get the reader to trust you. Use whatever it takes from infographics to videos to pictures of the product, etc. to remove all mental obstacles from the buyers’ minds and show how useful the product can be for solving their problems… and be subtle about it.
Traffic
The next thing you should know is that unlike real-life sales where the prospect comes to your store or you can go knocking on doors prospecting, when it comes to online marketing, things are a little different.
Building a website alone doesn’t automatically mean that you’ll get floods of traffic. You may not get any for years. To sell online, you need to go and GET traffic. It’s all about ‘getting’ and not sitting around waiting.
You’ll need to drive traffic on your own by using free or paid methods. So, you must learn a few traffic generation techniques and take action.
Tracking
When running an online business, you must track your results. Does your site have visitors? Do your products convert? Where is most of your traffic coming from?
Are your emails being opened? Which pages on your site see the most traffic? Which ads are performing well and which need to be shut down?
As you can see, there are many variables involved and by tracking your results, you’ll know where to multiply your efforts and scale up… and where your efforts are yielding no fruit.
You’ll also know where you’re not performing as well as you should and be able to remedy the problem. You’ll never know this if you don’t track.
So, remember the 3 T’s of affiliate marketing. Trust, traffic and tracking. If you follow these T’s to a T, you’ll succeed at affiliate marketing in record time.
If you want to know more affiliate marketing, then check out the featured resource below for a free Affiliate Marketing Machine report which complements this post perfectly; download, read it and take action 😊
Affiliate Marketing Research, Kindle And Automation
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.
If you want to know more affiliate marketing, then check out the featured resource below for a free Affiliate Marketing Machine report which complements this post perfectly; download, read it and take action 😊
Is Affiliate Marketing Good For Beginners?
Is Affiliate Marketing Good For Beginners?
There are so many things to learn in the world of online marketing. Beginners can easily become overwhelmed by all of the various business models, tools, and courses they can learn from and implement.
Affiliate marketing is perfect for beginners to embrace because it cuts down on the learning curve substantially. Instead of having to learn everything about online marketing from a soup to nuts perspective, you can simply chop off the product creation elements and pick up with the post-creation promo strategies.
All you need is to find an offer with a good affiliate program. And there are many affiliate platforms in many niches; what about the Amazon affiliate program, or for more digital products, what about Warrior Plus, Clickbank or JVZoo?
You can get started without a website; you simply need your affiliate links to the offer(s) you are promoting. This is a big blessing to many beginner affiliate marketers who want to set up some promotions, but don’t yet know the ins and outs of domains, hosting and blog setup details.
You don’t need to learn product creation skills. The hassle of product development, automated delivery to the customer, and subsequent customer service issues is very draining to someone who is a beginner online.
You will need to learn niche research skills. If you choose a niche that you enjoy or are passionate about, it will make the niche research portion very enjoyable. You’ll want to tackle this aspect of affiliate marketing like an adventure – where you’re always discovering new information and sharing it with your audience.
You’ll want to understand SEO (Search Engine Optimization) if you have a site of your own. Some affiliates do start out with their $10 or so domain and under $10 a month hosting account – just so they won’t have to do this step later.
When you start out this way, or really even if you’re using free platforms, you’ll want to learn the very basic steps associated with SEO. That means understanding keywords and using them in your content creation to attract the right people to your affiliate offers.
Mastering the art of reviews will serve you well as an affiliate. Forget about being a professional writer. Just being casual in your conversations online is what helps buyers trust you and be willing to part with their money.
Beginners do very well in affiliate marketing if they keep their ethics intact. Sometimes, desperation for a quick income can cause you to compromise your beliefs. But if you do that, you’ll shoot yourself in the foot because you’ll be building a reputation as a scammer instead of a leader.
Don’t be afraid to ask for help as an affiliate whenever you get stuck. There are many people online who are willing to explain things and hold your hand through the newbie stage of affiliate marketing.
Ongoing Affiliate Marketing Training
Learning affiliate marketing is not something that happens after you read one blog post, or buy one course, or absorb and implement a video tutorial. It’s an on-going process that evolves over time.
You want to think of affiliate marketing as a continuing education system where you’re always learning, always bettering, and always improving your conversion rates. And that will help your earnings soar.
Learn from a wide variety of people. Yes, over time you’ll have your favorite teachers to learn from – but it’s important t see what kind of golden nuggets other instructors can share that might resonate well with you.
Tackle different styles of affiliate marketing. If you’re only in tangible marketing, why not try to learn how to add digital affiliate marketing to the mix – or vice versa? Or if you’re only using Amazon, why not figure out how to add Commission Junction?
Learn how to advance and tweak your strategies. Never just stick with a beginner’s mindset. You want to learn how to really click with your visitors. So let’s say you feel like you know how to write a product review.
You might be doing just fine with it. But wouldn’t you like to add more conversions, regardless? Who wouldn’t? So learn about how to connect with customers, how to build trust with an audience, and so on. Really expand your learning process to the outer edges.
Test the results of more than one method. Don’t stick with making comparison tables in blog post after blog post – even if it’s working for you. Branch out and learn other methods, like top 10 lists for example.
Understand that the web changes. What may have worked to get you traffic and sales two years ago could be highly obsolete today. You want to keep your pulse on the market and see how trends have evolved.
When video marketing hit the scene, it was an incredible edge some affiliates had over their text-only affiliate competitors because they were able to build trust quickly and easily – and reach more prospects because of YouTube.
Try to invest in several different styles of teaching. A downloadable course is one method. But have you looked into affiliate marketing memberships where you can interact with other affiliates and share strategies?
Or how about paying for a few sessions with an affiliate marketing mentor or coach? That way they could specifically analyze your efforts and help you make headway with your promotions and profits.
Evaluating Info Products For Possible Promotions
If you’re an affiliate marketer who wants to promote digital information products for a commission, then you have to go about it carefully if you want the highest conversion rate with the least amount of refunds.
You want to protect your blog readers and list subscribers from making a worthless purchase, so evaluating the products and reviewing them the right way is important. There are three things you can do to get good results.
Dig around into the product seller’s reputation. Before you buy, you want to know whether the product owner is one of the good guys, or one of the shady marketers.
Sending your customers to buy from someone who doesn’t practice ethics is like sending a lamb to slaughter. They trust you. So make sure you’re looking out for them.
Don’t just read the sales copy to see how you feel about this seller, start digging around online. Look at things like IM Report Card and various forums where anyone has reviewed one of their past products.
If they’re engaging in forums or on their blog, make sure you look to see how they treat people and how they act. Are they someone you’d want to send a good friend or family member to learn from?
You might even test the waters yourself by emailing the marketer to ask a question. How they handle customer service issues could affect your decision on whether or not to promote their products.
Don’t ask for a review copy – buy the product. Sometimes, getting a review copy can make some affiliates feel like they’re obligated to say good things about the product. You want to give an unbiased review, so buying it frees up your conscience.
Another reason to buy it is so that you can go through the process and share what it was like to your readers. Did you encounter any upsells, downsells or one time offers? Did you get immediate access to the product after paying?
Do an implementation review, not just a sales copy review. Too many affiliates simply read the sales copy and report on what the product is. If you want better conversions, then you need to put the product to the test!
Start by reviewing why you decided to buy this product, what you did or didn’t like about the sales copy and buying process, and then share your experience (not the product details) on what it was like to use the product for your own business.
If you want to know more affiliate marketing, then check out the featured resource below for a free Affiliate Marketing Machine report which complements this post perfectly; download, read it and take action 😊