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Affiliate Tips: Choosing the Right Niche
March 18, 2013 by Leave a Comment
Affiliate marketing is the practice of promoting someone else’s products online in an attempt to earn commission. There are merchants accepting affiliates in almost every niche these days, from financial services to video games. The first thing that many affiliates want to know is, “Which niche should I choose?”. Hopefully, these tips will make your choice easier:
Approach 1: Promote What You Love
A lot of people enter affiliate marketing by accident. They start a blog about a hobby that they love, and decide to monetize this by signing up to related affiliates. This can be a fun way to learn about affiliate marketing, and if you are lucky you may make some money from it too.
Unfortunately, many of the most popular “hobby” niches are not ones that are easy to monetize. If you run a video game blog, or a site about a TV show, you’d be lucky to pay your hosting bills from your commissions.
Approach 2: Choosing a High Paying Niche
Another simplistic approach is to simply log in to your chosen affiliate network website and sort the campaigns by pay, then start a website about whatever the highest paying keyword is. If you don’t mind writing thousands of words about payday loans, obscure drugs, or no-win no-fee lawyers then this could be a successful strategy.
There are two downsides to choosing a niche based on pay alone. Firstly, the high-paying niches change frequently, and if you’re going to try to keep up with those changes it’s likely you’ll burn out. Secondly, the high-paying keywords tend to be high competition keywords too – do you really want to have to throw resources at trying to outrank a huge number of experienced affiliate marketers?
Competition vs Popularity
The best products to promote are:
- Products you believe in and would use yourself
- Related to a niche that you enjoy writing about and researching
- See a good amount of search traffic
- Are relatively low competition
- Are consumable products, or otherwise ones that encourage repeat purchases
Choose evergreen products whenever possible, especially for your first few sites. Once you have gotten the hang of setting up and ranking sites quickly you can try to capitalize on trends (such as major movie releases or popular music artists) if you wish.
To determine whether a niche is popular or not, use the Google Adwords Query tool. Make a list of keywords related to the niches you are thinking of using, and run them through the tool. In the ideal world, you want a keyword with a lot of searches (including long-tail versions of the keyword), and minimal competition.
Don’t fear competition too much – every niche has competition in it – after all, if there were no affiliates, merchants wouldn’t bother to keep their programs going. You want to avoid the very high competition niches, but you should try to establish yourself in a specific area of a healthy niche.
Finding your audience
The best way to establish yourself is to pick a relatively narrow part of a broader niche. For example, if you’re targeting a male audience and want to sell sports supplements, narrow down that audience and run a bodybuilding website, or a site for strong men. It’s easier to build a reputation as an authority if you specialise in one narrow part of a niche.
This article was written by B. Frisby, working for Clicksure Payments. Find out more about them on their about page.
Why is Email Marketing Still The Key to Success?
March 6, 2013 by Leave a Comment
For years email marketing remained the essential part of online marketing campaigns and the first priority of small business owners. It helps companies and businesses to market services and products to people who might be potential customers for them, but since email filters have become more intelligent it is harder for marketers to bypass the filters and reach inbox. But for some people email marketing is still one of the most successful marketing methods.
We will look at some reasons for email marketing campaigns still being one of the most successful marketing methods.
Access to a Huge Audience
Today almost every internet user has an email address because it is nearly impossible to make use of the internet to communicate with other users without having one. Email marketing provides direct access to internet users without borders and restrictions in between. A company or business can share the details and benefits of choosing their products or services straight with a user.
Today there are more than one social network platforms on the web and businesses are using extensively them to market their services and products, but users can easily customize their settings to choose what they want to see and hide. In contrast if emails reach users’ inbox they will more probably be viewed.
Create a Mailing List
Marketing on a social network platform has some drawbacks among which updates getting lost are most common. Most users over see new updates such as promotions, discounts and offers because they are often mixed with other updates which mean more to them. It is essential in marketing principle to get attention of a user to convert it into a customer.
Users and fans can subscribe to mailing lists to remain updated while webmasters and marketers can send mails containing information about promotions and offers which they might be interested in knowing. Creating and managing mailing lists has become a skill and companies often hire a social media manager to handle and manage email subscribers and pages on social networks.
Online service such as MailChimp is an example of a third-party email marketing company helping companies and businesses manage subscribers’ mailing list.
People Have More Time to Check Mails
Social networks are superb and they are one of the best ways to remain updated with friends and family, but it requires some spare time to upload your photos and tag some friends. Checking mails suits to office decorum and you only get information which is important to you. People subscribe to important mailing lists at their favorite websites and can easily read and forward them to others without getting in the social mess.
As a business owner you can send what is important for your readers and not spam them with emails to make email marketing campaign effective.
Customize and Show Your Business
With emails you are free to think creative as far as your imagination goes. You can think of creative ways to make emails more readable and user-friendly to express your business. You can use templates, your business logo and insert links to web pages which a user might be interested in.
Customize Your Campaign for Users
You can distribute mailing lists with interests and professions of users, and customize emails for different users, which is nearly impossible with social networks as you have limited resources. You can use a formal business language for emails you are sending to working professionals, while you can use more colors and a leisure talk for younger audience. Marketing campaigns designed for social networks work completely contrasts to that because each page is designed for all kinds of audience – email marketing campaigns give you more freedom.
Verdict
Social networks and other online platforms have made socializing much easier but email marketing is still the prime medium of marketing because it gives you freedom and you can manage email listings using your own tools and use it as you like.
Mark is an online counsultant expert in email marketing and on page optimization
