What I Didn’t Learn About Affiliate Marketing but Wish I Had by Aaron Fletcher - HTML preview

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Chapter 4.  Niching Down

Finding a lucrative area should be your first target if you intend to make money with affiliate marketing. It's simpler to communicate with marketers and sponsors if you focus on a narrow niche segment. It also focuses your marketing strategies and allows you to rapidly broaden your audience. Regardless, the most effective consumer niches to reach, are the broad niches. These marketing niches already have a lot of rivalries, a lot of interest, a lot of people looking for them, a lot of consumers looking for them, and a lot of similar brands, social networking groups, forums, and blogs. If you come into a market that other affiliates have missed, it's usually because demand is poor – which means buyers are small and far between – and the number of services and products to promote is minimal. Even an experienced marketer will find it difficult, let alone a novice.

Focusing on a market sub-niche, such as "food advice for elderly" or "good living for family" – to use the health niche above – will help you create a popular website and can stand out from the competition. This way, you will use relevant keywords to drive search engine website traffic and increase affiliate purchases, which are sometimes overlooked by well-established publishers. This is a better strategy since the niche is evergreen, as you still realize there are gains to be created. In seven simple measures, learn how to locate a lucrative niche for affiliate marketing.

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4.1. Think about your own hobbies and interests

When it comes to pursuing niches, the obvious place to start is with your personal interests. Quite likely, you've already spent money on these products, so you're familiar with consumer attitudes. All you have to do now is figure out whether they're a good fit for an online company.

                         “Pick a career you love, and it will never seem like work”

Many people have been effective in converting their hobbies into lucrative niche enterprises. Gardening, for example, is a very common pastime in the United States. A group of friends who are avid gardeners owns the niche website SavvyGardening. They write content on a daily basis that promotes partner brands and earns money from Adsense.

Make a chart of all the hobbies on a piece of paper and go through it carefully. The number of possible niches highlighted in your collection would astound you. Consider the knowledge of niches in the industry you choose to join. You don't need to be an expert; what you need is to know a little better than your target group. If you're going to create the material, you can feel confident about your ability to do so after doing your homework. Avoid pursuing a technological niche that you are unfamiliar with; otherwise, it would be difficult to write blog posts on a regular basis. Another choice is to hire niche-specialist freelance authors to create material for your website. You don't need to know anything about the niche in this case, but you can consider the related costs before proceeding.

Several websites focusing on the same niche, such as travel, will also be found. However, for affiliate marketing, an area like this is much too big. Thankfully, you may go on the Quora platform and look up that broad niche. People may ask questions about everything under the sun here, and the group will respond with detailed answers. Click the Enter key after typing your diverse niche subject into Quora's search area. This will pull up a series of queries in the niche that have been posted by other Quora subscribers. These concerns elucidate specific niches within the general category you've investigated. This would offer you a lot of insight into whether you should concentrate your affiliate marketing efforts in that niche or not.

4.2. Determine the niche's potential for monetization

It's definitely a good idea to choose a market with a variety of monetization solutions so you can build several revenue streams. This spreads the risk and means that although one of your affiliate services is terminated, you can always be in the company. Begin by assessing the market and taking notice of their monetization strategies. Do a Google search for your main subject, then review the top 10 - 15 websites that come up in the results. These pages can preferably be monetized by supporting material, Google advertising, Amazon merchandise, and their own subscription areas, among other things.

4.3. Evaluate the Niche's Competitiveness and Search Volume

As previously stated, niches with very little competition should be averted because sales revenue is generally limited. It's crucial not to mix up niche analysis and keyword search, which is a common blunder.  You should choose words with low to the moderate competition when searching keywords because you want to rank highly for them. The goal of niche analysis, on the other hand, is to see if the niche can generate revenue.

In your niche, you must look for keywords and phrases with a CPC of at least $2 and at least a search volume of 10,000. This indicates that the subject is prevalent enough to generate significant returns and that advertisers are willing to pay a reasonable fee to have their ads displayed for these google searches. You can be certain that there are gains to be made when many of the primary keywords in your niche do have high CPC. Marketers who pay a few dollars per click for no assurance of a sale must've been making a lot of money. Obtaining high ranks for such keywords in Google's organic search results, on the other hand, is a different obstacle.

4.4. Determine the number of accessible traffic sources

This step's significance cannot be overlooked. Because the stabilization of your online company depends on having a broad set of traffic sources, you must evaluate whether your niche has a vast array of traffic sources. Looking at the top websites in your suggested niche to see from where they gain their traffic is the smartest way to figure this out. Take note of whether the top websites are either found by search engines or through social networking. If you have a lot of social media visitors, keep track of which networks they're coming from. In certain niches, for example, top websites derive a significant portion of their traffic from Pinterest and Instagram. These are usually multimedia websites with a lot of photographs.

Indeed, according to a study, just 31% of blog entries are found by search engines. The rest was found by referrals, mailing lists, social media, and other means. There's also nothing stopping you from creating and expanding your own Facebook Page. Since YouTube is the second largest search engine after Google, it's worth checking to see if your possibilities are active there.

Because a niche affiliate site with restricted traffic outlets has limited development opportunities, these are all critical concerns to solve. Affiliate marketers that are effective should not rely on a single stream of traffic.

4.5. Look for market flaws that you can target

You must have outstanding website material as compared to the other websites in your niche in order to benefit from it. To do that, you'll need to figure out where your contemporaries' material falls short and come up with ideas to improve it. To begin, read the material generated by the top websites in your sector and make a list of any flaws. Then think about how you might improve it. For example, you may be able to distinguish your content from your competitor by using more videos, GIFs, or photos. Alternatively, you might add several case studies and comprehensive explanations to the material to make it more in-depth.

4.6. Look for websites that have been already sold or that may be profitable acquisitions

The number of successful companies or websites in a niche is a relatively reliable indicator of its worth. If people are buying e-commerce stores, websites, and other blogs in your niche on a regular basis, it means there's money to be made.

Select the findings by 'Monthly Benefit' and set the minimum sum to $1000 every month to see how much money various websites are earning. Select 'ClickBank' and 'Amazon' from the 'Monetization' drop-down list if you're really interested in websites that make money from affiliate marketing. This information can greatly aid your niche research because it uncovers the various niches into which people are venturing in order to make large sums of money. You'll be astounded at the profits that can be generated in the most unusual niches. Create a mental record of some brilliant suggestions you come across.

4.7. Define your unique selling proposition (USP)

There's one more point to think about before deciding on which niche to construct the affiliate website around. What would be your exclusive perspective? How can you set yourself apart from the zillions of other websites on the internet? What are certain ways to help people remember you? This is particularly important in niches with a lot of competition.

Make an effort to come up with a relatable story that will pique the website visitors' attention. For example, there are numerous websites in the niche of "making money online," but MyWifeQuitHerJob resounds with audiences more than any other website because of its founder's backstory. The same could be said for SmartBlogger, another leading website in this niche with a compelling storyline that attracts visitors. You will also stand out by making your site more appealing or earning authority rank in a sub-category of your niche. As a result, their followers are more trusting of their feedback than they are of a typical affiliate platform that publishes bland reviews with little analysis.

You must, in every way, stand out from competitors by cultivating a distinct identity. The niche you chose should naturally lend itself to this operation. Your audience would be more likely to buy the items you sell if you do it this way.