Affiliate marketing partners new and old know that, while affiliate marketing itself can be profitable if you’re just sticking to the general market, you eventually will want to find the area of the market in which you do your best. Maybe you’re best at the general market, and that’s great, but what if you’re struggling to find products you’re passionate about? Or maybe you know the product and service niche you’re most comfortable in and passionate about, but are having trouble finding the right client base to market to.
Possibly the hardest thing about affiliate marketing is finding your niche and making your way into it successfully, but this doesn’t have to be the case.
There are millions of people all over the world that are passionate about and interested in the same things you are; you just have to find the right way to reach out to them. In this post, we’ll be going over five tips to help you be successful within the world of niche affiliate marketing.
Find Your Niche
So what is a niche when it comes to affiliate marketing? A niche, by definition, is a job or activity that is very suitable for someone. In affiliate marketing, it’s essentially the same thing; you succeed in niche affiliate marketing by promoting items to a particular group or type of people. For instance, if your passion is outdoor activities, you’ll find your niche in promoting products and services having to do with the outdoors to people who have the same interest. Finding your niche is the first step in becoming a niche affiliate marketer, because you then have a starting point for building your market specifically for your particular client base.
Research
After you’ve found your niche, get to know everything you can about it. Sure, you may know the products and services currently being offered by companies that sell within that market, and that’s a wonderful start. What you’ll need now, however, is market details. Get to know the trends and the customers of the market. Check out how those trends fluctuate between seasons, and which trends tend to have more of a random spike to their sales, rather than a continuous revenue flow.
Getting to know the methods that work for other affiliate marketing partners within your niche is helpful for being successful as well. Watch the way they promote their products, and see if you can tell which ones have a better reaction from customers. Now, that doesn’t mean that you should take this information and copy what they’re doing, but to simply let it inspire you to use that concept in a way that better fits your personality. Be you!
Add Value
When building your brand, whether it be your blog, site, social media page, etc., make sure it’s one that will add value to your consumers. Don’t just tell people that they should buy a product, tell them why. When trusting someone’s opinion on a particular item, most people will want to know everything about your experience with the product before they’ll even think about clicking on your affiliate link and purchasing. Give them information they can use to make an informed decision, and above all, be honest. Tell them what you liked about the product, what you didn’t like, and what your overall experience with it was. Would you buy it again? On a scale of 1 to 5, how would you rank it?
Building a brand that people can trust is the best way to ensure that the people who use your affiliate link will not only buy the first time, but will continue to buy on your recommendation. This is why it’s so important to be honest with your readers, customers, or even friends and family. If you talk a product that you don’t like up just because you’re getting paid to promote it, they won’t be likely to trust your word after that first time. Making sure you’re partnered with a company that will allow you to be honest with your audience is important, too. If they won’t allow you to say you dislike a product or service that is poor quality, it isn’t a company you want to be partnered with, so always read the Terms of Service before signing on with them.
Have Multiple Traffic Sources
Having multiple traffic sources within your niche marketing career is important for a couple of reasons. The first is that with more platforms, you reach a wider audience. If you promote on a blog, on social media accounts, and through forums, for example, you’ll reach people you may not have reached just promoting on one of those platforms. Some are easier to generate revenue on than others, and this brings me to the next reason for having multiple traffic sources: Revenue tracking. If you have multiple traffic sources and you don’t track them, you need to start. By tracking your revenue sources, you gain telling insight on which platforms you’re doing well on, and which ones aren’t generating enough revenue. This will allow you to grow the successful ones, and see what you may be doing differently with the others.
Mobile Friendly
Whether you promote on a site or blog, forum or social media, making sure you’re mobile friendly can be very important to reaching an audience that may be more technologically on-the-go. Some of your viewers or readers may only have a phone or tablet as their internet source, so being mobile friendly will help you reach them as well as the rest of your audience. Some people may be moving from a home computer to only using a phone in a few months’ time, or in a year, and you want to make sure that your site can make that transition with them and still be easy to navigate. When you market anything, it’s important to keep up with the times, not only trend-wise, but technology-wise too. The last thing you want, I’m sure, is to get left behind when the world inevitably changes the way they get their information.
