Diary of an Affiliate Marketer
After my conversation with my good friend Gavin the other day my head is full of affiliate marketing ideas and it occurred to me that many people struggle to get started with affiliate marketing because they don’t know where to start or what to sell.
The successful affiliate marketers find things to sell in niche markets and I remember every time I heard that phrase it used to drive me mad … what is a niche market?
It’s important you understand what a niche market is otherwise you will not fully profit in your chosen market place and will get frustrated when all that was required was you do some research first. Let me try and explain in a bit more depth.
Let’s say I’m looking for a new market and I start thinking of some affiliate marketing ideas. How about promoting cars? (I’m being ridiculous here but stay with me).
The two tools I am going to use here for simplicity is the Google Keyword Tool and Google’s search engine as it is the most popular these days. Typing in my keyword “car” returns
506 million searches and 814 million results … ridiculously competitive
So let’s go nichier … what about “car accessories”
20 million searches and 86 million pages show up in the results … better but still ridiculous
Now you can start to think of popular car accessories, what’s hot at the moment? I know, let’s try “sat nav” … more and more people are using these devices every day.
2 million searches …. Fantastic! Oh! … 21 million results
Okay, we’re moving in the right direction. We are narrowing down our target market. We started off with a car, then car accessories, now an individual car accessory, sat nav. So what’s next?
How about a particular make of sat nav? Let’s try “Tom Tom Sat Nav”
Now we’re talking …
200 000 searches per month and only just over 1 million results for the main keyword “Tom Tom Sat Nav”
By the time we put together a keyword list with everything related to our main keyword “Tom Tom Sat Nav” we will have a formidable list, plenty of traffic and with all the other things we have learnt about affiliate marketing we should be able to achieve high rankings for our keywords.
If you understand the principle of what I have shown you above you can come up with lots of affiliate marketing ideas. All you have to do is start with anything you see selling anywhere, in magazines, down the mall on television … anywhere.
Now just keep narrowing it down until you have a niche which may be the brand as in the above example, or type such as wooden, metal, glass etc.
The whole idea about niche marketing is provide your visitor with exactly what they were looking for … a specific product or service.
One of the most important rules you need to realize with the internet is that unlike shopping at a mall where you may browse and find something you want, with the internet the surfer already has a picture in their mind of what it is they are searching for … it’s usually very specific and if you can provide it from your niche website built around that very specific topic … $$$.
