The Internet & Affiliate Advisor

Selecting a Market and a Niche

2008-06-20T16:05:00.004-03:00

One of the keys to success in affiliate marketing is to select a niche market to participate and advertise in. When I started out, I struggled with this...what is the right niche and how do I find it. Well, unfortunately that questions is not easy to answer but by doing some soul searching you'll find the right niche. Also remember that the right niche for you may not hold true for me. Why? If your knowledge of a product exceeds mine you'll know which benefits to promote, what buttons to push and ultimately your conversions will be higher.

Key factors in choosing a niche:

- What are my interests? Find something that your interested in and you'll be far more successful.
- Based on my interests what is hot or has potential?
- How large is the market? If the market size is small it will be hard to make a marketing campaign profitable no matter how enthusiastic and knowledgeable your are.
- What will my USP (Unique Selling Proposition) be? Do I have a different view of the market then my competition, can I present the information in a different light?
- Can I find products to advertise and promote within the niche?

Some tools to use in finding a niche:

Google search - perform searches on the key words you think fit the product or market that you want to promote. Look at the sponsored ads and the natural search results. Are there a lot of people advertising in the market space?
Google Keyword tool (https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal). Using the keyword tool come up with a list of the key words you think describe your product or market and enter them into the tool. Look at the Advertiser competition, search volume and average search volume levels and determine what the competition is like and if there is enough search volume and interest to support a campaign. Do not write off a keyword or market based just on these numbers when you start marketing you can change the focus of the keywords and get good results. This exercise is simple to gauge the competition and volume.
Magazines, websites, newsletters and discussion groups. Review some of the top content sites, join newsletters and discussions in the niche that you think looks good and learn as much as you can. This will also help you determine what is important to the user group.

Good luck! Feel free to email me at affiliateadvisor@gmail.com with any questions or post a comment.

Chris

What is affiliate marketing and how do I get started?

2008-06-18T11:50:00.001-03:00

When I first picked up the book Affiliate Millions by Anthony Borelli and Greg Holden I was new to affiliate marketing and the book provided a great starting point. They outline what affiliate marketing is and how to get started. In this post I thought I would do a bit of the same but provide a overview of affiliate marketing and some of the tools to get started. On a side note, I plan on keeping this post pretty basic and just an overview but will expand on many of the subjects in future posts.

What is Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate marketing according to Wikipeida is a web-based marketing practice in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought about by the affiliate's marketing efforts." Seems pretty simple...I send people to a business and they pay me, sign me up! Where do I get started? The real trick is doing it and making money, which we'll get to later on.

It's also important to distinguish between Search Marketing and website marketing. Programs such as Google AdWords will allow you to link directly to the merchant sites or to a your website. If you are linking directly to a merchant than this would be considered direct search marketing, if you linking back to your own website where you have set up a dedicated "Landing Page" then it would be considered website marketing.

The Skills required to jump right in
Let's start with the skills required to get started. If you already have:

Web design skills
Web development skills
Internet marketing skills

You're well on your way. If you don't, not to worry. This stuff can be outsourced so don't stop reading and leave. Come back for future posts and I'll continue to share what I've found.

Some of the Tools required to succeed

Other than website design and development tools like Adobe Photoshop CS3, Adobe Fireworks CS3 or Adobe Dreamweaver CS3 you'll need to find the affiliate programs, get familiar with Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising models and understand a bit about copy writing.

Below are a few of the basic tools you'll need.

Affiliate Programs:

Search Marketing:

Yahoo! Sponsored Search (Sign up now and get a $25 credit)
Google AdWords (

)

That's all for now, next time we'll start to explore some of the different markets and how to select a niche.

Chris

What to expect from The Internet & Affiliate Advisor Blog

2008-06-16T12:49:00.001-03:00

Each day I strive to learn something new about the Internet, website design, website development or affiliate marketing. I thought that a good way for me to really become an expert in the content and understand the market place would be to create the The Internet & Affiliate Advisor blog. I hope that in the process I can help you to improve your knowledge and help you understand the opprotunties that exist for you online.

So the BIG plan (or mission) for the blog will be to share my knowledge of the Internet and affiliate marketing, help improve your knowledge and provide you with added information so you can succeed. I can't promise that everything I provide will be relevant but I'm always open to content suggestions so feel free to leave comments or email me at affilateadvisor@gmail.com.

That brings up another point, I would like to use the blog as a way to build a community of like minded individuals and use the reach of the internet to help everyone. So again help me out by leaving comments and getting involved.

Hope everyone has a great day!
Chris

The Internet Affiliate Advisor Goes live!!

2008-06-12T11:50:00.000-03:00

For a while now I've been kicking around the idea of starting a blog and like many out there struggled with what to blog about. Recently I've been following the affiliate marketing industry, reading blogs about the subject, subscribing to newsletters and basically trying to follow everything I can related to the industry.

By the way, I don't recommend this approach! There's a lot of information out there and since trying to following EVERY thing (okay, maybe not everything as that would be impossible) my inbox is a mess of newsletters and email right now.

Something about the industry struck a cord with me, the first thing being how big the industry really is and secondly that the skills required to possibly succeed was something I already had. The skills part is what took me by suprise since it's been a while since I've used my web development skills.

So in an effort to get back to what I really enjoy (The Internet), I've decided to dust of the web design, internet marketing and web development skills and jump back in the pool.

Hope you enjoy following my thoughts on the subject of Affiliate Marketing and I'll attempt to possibly demistify "Affiliate Marketing".

Chris