Niche Marketing
Getting
the balance right!
OK,
probably the most important thing in creating a profitable
website is finding your niche market. What do I mean? Well,
whenever I first explain to poeple what I do, that is - make
money from websites, and 'no I don't actually sell anything'
they think about it for a while, and then often come back
to me and say, "I know, people always book holidays on
the net, I'll make a cheap flights website!!" and I say,
"yeah thats a good idea, go for it..." thinking
at least its not going to be any competition to me!! OK, so
I'm kinda kidding, I then explain how competetive the holiday/flights
market is on the internet, and give them some rough figures
of how many websites there are that promote cheap flights,
and how many affiliate sites there are dedicated to cheap
flights, and then how highly ranked a lot of those websites
are etc.. when I have finished I expect to hear.. "so
basically I havn't got a chance competing in that market..."
Exactly!!
Now
obviously its a competitive market for a reason, lots
of poeple fly, flights are expensive, merchants give affiliates
good commision rates.
What
I'm getting at in my 'round the houses' way, is that some
markets are already too saturated, and why try and compete
when to be honest unless you are very good at this game already,
your not going to get very far. Instead, what I would suggest,
especially to beginners in affiliate marketing, is to find
your own niche market!
The
key is to find a niche market that gets a lot of searches,
but not so much competition. Now its obviously not
that easy, and takes a bit of investigating, but it is worth
doing. Now obviously if you have particular interests investigate
those first, because you will find it much easier and more
enjoyable to write content. remember content is key!! However,
also remember that it has to be a subject that you
can monetise, but don't be put off if you don't know
anything about the subject, at the end of the day, you can
go to the library and get a book out, or search the net and
learn fast... fast enough to write about it anyway (which
I have found is a great way to learn about a subject in itself
if you genuinely have an interest) Anyway, before I bore you
to tears lets have a look at the free tools available.
Firstly
you want to get a rough idea of your market to investigate.
Then you want to find the most popular searches for that market.
For example, lets say.. um, *looks around the room* ah, fireplaces.
Now (put this in your favourites, you will use it a lot) open:
http://inventory.uk.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/
this
is overtures UK keyword identifier, for want of a better title,
it will tell you roughly how many times a keywords
or keyword phrase was searched for on overture for
the previous month. Now don't take too much notice of the
figures themselves, but try a few different things so you
can tell a high value from a low value, type in 'cheap flights'
'car insurance' and all that kinda stuff just to get an idea.
In actual fact you have to times the number by at least 7
or 8 I reckon to get anywhere near to google searches. Have
a good play with this tool as you will need to do some of
your own benchmarking to understand a good keyword phrase
from a bad one.
Right,
type in 'fireplaces' heres what I got at the time:
47397
fireplace
3903 fireplace resource
3741 equipment fireplace link
2794 equipments fireplace link
2661 stone fireplace
2250 contemporary fireplace
2201 marble fireplace
2092 cast iron fireplace
1829 victorian fireplace
1626 gas fireplace
1516 electric fireplace
1433 antique fireplace
1314 fireplace surround
1189 modern fireplace
972 brick fireplace
972 fireplace uk
829 inglenook fireplace
698 fireplace accessory
672 fireplace design
So
'fireplace' got loads - but thats probably going to be quite
competitive (type in fireplace in google and see how many
it brings up, and then see what kind of backlinks and PR those
top ten sites have)
So
lets go down the list a way, and find something to specialise
in. At first glance I would investigate 'victorian
fireplace' and 'contemporary fireplace'
a point to remember is that overture's tool doesn't make any
distinction between plural and singular, in other words fireplace
and fireplaces will be numbered the same. ok, Now next I would
look up 'victorian fireplaces' in google and have a look at
the competition. I would look for several things. Firstly
how many results it brings, then their google PR (page rank)
then their backlinks and the general SEO (search engine optimization)
that has gone into the page. This will all give you
an idea how much work, and how hard it would be to compete,
and get ranked for this subject.
I
would go through this procedure for as many niche affiliate
markets as you can think of, and find the ones with the most
searches, for the most keyphrases, with the least competition.
You get my drift? OK, so I skipped over the 'checking
the competition' section a bit huh, well lets get into it
in a bit more detail in the next article:
Checking
out the competition
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