You’ve decided to try Affiliate Marketing, nice one! But before you dive into building
your website,
there are a few things I would always recommend considering:
*Decide what you want from Affiliate Marketing - Is your Affiliate Marketing
business going to be a nice little earner to cover costs of your blog or is it going to
provide you with a bit of money on the side of your full-time job? Deciding what you
want to do will give you a direction to aim and allow you to set goals for how you
want to expand your Affiliate Marketing project. My advice - don’t quit the day job
just yet. Get your Affiliate Marketing project off the ground and consistently making
money before you make that decision.
* Choose your niche - Perhaps the most important piece of advice I can give
when deciding your Affiliate Marketing business is to be selective about what niche
you will work in. Spreading yourself thinly very rarely delivers profitable results. In
my experience it is best to pick something you are passionate about and craft your
affiliate business around this. For example; if your passion is jogging then perhaps a
blog about your running achievements, experiences and favourite routes would suit
you. From this you could select sports advertisers you want to partner with and
review their products with affiliate links inserted, you could also host their banners
and publicise their discounts to your community on social media. The same is true
for voucher code sites; the market is saturated with thousands of people trying to
provide voucher codes for every single merchant they can sign up to, with little
success. Find something you’re passionate about, if there are relevant publishers
with voucher codes then theme your website around this.
*Decide your audience - I would also advise knowing who you want to target
with your Affiliate Marketing. If you’re going to run a blog about saving money when
buying a car then it wouldn’t make sense to advertise luxury supercars. If you
provide your audience with the wrong products you will generate very little
commission. Make sure the audience you are targeting is relevant to your niche and
research what they like and dislike, then tailor your advertising around this.
*Choose your target location - A little secret of mine is to make sure my
affiliate websites are location specific. By this I mean that if I am running a cooking
blog I will often make this a .co.uk blog and target it at readers in the UK. Th
reason behind this is many affiliate programs restrict their affiliates to promoting in
one region. For example with Amazon associates programme if you join the UK
version you will only make commissions on UK sales. Targeting by location also
makes displaying currencies easier; if you’ve reviewed a product it gets annoying
for readers to see “buy this from Amazon for £30/$60/¥5000/etc”.
*Research levels of demand - Before you go throwing everything at your newly
researched affiliate site it is best to step back and see whether there is any demand
for what you’re going to be posting about. There are many tools out there that let you
assess whether or not people are looking for a website like yours. I’d recommend
thinking of what phrases someone might type into a search engine to find your new
website then use this to do some research using Google Trends and various
PPC/SEO tools that are available.
*Research the market - Once you’ve identified that there will be enough people
looking for your website it is a good idea to find out whether they could already find
websites that will answer their problem. Do some competitor research and by all
means be competitive, if you find 2 or 3 other websites offering similar to what you
want to offer then work out a way to do this better than them. However if you find
that the market you’re looking to enter is saturated with lots of competitors then it
might be back to the drawing board.
*In summary: Be realistic - Do not start a voucher code website offering every
voucher from all possible advertisers and expect it to make you a lot of money. It
almost certainly won’t. The big voucher code sites that dominate the market employ
hundreds of people in order to succeed. Instead, choose a niche that you’re
passionate about, make sure there’s an audience for this and you know what they
like, think about narrowing your location then move to the next steps…
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