Selecting a Market Niche for Affiliate Marketing

A market is a physical place. Common people associate the word market with a physical place that they visit. However, a market is simply a platform where buyers and sellers interact. Therefore, in this virtual reality that we live in, the internet is one of the biggest marketplaces. It is diverse and has a huge number of buyers and sellers transcending geographical boundaries.

However, any internet marketer worth his/her salt will tell you that targeting the entire internet is a strategy designed for failure. When you are targeting everybody in general, you end up targeting no one in particular. This makes niche marketing important as well as essential. In this article, we will understand how affiliate marketers must necessarily select a niche in order to be successful.

What is a Market Niche?

Simply put, a market niche is a sub-division of the market. In order to obtain niches, markets are divided on the basis of products. For instance, selling educational CD’s on the internet can be considered one particular niche. This niche can be further classified into a smaller market division such as educational CD’s which teach science only or alternatively, educational CD’s which are premium priced because they are linked to an app where the students can learn practically as well! The whole idea of a market niche revolves around reducing the huge market into a smaller homogenous entity which can then be used to promote products and services.

Also, most of the affiliate marketing is carried out via search engines. In case of a niche, it is easy to identify the keyword and the major sources of traffic. Niche affiliate marketing allows marketers to focus better on search engine optimization campaigns and thereby drive relevant traffic to the merchant’s website.

Why Focus on a Market Niche?

Focus on a market niche is important because even an expert affiliate marketer cannot sell everything to everybody. For people to get influenced by a marketer, the marketer first has to establish himself/herself as a subject matter expert.

An expert by definition knows a lot about a small subject. Hence, affiliate marketing, by definition is the game of niches! Any affiliate marketer targeting the entire internet, moving from products to products trying their hand at whatever provides maximum commission will find out that they aren’t really able to sell anything. Affiliate marketing is all about using niches to narrow your focus and then increasing your efforts once the scope has been identified.

Cross Selling Benefits in a Marketing Niche

Several benefits arise out of focusing on a market niche. Cross selling is one of these benefits. Consumers do not want to buy unrelated products on the advice provided by an affiliate marketer. However, if they are buying related products, they do not mind spending the additional dollars if they believe that the advice being provided is genuine and unbiased.

Establishing yourself as an expert allows you to cross sell several products to a consumer and earn a commission on all of them. However, reputation is key here! Consumers must believe that you are only offering whatever is best for them. If they believe that the affiliate has ulterior motives, the credibility is lost and this loss has an extremely adverse effect.

Economies of Scale and Market Niche

Affiliate marketers can also take advantage of economies of scale when they restrict their activities to a marketing niche. This is because when they become an expert in the niche, they can negotiate better deals with vendors selling related products. As mentioned above, cross selling of related products is relatively easy when expertise and authority have already been established.

Also, the incremental effort required to promote an additional product is not very high. The same blog posts can be used to promote several articles by including a few lines. Any revenue generated is incremental since the efforts required are not very high.

Selecting the Right Niche

Selecting the right niche is an important skill for an affiliate marketer. There are some guidelines that can be followed to obtain better results. They are :

• Choose a niche where you have some sort of expertise. Educational as well as professional expertise is not required for success in the affiliate marketing game. However, they do make life considerably easy as affiliates have to work less hard to gain trust!

• Do not choose a niche which is a fad or the “in thing” at any given pint of time. It attracts a lot of fly-by-night affiliates. These affiliates cause the commissions to drop till they are no longer viable and then exit the market. Also, the vendors in these markets may not be financially strong. Consider stable niches that have been there for decades and will be there for decades to come!

• The size of the niche should Not be too small. Smaller niches are easy to capture. However, they are not enough to earn decent commissions. For the business to be sustainable, it has to be scalable to some extent.

Therefore, for an affiliate marketer, it is essential to find a market niche and focus the efforts on that niche rather than the market in general. The idea is to be a big fish in a small pond rather than getting lost in the vast ocean that internet has become!

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