Affiliate Blog

Niche, I personally believe is the only place online where there is still a reasonable amount of competiton to be had, particularly as an affiliate with little budget. In my previous post I mentioned why Niche was actually a really good opportunity, and in all honesty, I still believe this to be true.

The hard part about niche marketing in the context of affiliate marketing is ‘how niche is niche?’

you could create a niche site but get no traffic, or you could create a niche thats got loads of traffic, but none that convert to sales. and in this way, Niche affiliate marketing is as much an art as it is a science.

Lets just go over the basics once more – niche is esstially the variation on the generic, the longer and more specific the query sting, the less sites ranking and optimised for it, the closer into the buying cycle the customer is and the more likely the customer will convert to a sale. Red car is a niche of car, but red aston martin 2009 is the niche of red car.

So, lets look at finding a niche. first things first, loads of research has been done into the depth of a search, and it was found out that typically the searches that resulted in the best coversions contained 4 words, this gives a relvealing clue into the fact that as an affiliate you need to focus on these terms.

Using the google keyword tool and something to find domains like 123reg,  we can make educated guesstimates as to the likely potential of a given Niche.

Lets focus on finding the niche first-

1. inspiration -

you need an idea first, the easiest way is to think about the things you are interested in or are easy to find information on. Read the news and check magazines, if you’re signed up to network affiliate program usually send out mailers these can contain all sorts of great niches if you’re willing to think laterally.

2. searching -

lets say you decided to focus on cars, enter this into the google keyword tool, once the list appears you need to switch the control to show the ‘match type’ as ‘exact’, the tool will spit out a list of keywords based on your inital search along with other information, the most important is the green bar, which shows likely competition (in PPC) and the ‘global monthly search volume’

3. being selective

what you’re aiming to look for is a very low green ‘competition’ bar, and a very high ‘global monthly search volume’, this is the mecca of niche, a keyword related to the products you’re trying to sell (via affiliate marketing) with very low competition and really high volumes.

you need to fiddle around, try a few different keywords, even different combinations of keywords, and you’ll always find there is some competition. Its really about compramise. I’ll usually settle on a keyword/phrase with half a bar to 70% bar of green and around xx,xxx search volume, in terms of search volume, i’d go no lower than x,xxx. you can also reveal the average CPC using the google keyword tool which can help you to estimate the performance of the niche as well.

4. competitor research -

Jump into google (.com) and chuck in the keyword/phrase you’ve settled on, now check how many sites are listed for that search, and open new windows with the first three results in google. what you’re trying to do here is assertain if the niche is a viable and potentially easy niche to penetrate. What you’re trying to look out for is, 1. low number of sites in the search, 2. low number of PPC ads (although this isn’t too important, just a bonus), 2. in all the top three sites you want to be checking their SEO to see if the competitor sites are targetting the same keywords as you and if they know what they are doing when it comes to SEO. Assuming theres low competition then this is a viable niche. There’s no easy way to estimate this, and its very much down to expierence, but if wikipedia or amazon are in the top three thats an indicator its viable niche.

5. finding the domain-

now lets jump to 123reg. by now you’ve got your keywords and you’ve got an idea of how competative the niche is. enter the keywords into the domain tool and look out for .com, and .co.uk domains (or the domain of the country you are targetting) first look for domains with no spaces eg. redcards.xyz if that isn’t available try with a dash eg. red-cards.xyz, you can also try double dashes eg. red–cards.xyz if none of these are free you can try to add a call to action term such as ‘buy’; ‘cheap’; ‘free’ as a prefex to the keywords. Asides from this you can try and flip the keywords around but this may alter the performance of the site.

And…thats it. Simples.

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2. Affiliate domain buying strategies
3. Bing vs Google
4. Voucher codes god long tail
5. Useful Tools for affiliate marketers