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Affiliate Marketing on Niche Websites |
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by Michael Ellis (5/26/2006) Affiliate marketing is very attractive to Internet marketers of any experience level. But everyone isn't getting rich marketing affiliate products. In fact, my experience has shown me that there are just a small percentage of affiliate gurus making significant money selling affiliate products. And then there is the rest of the field (the majority) that make very little. In fact, most of the beginner affiliate marketers never succeed in selling anything. So what are the rich doing that everybody else seems to be unable to do? In my experiences with affiliate marketers I noticed that the most successful marketers seem to possess: 1) Huge email lists, or 2) Lots of niche websites Having a huge email list of potential customers is a goal that every Internet marketer should aim to develop. It is an absolute gold mine. However, I'm not going to go into this topic because most of the people reading this article don't have a huge email list to promote affiliate products to. That leaves us with number two – creating lots of niche websites. A niche website is basically a website that caters to a topic that a specific segment of the population cares about, and it certainly doesn't have to be a large segment of the population. For example, a website on classic wines might be a good niche website. What makes a good niche website, and how can you make money from it? In Internet marketing terms, a good niche website is a website that covers a topic that is, for the most part, not saturated with competitors. Take the Internet Marketing topic as an example. If you go to Google and run a search for "Internet Marketing" you'll find that there are over 75 million sites! Internet marketing is not a good niche! It's too competitive. Unfortunately, most affiliate marketers are immediately attracted to the Internet Marketing niche and try to sell how-to type affiliate products to an audience that has probably seen that same affiliate product offer 100 times. The result, the offer is ignored. The potential customer gets an "oh there's that again" mindset and simply ignores it. Experienced affiliate marketers have learned that the lucrative affiliate products are the products with the least competition – which also tend to be the products that are searched for the least. For example, going back to our classic wines example, when you search for "classic wines" in Google you get around 65,000 sites, as opposed to the 600+ million for Internet Marketing. And most of the sites for "classic wines" are not sales pages like they are for Internet Marketing. Now, the number of searches conducted each month for "classic wines" in the search engines probably doesn't exceed 1000. One the other hand, the number of searches for Internet marketing for any given month probably exceeds 300,000. However, how successful do you think you will be getting your Internet Marketing website seen in the search engine when the first returned website from an Internet marketing search has a page rank of 8, and the 10th place website has a page rank of 7? Not very. On the other hand, the very first returned website from a "classic wines" search only has a page rank of 3. So, it's very possible to make your website the first returned site in a classic wines search! You could get a significant portion of those 1000 or so searches per month. Load your niche website with some interesting content on the niche topic and include some backend links to affiliate products, of course on the same niche topic. Granted, a small niche website won't likely make anyone rich, but 50 or 100 of them could certainly have you living comfortably. Author - Michael Ellis (Email: michael@victorykey.com) Talk more about this topic in our VictoryKey Internet Marketing Forum
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