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The affiliate industry is big business

The affiliate marketing channel is an important part of most businesses online marketing strategy, estimated to be worth approximately £3.82bn with £227m paid in commissions and fees to affiliates and networks in 2008 (source: Econsultancy). As with any channel there are established players and saturated markets that are difficult for new players to enter and make a profit. Generic affiliate verticals such as dating, gambling, telecoms, voucher codes etc are so competitive that typical sized affiliates are increasingly looking at niche markets with minimal competition or barriers to entry in order to earn money.

What do I mean by the term “niche”?

In this context I am using the term to refer to a few different things…

• A niche market (e.g. party accessories),
• A niche product within a market (e.g. invoicing software for web designers)
• Targeting a specific product/ model rather than the entire brand or product range (e.g. “Pink 8gb iPod Nano” rather than “iPods”)

Identifying a niche

I am going to take your level of interest and/ or motivation to work on a website in the subject at hand as red. Without it your site will fizzle out in a matter of weeks. Beyond personal drive the factors to look at whilst identifying potential niches include:

Keyword search popularity: Using a service such as Google’s keyword  tool type in your generic keyword and look for how many informational and transactional searches are made (not navigational) that are further down the buying process and will have a higher propensity to convert. Unfortunately there are no hard fast rules or magic thresholds I can share that makes one niche better than another but you will soon get a feel of those that are worth targeting and those that aren’t.

Merchants: Take a look in the affiliate networks merchant directory to see the number of available merchants and their affiliate commission rates. If there are only a couple of available merchants or their payment schedules are low is it worth your time?

SERP organic competition: How deep does the competition go in to the SERPs and how strong is their PR for your keyword of choice?

SERP advertising competition: Competitive verticals will force affiliates to advertise to get on to the top Google pages. If all the advertising slots are taken through to page 2 you know it’s going to be tough to make an impact.

Researching a niche

Once you have picked a niche you think will deliver a good amount of converting traffic and will pay out enough commission to make the ROI on effort worth while it is time to look at the market in more detail…

Existing affiliate websites: The best place to start with any venture is with people who have already done the work! (Note: This isn’t to suggest you should copy any design work or web copy just take inspiration from what is good and fill any gaps you see.)  Unless you are first to market you will be competing with other websites for people’s eyeballs and loyalty. To avoid reinventing the wheel take advantage of their hard work and have a look at what they have done and sign up to any newsletters/ marketing emails they have. How have they structured their website? What tone of voice do they use? What services/ extras do they offer? What can you do differently/ better? How do they promote themselves (new and existing visitors/ customers)? To see how active they are in marketing themselves and gaining brand exposure use Google’s web search, news search and blog search. To find out which sites are linking to them use Yahoo’s site explorer (http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/)

Choosing your merchants: Which merchants pay the most, have the best creative, are known for good communication with affiliates, are active in the affiliate industry…? Take the time to get to know them and pick out the best ones for you.

Targeting a niche

Choosing your keywords: As well as using the keyword tool, it is also worth looking at other site’s meta-description and meta-keywords. Although they no longer influence the large search engines some sites still add them. From this you can see which keywords they deem to be most important and then use that information on your own site. Take a look at the keywords any existing affiliates and merchants (they will become your competitor too now) are using in their Meta data and on the site.

Domain name: You’ll find a warehouse’s worth of content online offering advice and guidance about choosing a domain name, but to be frank it’s not that hard. The difficulty lies in finding one that is actually available!  Ideally you should choose a domain name with your main keyword in it to give you a nice boost in the SERPs for example if you are going to create a site promoting budget priced beds you would want a name along the lines of “cheap-beds.co.uk”.

Building your website: Unless you have the HTML/ CSS skills of a ninja who can create sites from scratch in the blink of an eye, you will probably want to use a CSS template to get started or a CMS such as WordPress, Joomla or Expression Engine. If you fall in to the latter make sure your website’s template design fits in with your target niche and visitors feel there is a connection between place and product at a glance e.g. don’t use a bright purple dance music theme if you are promoting Oak cupboards etc.

SEO: SEO is the most valuable marketing channel to affiliates so it’s important you understand it. Briefly, using your chosen keywords put them in…

• Title tag
• H tags
• Image alt tag
• Image file name
• Internal link anchor text
• Internal link alt tagMeta description
• Site map
• First paragraph of copy
• Page URLs
• Strong tag in copy

Taking a short cut and buying links directly from sites or through link farms/ brokers can be very tempting when you first start. It is important you understand Google takes a very dim view of this practice and will punish any sites found to be guilty of this. The punishment can vary from having the link juice removed through to your site being excluded from their search results altogether.

PPC: If you have found a profitable niche that has little competition it may be cost effective to advertise on Google’s paid search through Google AdWords.  If there are only a couple of advertisers you may find the CPC can be as low as 20p. Keep any eye on the CPC though, if other affiliates start to appear it can soon become very expensive.

Social media: Twitter is all the buzz and if you have enough to say on a regular basis then it certainly helps to keep in touch with your followers but don’t discount some of the social media ‘oldies’ such as Wikipedia, YouTube and a Facebook page. Don’t get sucked in to thinking of yourself as a brand, use your targeted keywords in the profile names e.g @cheap-beds and youtube.com/user/cheap-beds. If you have the content, blogging is worth looking in to as well to generate regular keyword rich content.

Getting involved in the community: Forums and blog comments may or may not result in link juice (depending on the sites nofollow settings) but they will certainly draw people to your site if you use your URL in a signature plus regular contributions will help position you as an authority in that space, which then leads to incoming links!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 5th, 2010 at 4:33 pm and is filed under Promoting your site. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.