What is Affiliate Marketing?
Affiliate marketing is the process that an individual can market or advertise a product or service offered by another company. In most cases the person marketing the product often not actually have to purchase the product or service being marketed. As an affiliate marketer you are offered a percentage of the sales you help generate by the company you are marketing a product or service for.
As an example when was the last time your browsed through a magazine display. Each one of those magazines are designed to focus on a particular interest or niche in our society.
So what is Niche Affiliate Marketing?
Niche Affiliate Marketing can be described as finding a small segment or distinct interest of a market and focusing on a particular item or service within that interest. For instance "home cleaning aids" could be considered a niche but that is an extremely broad term. You could further break that down into "vacuum cleaners." Still a very broad term and would be hard to market considering the competition you would have. You could break that down into "upright vacume cleaners", "canister vacuum cleaners", or even "cordless or portable" vacuum cleaners. One could possible break that down by brand or even canister or upright vacuums.
That is what niche marketing is all about and there are many ways to find a profitable niche to research and market. Think about the things your are passionate about and maybe even things you don't like. You can likely find a product or service to market that interest. To help find a profitable niche you might take a look at an article I wrote on the subject at: 9 Ways To Find A Profitable Niche
What does it take to create a good niche affiliate marketing campaign?
Once you have decided on a niche product or service to market it's time to do some research. The Google Keywords Tool is a good place to start. Enter some keywords on the product or service you are considering to promote into the research form. You will get a list of relevant keywords and phrases that are listed according to competition. The higher to competition the harder it will be to market a product so choose keywords or phrases with low competition.
What's the point in all this? To have an effective niche affiliate marketing campaign you will need traffic. Since 8 our of 10 people use Google as their main search engine then you need too have some way to get a high ranking page in Google. Writing articles about your niche is one FREE method of obtaining a favorable page rank in Google.
Why write articles?
The main reason is that Google loves fresh, on topic information about a product or service and tends to give articles a high page rank. Writing articles about your niche is a lot easier than you may think and is a big part of any niche affiliate marketing campaign. There are many places to submit your articles online and a good place I recommend to start is StreetArticles.com. This is a high traffic site and your articles are indexed by Google within hours of submission. Usually much quicker than that.
Note: Your articles will not be your sales page. They are written to provide information to the reader about a product or service. You will have anchor text links pointing to your sales page or links in the author bio pointing to your sales pages.
If you are new to writing articles then Beginner's Guide To Article Marketing is a good inexpensive guide that has helped me. No only will you get the secrets of writing good articles you will also get over 1000 pre-writen articles on many subjects to use as guides when writing your articles.
I've put together some resources to help create a good niche affiliate marketing campaign.
One thing you will need to learn a little about is Search Engine Optimization. There a many things that will help get a favorable listing in Google. Two of the more important are relevant keyword density in an article or blog and some quality backlinks pointing to that article. I've listed some of the basics of search engine optimization on my page: The Basics of Search Engine Optimization.
The second part of obtaining a good page rank in Google is the use of backlinks. The more relevant the site you are back linking from helps a great deal with page rank. I've listed some good quality back link resources on another page: Search Engines, Backlinks, and Other SEO Tools.
Other resources and guides that have helped me with my niche affiliate marketing campaigns.
When I first started looking into niche affiliate marketing as a business I received some information about a guide from a lady that calls herself PotPieGirl. Her real name is Jennifer but I like PotPieGirl. She really knows all the ins and outs of niche affiliate marketing and has created a guide called: One Week Marketing.
You will actually get several bonus guides with the One Week Marketing action plan. One thing I did like about this was that I was allowed to download the first 18 pages of the guide before I committed any money to learn a little more about the guide. I would suggest you take a look at those pages first before you purchase to see if this would be for you.
PotPieGirl will help you make money on the internet. This is a great resource to help you learn niche affiliate marketing.
Another fantastic resource that I use is the information available by joining the Wealthy Affiliate University. There is way too much information to put here about Wealthy Affiliate so it will be better to go to the main home page of Wealthy Affiliate University to learn about all the great resources, training, blogs, and how Wealthy Affiliate will aid you in creating many niche affiliate marketing campaigns.
