Affiliate marketing is all about targeting, getting the right people at the right point in the buying cycle, providing this audience with the information and facilities to enable them to take action.

Affiliate sites take all shapes and sizes, and cover a whole range of topics if not multiple topics. As competition gains momentum and the fight for online property increases, the need to innovate and find new ways to compete grows, Google, being the monolith that it is, is at a base level flawed, it isn’t designed to rank site by quality as such, but its fair to say the Google algorithms is as close as it gets to manually making that decision. But to be frank aside from a supposed ’sandbox’ where new sites are ranks highly at first before an actual rank is established.

New sites, especially in the generic keyword searches, are at a massive disadvantage to  established sites, with professionals in SEO and PPC costing thousands, long gone are the days when joe bloggs, in his spare time could make a site and have it rank highly in Google for generic key terms.

But there is still room to maneuver, in the ‘long tail’.

The Long tail refers to keyword searches which are far more specific and targeted, such as ‘buy left handed  pencils’, with each subsequent word, the search is more specific and equally with each subsequent word, the volume of people decreases, however, with the right words, the idea is that the traffic that you do get will be closer into the buying cycle and thus more prepared to action. Much of the research and ground work for this can already be seen in PPC and the strategies of PPC affiliates, the only difference with niche affiliate sites is your creating a site, using PPC keyword research strategies to gain better rank, and thus more users and results.

To create niche affiliate sites, you need to be selective and concise, instead of CDs, you need to focus on European dance music CDs, instead of shopping, you want to define the specifics, and create a site around those specifics, to the point where it not unusual to find sites dedicated to one product or service. In this way, joe bloggs and is afternoon off still have a chance to build a humble business in an arena dominated by the rPoint’s and Technorati’s of the online marketing world.