Welcome to the 3rd part of the series on creating niche affiliate income. Missed anything? Then go check out this page and get caught up on the last two lessons.
Up to this point we’ve answered some questions and gone over fifteen strategies that will “Google-Proof” your website.
Now let’s that first step towards building a successful niche website!
Everything starts with your topic. Most people recommend starting with keyword selection. I disagree. My plan is to target specific affiliate marketing niches and products. I’ve found you can make a lot of money by picking the right product in the right market.
Here’s how to do this…
To start, I recommend reading my free PDF: THE Affiliate Research Formula. This 8,000 word report provides a comprehensive overview on generating niche ideas.
My niche selection strategy mostly follows what I cover there. The only difference is I look for niche topics with one of two things:
a) People with a buying mindset
b) Products that fulfill an emotional trigger
There are many affiliate products that fit this description. My strategy is to find people who are:
- Doing research on a particular product
- Asking questions about that product
- Looking for information on a problem they’re experiencing
- Seeking advice in a market where there are multiple solutions
- Seeking advice in a market where there are multiple problems
Sad to say, I don’t have a fancy strategy for finding a niche market. Usually I’ll start with the Clickbank Marketplace. Then I’ll use the sales page to generate keyword and topic ideas:
I know. This isn’t a very a sophisticated way to pick a topic. But it works for me because I know 99.9% of my competition isn’t willing to take that extra step. Odds are you can make any niche work if you’re willing to work hard at getting quality backlinks.
Like I said, this is a strategy I’m using. I don’t guarantee it’ll work in every situation. But here’s how it’ll be applied in three different niches for this series:
Example #1 – Niche Site X
In the first part of this series I mentioned that I won’t give specific details about this site. What I will do is discuss basic strategies and the results I get.
This is a review site of a product with a sizable affiliate commission ($100.) My primary strategy is to target the “buying keywords” that people use to get more information. Then I’ll go after keywords which relate to the problems that the product solves.
Frankly I made a mistake with this site. While it’s already made a few sales, I’m not sure if I should have branded this site around a specific product. Who knows if this will break a “Google Rule” in the future?
What I should have done is target a niche topic and then worried about a specific product.
Example #2 – Niche Site Y
Alright, this site is only a figment of my imagination. I think I’m sure about the topic. But it’ll be a few weeks before I’ll provide the exact details.
This will be my attempt to pursue an ultra-specific, small niche with low competition. Why am I mentioning it now? Because it’s the opposite of the mega-niche site I’m starting this week.
Which brings us to…
Example #3 – The “Break Up” Niche
I picked this topic for a number of reasons. It has a lot of profit potential (more on this later.) There is a lot of demand for information in this niche. And it has a lot of negatives which would dissuade most people from pursuing it.
You see, I want to pick a topic that is extremely competitive. I figure if I can make this work, then I know my search engine strategy can be applied to any market.
Plus I purposefully picked something that’s considered a spam topic by sites like Squidoo.com and EzineArticles.com. Why? To show how to build a quality site in a niche that’s full of “thin content.”
I’ll admit this might not be the perfect idea for a case study. But I’m willing to step up to the challenge!
I’m sure everyone has heard about the “get your ex back” niche. It’s what Travis Sago recommends in his Bum Marketing Method. (A free eBook that’s helped many people get started with affiliate marketing.) The goal of this market is to help people win back their ex girlfriend or boyfriend.
I think there should be a lot more to this niche. Basically you’re talking about anyone who is going through a break up or wants to prevent one from happening. Yes, you can recommend a product to win back an ex. But as we all know, some exes should stay exes. The better idea is to build a catalog of offers that can be promoted on a single site:
Here is the rationale behind each *type* of person:
- Get Over a Breakup – An individual who is experiencing emotional trauma from a breakup and wants to know how to move on
- Prevent a Breakup – Someone who wants to improve an existing relationship or add spice to it
- Win Back an Ex Girlfriend – A guy who still loves his ex-girlfriend and wants to get her back
- Win Back an Ex Boyfriend – Same thing; but it’s a girl who feels this way
- Win Back an Ex (Non Gender) – Some content (and products) can be applied to any sex
- Dating Tips for Men – The ex is gone…for good. Time to start meeting other people!
- Dating Tips for Women – Same thing; but it’s a girl who is starting to date again.
- Side-by-side Product Reviews – Someone is searching for information about products. This content shows the comparison between the most popular offers in this market.
These are just a few ideas I brainstormed in five minutes. I’m sure I could come up with at least 20+ that relate to the “break up” niche.
I’m not saying you have to pitch a product for each topic. Some might be better off as blog posts. What I am saying is there are a lot of things you can do with this one particular niche site.
The first thing to do with niche research is find a product. The one product that sticks out is the Magic of Making Up by TW Jackson (Travis Sago’s pen name.) I’m not 100% sure this is what I’ll promote. But it provides a great starting point for keyword research. All I do is take the product phrases and insert it into Google Keyword External to get more information:
As you can see, there are a lot of phrases related to this product. So how’s the competition? That’s what I find out using the Market Samurai tool. This piece of software helps me identify what keywords to target when I start my niche site.
Here’s a video where I go through the competition of these keyword phrases:
As you saw in the video, Market Samurai is telling me there’s a crazy amount of competition in this market. On the other hand, I think there is a lot of opportunity. Some of the top rankings are pieces of content that are hosted on properties like:
- Article directories
- YouTube
- Homestead.com
- HubPages
- Squidoo
My point? With a quality backlinking strategy you can beat these people. In my opinion, this is a topic that’s worth pursuing.
My core strategy is to use search engine optimization to generate web traffic. So I’ll need any advantage I can get. That’s why I’ve decided to purchase an aged domain.
Here’s a video that shows how to do this:
Here are the two sites I mentioned in the video:
Anyway, I think getexbacksecrets.com is a pretty decent domain name. Plus it’s over a year old.
Now all I have to do is put some content on it…
Alright, that’s my strategy for finding a profitable niche. There’s a little more that goes into it. Specifically, most niche sites get the majority of their traffic from long-tail keyword searches.
So in the next part of this series, I’m going to talk about the long-tail and how to generate lots of traffic using this technique.
Questions? Comments? Concerns?
Respond below and let me know your thoughts!
Take Action. Get Results.
That’s a good discussion on how to make money online in niche affiliate marketing. I’d add that it helps if you buy the product you’re promoting. I earn far more promoting products I’ve used, like and know well than otherwise.
Peter,
Great point. I actually should have said something about that in the post! I would go as far as to say that is almost a “must” It lets you avoid those really horrible products and gives you a hack of a lot more experience to talk about the ones that are decent.
Another great post Steve. Keep them coming!
I look forward to your next post on long tail keywords.
How is your affiliate program going?
—
Nick aka The Traffic Guy
nickstraffictricks@gmail.com
Nick,
Thanks man, Glad you liked it. The affiliate program is going OK, vut not as well as I hoped. I have been behind on everything I do since I launched it (I took a month long trip the day after) and I haven’t had to time to market it properly yet so it has been slower than i am used to getting the affiliates. But it is getting there…
Good post. I’ve read Travis’ guide and it IS a good product and coverts well as an affiliate product too. There is another product (but it’s even more specific) that converts even better but I’ll keep that info to myself since I’m promoting it.
Thanks Jay,
Yeah I have read Travis’s product in the past. SO I know it is not simply a load of complete crap. That is an important part of this too. Picking products that you are not ashamed to get behind and all of that.
Affiliate marketing is a challenging task for beginners, but your research and advice Steve is very helpful! I loved your PDF, “The affiliate research formula”. I totally agree with you on the crucial issue of the “big four” of Internet marketing; health, wealth, relationships, and passions. You are so right Steve. I have now bookmarked it and will check back later.
I would rate this article as a good and worthwhile read.
Thank you, Steve.
Thanks Nick!
Glad you liked the PDf and the article. I appreciate your dropping by and commenting.
Steve
A very complete article once again. Especially with the videos. I find very interesting your “Break Up” Niche challenge (the niche itself is boring for me but the challenge seems amazing).
Looking forward to the next post.
Hopefully it will be a good example. My idea was to go the opposite way from niche X. IN niche X I think I have a lot of advantages. With the “get your X back niche” although there is a large audience there is also crazy compeiion, lots of “spammers” and a view that the entire niche is dodgy.
But that doesn’t mean that the content has to be that way.
Of course I am less sure this one will work, but it will be interesting to see how it fares in a competitive niche. SHould be a good side by side
Hey Steve,
Is quite interesting this experiment. I’m looking forward to see how is gonna end. I will come daily to see the progress.
Cheers.
Thanks Radu,
Hopefully it will keep you interested and come up with some cool results.
hey Steve. Great tips on starting out. The Ex Back niche is a profitable one, I just had problems with what many of the products teach. another area to consider that could be its own category is save marriage. A lot of similarities, but some deeper issues than with normal breakups, and loads of available topics for discussion.
Are you doing this site as a static article site or as a blog?
Thanks for the idea James,
Already rolling on the ex back, though. I think there is good content in the niche. But also a metric ton of crap. That is part of the challenge and why it is important. Sure the profitability is there, but the niche also has some heavy negatives and I am trying to see if they can be overcome. The third niche I try will be something with less competition and negatives but likely a lo less inherent profitability. Between these three, there should be a pretty good idea what works and what doesn’t. It will be interesting if one works and another fails horribly.
It will be a blog, for sure.
Hi Steve,
Excellent post as usual my friend. An important key is how to find people who have the “buying mentality.” In other words, how to get to people who are willing to pay for what you offer. I think this is a huge part in having a successful business online. Thanks for sharing Steve
Dia,
For sure! Ex back has that in spades. Which is one of the reason it is so cluttered and spammy. My hope is that a deeper site, with less spam and more substance will do a little bit better than the rest of these.
Hey Steve,
I especially agree on the buying mindset and emotion trigger. People that are in pain will do whatever it takes if you can cure them.
Look forward to your next post on long tail keywords 🙂 Great stuff!
Cheers,
Ming
Thanks Ming,
Glad you are liking the series so far.
So according to you, We first find out the product which is profitable if we can make few sales. After choosing the product look for the niche market, competition and keywords as well.
I think your point is correct, We’re creating an affiliate niche site so it’s important to choose profitable product and then work around it.
Aaron,
This is the difference between a niche and an authority site. Obviously an authority site is the opposite. But you need to know what your main money make will be before you start deciding on all the keywords. I could see people doing keywords->products and while that will work I really think the other way is better. Of course in the end the only pole SURE to get killed are those that do not do ALL of the steps.
Great going, Steve! So you will be building 3 niche sites all at once then? Wouldn’t that be a lot of work? Well, I guess you will be outsourcing the content generation, but that would still leave a fair amount of work to be done by yourself?
It will be a lot of work. Some of it will be done by my brother and a ton more outsourced. SInce these are niche sites I won’t have comments and commenting to deal with. I will do most of the content (I may outsource some) and then outsource almost all of the link building. (Trying a few programs/sites for backlinks).
It will be/IS still a lot but hopefully doable.
Alright, that sounds great! Not having commenting to deal with will put away a huge chunk of work.
Outsourcing the back-linking sounds great too… but also reminds me of the many complaints I’ve read recently from seasoned bloggers who seem to be frustrated about comment “SPAM”. Seems like more and more people are talking about disallowing comments that link to product pages or to blogs that do not allow comments themselves, etc. Do you see this as a potential problem? Of course, there are always going to be millions of blogs that will not have such stringent comment policies, so it would not be much of an issue, but would love to hear your opinion on that.
Mark,
Just to make sure, this is not commenting on niche sites… If people try that on the main (authority) sites there probably in for a rude awakening. Since you will be unlikely to get return traffic anyway in niche sites just isn’t worth the time.
As for your question… Absolutely. I get frustrated by comment spam too. Not quite so much about the ones linking the product pages or no follow blogs, I would rather link to people who are willing to give link juice back but I can understand those that want other pages to get link juice too. The important thing in my mind is that these borderline commentators, should try even harder to make sure this comment is valuable, because if I have to think about it they are probably getting deleted
Great post! Too bad I’ve discovered this blog only now. Well to tell you honestly, I’ve now been struggling to monetize my niche site which is focused on “3 day detox” since I have tried a lot of affiliate marketing strategies, contacting advertisers, building a list but then having the site live and ranked at number 1 in Google for those keywords and still weren’t enough for it to make money “for a living”.
Making a living off of a niche depends a lot on the of things. Mainly of them is how many people “buy” and what the entire level of traffic for that niche is.
Without knowing anything about 3 day detox, It sounds like those might be buying keywords. So that is good. But I am unsure of that the total traffic.
I would start with analyzing the keywords that people do find you with. List any good ones and try to rank more for those semi-semantic keywords while deepening your site. Like “clean your system” or “detoxify my body” (I am not in the niche, these are just wild guesses.) Ranking for a few other related keywords should help traffic a lot.
But ultimately if your keywords only get 1,000 exact match searches a month all you can expect is 400 or so visitors with hopefully a percentage of those being buyers.
There are niches were you can make a living off of alone. Those are often so competitive you need to live ranking them. But then there are niches that are easier, will out a few bucks in your pocket, and when done, it is time to move onto a new one and just “update” the old. Personally I do not know enough about niche or product to tell you which it is. But being #1 in Google should at least give you the lions share of leads for it.
It’s getting better man 😀
But I just have only one question. I see when you check for keywords in the Google keyword tool, you left them as “broad match.” Isn’t it true that we should check the “exact match” option to see the more accurate version of searches per month?
Don’t get me wrong. It’s just what I do and what I know many people have done when doing kw research. But in this situation, and with the niche of “get your ex back,” I can see that even when it turned to “exact” option, keyword volume will still be at the top!
And I really like the way you approach this case study. You know, chose a niche that Google and many other sites considering spammy in today’s world 🙂 Can’t wait for the next post man!
All the best!
Duy.
Ahhh you caught me. I thought about explaining more, but decided not to get sidetracked. I do think broad is important, but exact is too. I heard an example once exact os the traffic you get NOW for ranking on the keywrods, Phrase is the traffic you get in a few months and broad the traffic you can get in a few years. I figure broad into my longterm, just like exact, but I also keep an on PBR, because the better the PBR the quicker you will start to get some broad traffic. It also helps a lot if you vary your anchor text a lot for various semantic references to the broad.
But all that said…for sake of this example, I probably should have had it on exact. It gives people a better understanding of what the traffic could be today.
Yeah, I agree with you not to get side tracked too much for this case study 🙂
I re-watched your videos this morning and it makes sense to me. The PBR is a reliable statistic in this situation. And like I said before, if you can dominate top spots for your chosen keywords, traffic will flood your site for sure!
So, off we go to the next post Steve 😉 I’m hungry lol!
Duy.
Great explanation. I do think that the “Get your ex back” niche is a difficult one to get in to.
You have probably already thought about this but I will say it anyway. It is smart to host these new sites with different c-class ip’s, so you can use the authority you have created with for example this site to get some strong links to your new site.
If you do it all on the same hosting under the same ip then the links will be the same worth as internal links.
I hope you keep us updated on your projects, they sound great!
Danny,
You are absolutely right well “get your ex back” has some upside it is certainly challenging. You I also write about the class C IP’s, I have thought about that, and I have a couple different properties to link from a different IP’s, and of course your once I get a site I went to it even though the relevancy is minor.
Thanks for dropping by and leaving a great comment.
I have to get back on my words Steve.
I just found out that apparantly linking from one site to the other with the same IP is considered the same as any other external link, it is just a way for people like hostgator to sell you an extra service, which they definitely tried to do to me.
Check this topic out, in the bottom is a very good explanation from somebody called “HTMLBasicTutor”. Sorry for giving you bad information.
http://www.v7n.com/forums/seo-forum/281939-any-value-linking-your-site1-your-site2.html
Thanks for the info Danny. I had always heard the same thing about the multiple class C’s. It is good to know it isn’t the case. I learned something new today already! 🙂
Hi Steve
These online works are easy way to earn the money. There are lots of work in SEO like as searching the keyword, profile linking and blog commenting.
thanks,
Hi Steve,
First I’d like to thank you for this wonderful blog.
Second, i have to say that this post has inspired me to start my own relationship advice blog.
I have read many books about dating and relationships, and i have also read many of the get ex back books, then i did what you told in this blog post.
The problem is, i am really confused.. really, and i have a feeling that this blog will not survive, even if i do not have an obvious reason.
All iam asking you is to tell me the truth.. can this blog survive? or i should give up on it?
Thanks again.
Hey man, I’ve started up my niche websites, I just built two as a starter, I’m so new to this business and I’ve been learning new stuff each and every day to this point, mostly by reading blogs, books, and forums.
I read your blogs and ebooks all the time, I created my website upon reading one of your ebooks, a 100 page that what got me doing what I am doing, but here’s the thing, I don’t know what exactly I’m doing wrong, but still at this point I’m making nothing, blunt zero income, and I’m worried, should I continue making a third website waiting for traffic to come, or should I go back and look at what I need to change, I would appreciate if you help me out, send me an email, or msg me of what I should do to stay motivated and keep on working to achieve this dream, thank you.