Weight loss. Making money online. Pet care. Baby care. Survival. These are all extremely profitable niches and as a marketer, if you didn’t know that, now you do. People around the world spend billions of dollars in these niches every year. There are many affiliates who would love to get in on this action – and who can blame them?
* Niching down
What marketers early in their careers may not realize is that these niches are themselves filled with niches, and that’s where you should start. Don’t try to jump right into the whole make money online niche, you’ll never stand out among the people who are already leading it. Your beginner budget will never keep up with their budget back ed by years of progress.
Some niches are impossible to break into at that level. What about going further though, what if instead of targeting all make money online you target traffic generation? It’s a smaller market, but is it small enough? Can we do better?Â
How about YouTube traffic generation? Imagine the long-tail keywords! It will take much less time to get valuable information assembled, created, and presentable in a smaller niche such as this making it significantly more manageable.
Not only is this going to be easier to put together and stand out in, but the same people up at the traffic generation and online marketing niches are also going to be interested. Your market is not significantly smaller, but your focus is.
Create the content to help readers and you can excel, building an audience. Eventually, you’ll grow to the next sub-niche up and over time will become one of the big players in the parent niche!
* Questions to ask
Can you find products to promote in your chosen niche? Is it small enough for you to get in? Is it big enough to be profitable? Will traffic be problematic? These are all questions you need to answer before settling on a niche.
Jumping in without answers is essentially planning to fail. You might get into a small niche that isn’t profitable or a large one where you can’t make any headway.
Search for your niche and keywords. Are others doing affiliate sales here? Can you do better than them? Do they have ads? Can you promote some of the same products? Research their site traffic, is it enough? There’s no reason you couldn’t join them in the rankings if the size fits where you are in your affiliate marketing journey.
This is all market research. Answer these questions and you can create a marketing strategy. With a solid strategy, you greatly increase your chances of succeeding over someone who just throws up a site and relies on Google to send traffic.
* Strategizing for success
Start putting a process into place immediately. You cannot rely on your memory to create and execute on your strategy. Take notes and organize them into lists of tasks. Bulk process your tasks. This means finding all your affiliate products at once, creating your articles all at once, finding graphics all at once, etc.
Don’t skimp on keyword research. Find as many as you can and work them into your content as naturally as possible. The more work you do upfront, in planning the strategy and setting the pieces you need to assemble in place, the faster you’ll get through the content creation portion.
The more you know the niche you are planning to market to, the better you’ll do when marketing to it. There isn’t magic in affiliate marketing, just a combination of preparation and luck. All experienced affiliates hedge their bets on preparation instead of relying on luck, and you should too.
Is your niche small enough? Big enough? Do you not even know what it is? Let me help you tune it in and find the right balance of strategizing and action.