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Make Your Mark with Affiliate Marketing
Monetizing a Site with Affiliate Marketing
Now that you've got a handle on the basic concept behind affiliate marketing, let's delve a little deeper into the process by which you can monetize a web site with affiliate marketing sales.
This section is broken into two parts.
In the first part, we'll assume that you already have, or are thinking of starting, a content web site; that you have a particular audience in mind; and that you've decided you'd like to monetize the site using affiliate marketing. We'll progress through the steps you'll need to take to assess your audience, conduct keyword research, and find appropriate affiliate networks and programs to suit your site and its users.
The second part of this section will look at an approach to affiliate marketing that's taken by countless experienced affiliate marketers. Here, we'll assume that you have firsthand experience with affiliate networks and programs, and are skilled in generating affiliate revenues. This part will explain an alternative approach to making money through affiliate networks: starting with the programs and working backwards.
Monetizing an Existing Site
Like thousands of people all over the Web, you have a content site, or you have an idea for one, and you'd like to monetize that site with affiliate marketing. Great! This is a good approach for the novice affiliate marketer who has little or no experience in the industry and wants to learn the ropes. The tasks we'll need to complete in order to effectively use affiliate advertising on such a site are:
- Identify a niche.
- Conduct keyword research.
- Plan the site.
- Choose affiliate networks, businesses, and products.
Let's get started!
Identifying a Niche
The advice on the importance of identifying a niche audience to target with your site -- and affiliate marketing efforts -- varies. Often, affiliate marketing is best suited to a niche business strategy. As we saw in our discussion of the topic in Chapter 2, Planning, niche marketing allows you to closely target an offering to the needs of an audience of prospects who are grouped on the basis of a set of very particular criteria. Often, the niche is smaller than a broader market segment would be, but the information you know about the audience members is likely to be more specific, and therefore more valuable from a marketing perspective.
Within the context of affiliate marketing, pursuing a niche allows you to target users with very specific needs or interests at a precise point within the purchase decision-making process -- the steps through which an individual moves toward purchasing a product that meets an identified need (a process we'll discuss in more detail a little later on). As such, it's a great idea to spend some time researching and identifying niches that your affiliate marketing venture will focus on. Remember, as you start out with any new venture, you'll likely find it easiest to target a niche that you feel passionate about and that you're interested in.
If you already have a web site that successfully meets the needs of a targeted userbase, you could try targeting a subsegment of those users. For instance, if you have a site that focuses on reporting developments and news relating to astronomy, you may already have a fairly specific readership that can be targeted with numerous affiliate offerings. But within that group you may have a subsegment of users who are specifically interested in backyard astronomy, and access your site for information that relates directly to that interest. These backyard astronomers may represent a niche within your existing userbase that could work well, given your existing market exposure and (we hope!) areas of interest or even passion.
Once you've established your niche, it's time to look a bit more closely at the audience members themselves. Who are these people? What are their motivations? How much money do they have to spend on their hobby? Is there a gradual progression or process through which they can be expected to move as they become more involved in the hobby? And at what point on this trajectory are your users currently sitting? These last two questions, in particular, should help you when it comes to narrowing down the field of potential products you could promote, and how much work you'll have to do to move the users toward the point of purchase. After all, there's no point advertising a $5,000 telescope to a 13 year old, nor is it likely you'll sell that telescope to someone whose entire experience with astronomy has so far involved lying on his back in a field with a map of the stars, trying to work out where the Big Dipper is. On the other hand, a user who's printed out four of your PDF single-constellation maps might be quite easily moved toward purchasing a complete, annotated, glow-in-the-dark night sky map or map book.
A combination of demographic and psychographic profiling should help you to gain a solid idea of your target audience, and, potentially, to subsegment those users into yet more targeted groups. Demographic profiling involves collating information on the demographic or physical aspects of your target audience members -- their ages, genders, locations, incomes, household sizes, occupations, and so on. Psychographic profiling is the task of compiling information on the cognitive, or psychologically-based aspects of audience members -- relevant preferences, prejudices, behaviors, reactions, and more. Your target audience profiles can contain any types of information you like, so long as it's relevant to them, and to your marketing. How will you get that information? Well, if you have an existing site userbase, you could easily survey them online -- a series of well-planned, pertinent questions could produce some great insights into your users. (Among the good, free online survey tools are SurveyMonkey and SurveyPro.)
If you don't have a userbase, you might be able to access pieces of information about the audience you plan to target through a range of sources, and use these to create a fuller picture of those users. Those sources might include:
- the media kits available on sites which serve that niche
- broader research conducted by market research firms on, for example, people of the generation, or working in the profession, you aim to target
- research, reports, and whitepapers available through industry- or interest-specific bodies in the market space you plan to enter
- interviews or discussions held with business owners or mentors whose organizations target the users you want to reach
By the time you've finished, you should have a profile that describes in a few short sentences precisely who you're going to target.
Conducting Keyword Research
Once again, the way to online business success comes down -- at least in part! -- to good keyword research. Use your favorite word tracking tool -- Wordtracker, Niche Detector, and so on -- to review the keywords that relate to the niche you've chosen. The goal here is to find a number of words that are highly targeted, well searched, and have the kind of competition you can handle. Simple, right? Well, it's something to aim for!
When I used Wordtracker to research our astronomy example, I initially used "amateur astronomy" as my search term. The figure below shows the top results of that search.
We have results like "telescope," "astrophotography," and "astronomy products" in that list. But among the more common results, Wordtracker also turned up the names of planets, and terms like "planetary nebulae," "northern constellations," "light pollution," which are really quite specific -- they're possibly not the kinds of topics your backyard budding astronomers are likely to be searching on. So you can see how important your niche research is going to be in terms of determining appropriate keywords for the site. You may well choose a number of niches for consideration, then see where your keyword research leads for each one before you hitch your moon buggy to any particular shooting star ...
By the time you've done your research, you should have two things:
- a target niche, and a thorough knowledge of the individuals within that group
- a list of keywords that are likely to attract those audience members to your site
Having reviewed our audience profiles, we've decided that we'll target amateur astronomers. Our target users -- a niche segment within our existing site's audience -- range in age from 18 up (after all, we want them to be able to make purchases online), and include a slightly higher proportion of males than females. These users may have varying degrees of experience with astronomy, through they're all amateur, and we know that they're proud of their hobby. They're information-hungry (after all, they're using our news site every two to three days) but they're also keen for action -- they like to spend time on the weekends dabbling in astronomy, star gazing, and so on.
The keyword research we conducted using Wordtracker turned out to be quite interesting. The term "amateur astronomy" was predicted to be searched upon through major search engines in the preceding 90 days just 12 times. "astronomy," on the other hand, was predicted to have been the term used for some 3951 searches. But as we progressed through the search terms, we found a common theme: a number of more generic search terms ended up having as a related search term something to do with pictures, diagrams, and photos. We ran a competition search and found that the terms "diagram of the solar system" and "pictures of the solar system" were the least competitive terms, and had KEI factors that were good. A little searching online also proved that there were numerous affiliate programs relating to astronomy and space imagery, so we decide to make this our site's focus.
Keeping Track
Performing a competition search on the keywords you're keen to target should represent just one aspect of your competitor research. Once you have a concept for your site, invest some time performing competitor research online. Look at other sites in the vertical, or industry, try to ascertain which audience segments they target, how they promote their offerings to those users, and so on. It's important to do this sleuthing at the beginning, as careful research now could see you create a site for a slightly different niche than you originally planned -- but one that's far more lucrative.
We conduct some research into the other space imagery sites online, and we find plenty. There are blogs containing photos; star, galaxy, and solar system photographs taken by an amateur astronomer who also sells prints of her own photos; stock photography sites; and much more. The two key competitors we find are Welcome to the Planets, a NASA site comprising pictures and profiles of each planet, which is basically a promotional site for a CD-ROM that was last updated in 2001, and Nine Planets, "an online tour of the solar system," complete with pictures, history, and other information on each planet. Nine Planets is our largest competitor. The site is information- and photo-packed, and photos are linked to more information, so when you click on a thumbnail image on a given page, you access a page on the Welcome to the Planets site that explains that photo. The information on Nine Planets is well written and clear, but we note a few usability issues with the site (there's no above-the-fold navigation on the site, for example, and no links to the homepage in the top-left corner of the pages -- an accepted usability standard). We also note that the site, though it has a diagram of the solar system, doesn't emphasize the fact or provide very good visuals on this page. Also, the site doesn't seem to have much of a focus on looking for the planets yourself, in your own backyard. These are just a few gaps which could provide obvious opportunities for our site.
If you already have a site that's targeted to a particular audience, you'll already have a well-honed set of keywords, which will make this job a lot easier. You may want to research your current keywords using the tools I mentioned above, just to ensure there aren't any additional variations that could enable your site to attract specifically those audience members who have a recognized need for a particular product, solution, or purchase.