The most successful affiliate websites are highly targeted, aimed at a very specific niche. More than this, they are aimed at a highly profitable niche. If you are thinking about setting up a website to earn money from affiliate programmes you may be tempted to cover a wide range of topics and throw as many services and products in as possible with the hope that this will increase your market and give you a greater chance of winning sales. However, there are millions of websites out there with many more being set up everyday so your competition is massive. The best way to give yourself a fighting chance is to specialise.
A niche website is a small site, with generally less than 100 pages, which is targeted at a very specific market. The idea of a niche website is that you are not competing with the millions of other websites out there, you are focusing on a highly targeted specialty. In this way you can set yourself apart as an expert in your chosen field and offer what other sites don’t – expertise.
Your entire website must be designed around your target market, a one-stop-shop offering everything your market could ever need to know about your product or service. Thus, you no longer need to compete – you provide everything your audience needs.
If you want to build a business in affiliate marketing the first thing you need to do is decide on your niche; this is critical to your success. The trick is to find a subject that you are interested in that is also profitable. Sounds daunting? It is not as hard as you might think. There are so many affiliate programmes out there, there is bound to be something that you have an interest in that you can also make money from. But how can you find that elusive niche?
Discovering a profitable niche is considered to be the holy grail of affiliate marketing and if you run a search on the internet you will find plenty of people offering to help you in your quest for the perfect niche, all offering their own strategy (for a small fee, perhaps?). I don’t think this is necessary. You can easily carry out your own research to decide whether your niche is a good one or not.
Investigating and testing your idea is vital. You may have a niche in mind, but before you launch into setting up your site you need to know whether there is any profit to be made; this is where keyword research comes in. At every stage of setting up a website keywords are of paramount importance. When you are looking for a profitable niche, keyword research tells you whether there is a market for your idea. You might want to set up a site on DIY tips, but if no one is searching for them you will be wasting your time.
So, the first stage in determining whether your niche could be profitable is to check what internet users are searching for. You can use a keyword search tool like Word Discovery. This will tell you how many people have searched using a particular keyword and give you the top 100 derivatives. This is a really useful free tool and they also offer more detailed statistics if you subscribe.
So, as an example, perhaps I am considering putting together a site reviewing pushchairs. I would think of some basic keywords; pushchair, pram, buggy, travel systems and type them into Word Discovery and see how many people are searching for those terms and any related terms that come up.
Yahoo Sponsored Search has a really useful, free keyword research tool. You can type in some information about your topic and they will suggest relevant keywords. You can also check out how much other webmasters are paying for those particular keywords, which tells you whether your niche has the potential to be profitable. The more valuable the keywords the more money there is likely to be in a particular niche.
The next step is to test the keywords you have found, how many relevant sites does your search engine return? What sort of things are the other sites offering? There may be many millions of other sites and you need to think carefully if that is the case – can you offer something different, something better? Be wary too if there are very few other sites, perhaps there really isn’t much demand in that area. Although, if there is a high paying affiliate programme then this may work in your favour.
So, if your idea passes this test, next you need to think about what else you can do to make your site stand out from the competition. Obviously you will be aiming to eliminate most of the competition by thoroughly focusing on a very specific topic however you will need something more. You will need to find a unique selling point. A USP is a really useful tool to differentiate your website from the other sites out there.
Look at what your competitors are offering and see where you can improve on this. There ar
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