How to Profit from Niche Websites with Affiliate Marketing

Just like entrepreneurship, success in affiliate marketing is the combination of hard work and smart strategies. It doesn’t matter whether you are beginning your innings in the affiliate space or an experienced player, what matters most is your strength to capture the mood of your target audience.

What’s the secret sauce for making profits without worrying about your competitors?

Niche Websites!

These sites aim for a smaller set of audience in a big market. The motto is to select the limited competition markets, but there must be sufficient amount of online people searching for your desired topic.

In other words, niche website is a part of larger group of related things.

Let’s take the example of ‘Sports’ market. As you won’t be able to compete with authority websites, my advice will always be to focus on a smaller set of the audience under the same big market.

Let’s simplify the concept with an example. ‘Exercise & Fitness’ is the subset of the sports market. By going deeper, you can target people interested in strength training equipments. If you want to niche it down further, you can focus on people looking for dumbbells.

If you think there is no possibility to refine more, you are wrong. Possibilities are infinite. You just need to look for the online opportunities with eyes wide open.

Four E’s of Profitable Niche Website

With the rise of reputable affiliate programs and the promise of consistent revenue streams, the population of affiliate marketers has seen an exponential growth.

To extract the maximum output from your niche website, you must have the desire to learn more about the topic, understanding to analyze the market opportunity, willingness to transfer the knowledge, and the power to bind the interest of your target audience. Keep these 4 E’s in mind for building a successful niche website:

1. Eagerness

Your interest in the subject matter decides the profitability of your niche website. You might have seen marketers providing a list of profitable niches for affiliate marketing. Before jumping on those recommendations, make sure you have the passion and purpose to help your audience.

If you are starting your affiliate marketing journey, choose the passion path. When you have the eagerness to learn more about your niche topic and audience, it becomes easy to master additional skills in short time. You must have the fire to explore your interest. Forget about being an expert.

• Direct your energies on the niche which you love to research. You won’t feel like wasting your energy while digging into the topics.
• Don’t initiate your niche project from the monetary angle.
• If things don’t work out expectedly, at least you must be proud of building something which is close to your heart.
• Your eagerness will push your forward to overcome the troubling times.

The more your enthusiasm to go deep into your niche, the more your readers will feel your keen interest. Ask yourself, ‘Do I enjoy investing time and effort on this niche?’ Without an active interest, you can’t think of earning a passive income.

2. Eventuality

Once you are passionate about your niche, dedication comes in automatically. As I mentioned earlier, success doesn’t depend on hard work only. It requires smart tactics to make sure your niche is profitable. Limited competition in your niche is the outcome of three scenarios:

• No acceptable demand: If there are no visitors, passion alone won’t sustain you in the long run.
• Adequate demand but no satisfactory promotion – When there is nothing to promote, traffic inflow can’t promise your better future returns.
• Enough demand with lucrative offers but no exploration- You hit the jackpot with this scenario. When your passion mixes up with the golden opportunity, nobody can stop you from building a sustainable and profitable roadmap for your online business.

Be practical in your selection process. Don’t dive in by attaching your expectations based on your eagerness only.

3. Effectiveness

If you are clear about your inclination, you must be clear about your audience interest also. To get significant returns from a small targeted group, understand what kind of content your readers want from your side. Be it a blog post, video, podcast, or an infographic content; the main idea is to deliver quality information.

It is useless to publish content on a regular basis when your readers can’t extract any valuable guidance. Always focus on quality over quantity. If you can’t provide relevant tips, people might be fooled once by landing on your site. But, they won’t repeat the same mistake. Focus on creating valuable information to win the trust and confidence of visitors and search engine.

4. Engagement

If you can’t engage your target group, your eagerness to fuel your passion, eventuality to analyze market demand and effectiveness to educate your audience has no importance. Ask the following questions for structuring a clear and concise content to delight your audience:

• What’s the purpose of providing quality content when your readers can’t understand it?
• If your visitors find your content boring, do you think will they search for other resources on your website?
• If you can’t engage your audience, how will you persuade them to buy through your affiliate link?
• Why will readers recommend your website when they find topics too annoying to digest?

Many people enter this lucrative industry with high hopes, but few make it to the list of successful affiliate marketers.

What makes these few individuals different from those who accept defeat so early? Apart from rising bank balance, they include audience warmth and knowledge collection in their profitable account.

Essential Steps for Building a Profitable Niche Website

You get a unique affiliate link to promote other’s product. Once you make a sale, commission transfers in your bank account. You don’t have to worry about the product development. No after sales follow up. You don’t even need to care about the customer service.

By focusing on particular subject and content, one can easily generate encouraging revenues from different types of niche websites- say, product reviews, Google Adsense, Amazon products, Kindle books, to name a few- on an auto-pilot mode. Once you adopt the following strategies, get ready to enjoy passive income with minimal input from your side.

1. Niche Selection

Take a broad group and make a list of the sub-categories of products you want to promote. It helps in analyzing your scope and interest. Aim for a product with high commission rates. High price factor cancels out when you receive a low commission off the sale. At least aim for 10% affiliate commission to boost you after sales.

Product pricing plays a major role in deciding your revenue generation. Say, you receive 10% commission for selling product A which costs $10 and the same commission for Product B which costs $50.

If you sell 100 items from each product in a single month, you’ll receive a commission of $100 on product A and $500 on product B. In short; you’ll receive 400% more commission on product B for selling the same quantity.

2. Brainstorm Keyword Ideas

Focus on keyword competition (KC) to filter keywords by great search volumes with little or no competition. Aim for keywords under KC 30. With low KC, you require less content, links and promotional strategies to rank your keyword.

Sometimes, marketers apply black hat SEO techniques to get on search engine’s first page results. In such cases, link profiling becomes important because it’s impossible to sustain page one rankings for a long time with spammy tactics.

Low KC doesn’t guarantee a winning keyword. Your keyword must have at least 1500 monthly searches. Use competitors research tools like Semrush to look for the keywords your competitors are ranking. Analyze the kind of traffic generated from the existing keywords related to your niche.

Use modifiers – like best, cheap, deals, under, Vs, review to catch viewer’s attention. Save these keyword templates for future references:

• Best Deals on [Product Name]
• [Number] Cheapest [Product Name] with [Feature]
• [Product Name] | [Month] [Year] Coupon Sales
• Buy [Product Name] at Low Prices
• [Product Name] Review | Will it Solve [Audience Problem]?
• [Product Name] Vs [Product’s Competitor] | [Website Name]
• Best [Product Name] under [Amount] in [Month] [Year]

3. Structured Content Plan

Content builds the communication gap between you and your target audience. If structured with positive intention, it acts as an effective tool to win the hearts, minds and more sales. It not only engages your audience but it brings in more opportunities to convert your visitors into customers.

Here are some important content types to make your content more shareable and sellable:

a) Review Posts

These posts revolve around product’s recommendation. If you are asking visitors to buy the product, it doesn’t mean you’ll express the positive aspects only. Don’t just tell how it improved your life. List out the things which you don’t like; the features which you wished not to be present; the scope of improvement for the future updates.

Share your personal experiences. Educate readers without sounding like a cheesy salesperson. Your main motto must be to help prospects make a solid choice before making the final decision. Don’t write to manipulate the decision. Write with the pure intention of solving people’s confusion.

b) Video Tutorials

Visual imagery and textual content are a deadly combination for increasing your profits. Let’s say; you are selling a software product. Video demo helps viewers visualize the software’s capability. They understand how the purchase can resolve their issue. Everything happens in front of them.

Video tutorials help audience make the best use of your recommendation. With this content type, create a sense of urgency in reader’s mind. Make them visualize what they’ll lose if they don’t buy the product.

c) Listicles

Readers love the number game. The temptation to click on the list posts is hard to resist. It feels as if you’ll miss something by leaving these posts. If you have various products in your niche, try this content type by taking an idea from the following examples:

• 9 Best Adjustable Dumbbells, and Where to Buy them for Less
• 12 Upcoming Android Smartphones Worth Waiting For
• 7 Best Lenses for Nikon D5300 in 2017| Tried and Tested

Though listicles lack in-depth value as compared to previous content types, they outperform both of them because they are easy to read and share. Readers are curious before clicking the link. They want to make sure how many of their guesses make it to the list. Users find lists as a time-saving and less mentally demanding task.

4. Link Building

Though strategic keyword research and quality content build valuable natural links for you over the course of time, manual link building is essential for your niche website. Backlinks coming from reliable sites boost your search engine rankings. Higher the rankings, higher the organic profits.

Submit your website to different web directories. Seek out relevant websites in your niche and leave meaningful comments. Use forum posts, Web 2.0 sites, article directories, social bookmarks and Q&A websites for link building.

One of the most powerful ways for generating quality links is by combining the strength of infographics and guest posts. Publishing a guest post on authority websites is time-consuming. But, this strategy saves your time and effort by placing links on the site you admire the most. For this, you have to:

• Gather data and statistics related to your niche and convert it into an infographic.
• Hire a freelance designer from sites like 99Designs, Upwork, Fiverr for infographic design.
• Publish and embed the infographic on your website.
• Ask your niche-related website to post the infographic and the textual content describing the same.

5. Build Your Email List

Money is in the email list. If you think why I should build an email list for promoting other’s product, you have missed an important point. The main idea is to create a community of like-minded individuals with whom you can connect instantly with a single click. Think about sending exclusive offers and promotions for your list members.

Come up with a free e-book or an email series to shed more light on your niche. Access the email contact in exchange for your free beneficial teaching.

More than sales and marketing tool, take email marketing as a tool for building a strong relationship. Interact with your list members to know more about them.

Ask for involvement by asking their problems and listening to their suggestions. Every person on your list has the potential for generating great ideas. You never know how a single idea might turn out profitable for your niche website.

Conclusion

You might be passionate about a topic. It doesn’t guarantee profits unless the market expectations align with your topic of interest. People purchase based on their wants and demands. Unless your product solves their problems, they are not interested in what you want to sell.

Ask yourself:

Do the people love searching for the topic which you love exploring?

If yes, make a list of products under your niche based on the commission rates. Be practical while filtering your list. If there are no sustainable affiliate programs, you can’t move forward with just the ‘passion’ factor.

Give maximum time on keyword research and content generation. Generate headline ideas by including modifiers. Google’s constantly changing algorithm updates focus on user-friendly experience. To rank your niche site, stay away from the crappy content. Concentrate on educating your readers before eyeing on their pockets.

Yes, you promote other’s products and generate passive income with your niche website. But, the non-stop traffic and profit comes in when you treat other’s product as your own.

Think from the other angle. The profits, received by selling other’s vision, will help you in realizing your online dreams. In future, the same money might assist you in launching your first product.

So, promote the affiliate links with active participation. Begin your niche website to become a voice, not just a temporary noise for generating short-term profits.