Boost Your Brand and Grow Your Audience in Affiliate Marketing
In reference to making money and potentially starting a business, niche review sites are one of the most sought after methods for starting with.
Why niche sites you ask?
Simple… in most cases they are going after a small niche market, with less competition, and it’s much easier to provide the end user with exactly what they are looking for.
In recent years, there has been explosive growth in the online services, software, and electronics/technology niche, as many of the affiliate programs associated with these markets can pay up to 70% in commissions.
Even with these great payments in place, and millions of dollars in new leads and sales being generated daily, there is a good amount of time, work, and effort that goes into creating a successful niche site.
Today we are going to be looking at five of these data points and factors.
1. Position Your Site for Success!
If you want to find success with a review site, you not only need to prepare and analyze a bunch of other sites within your niche market, you also need to plan for success. Once you have a solid foundation in place, it will be that much easier for you to go live with a site, provide content of value to your audience, and then promote it in a way that creates real traffic, leads, and revenue for both you and your advertisers.
This is something Russel Ruffino has been preaching for a while now. When he’s not building out his own companies and brands, he’s helping others go through the same process. Time and time again, it’s all about the preparation and pre-planning that goes into a business or website, that will lead to it’s eventual success.
A clear example of this can be seen in the various articles and case studies that Russel releases about his webinar strategies. It seems like everyone is already doing them, but only a select few are able to generate six-figures a month with them.
Even with all of his useful tips and guidance in place, there are still thousands of people who jump forward to start their own business or blog without any product and marketing research. More often than nothing, this is because most people aren’t patient enough to put in the time, work, and effort, and just want to see immediate results. As most of us have personally discovered… it’s one of the many common business mistakes new entrepreneurs and business owners make.
Positioning your site in the middle between buyers and sellers is the first guide. A good review site should be neutral. If not, any review that is made is not very valuable and is nothing more than a promotional tool. Your visitors certainly do not want to be immediately directed to buy products as they need to be given the opportunity to think to decide whether a product really fits their expectations or not. This is the basic law of every quality review blog. Forgetting this means giving a bad basic foundation for your blog, especially when you decide to review various electronic products that are almost the same as each other. You can’t just promote a particular brand if you want to appear with quality reviews.
2. Understand Market Interest and Providing a Service
It doesn’t matter if you are going to start a local business or an online business, it’s so important to understand not only your business model, but also the metrics of your audience, who they are, how you will reach them and what it will cost to generate new business. This is one of the most crucial aspects of creating a successful niche site, but also one that most site owners and bloggers will never put in enough time on.
All of this preparation work should be done before you even go live with your site or pick a new domain name. You MUST understand the core of your business and how it will provide a service to your audience, in order for it to find success.
These points and more are actually covered in this ten-point data list from Constant Contact:
- Develop a powerful message
- Focus on the customer and fully understand the market
- Start small and grow
- Understand your own strengths, skills, and time available
- Surround yourself with advisors and mentors
- Get a SCORE mentor
- Write a business plan
- Know your numbers
- Understand there are no entitlements
- Have a passion for what you are doing
If you have all of these data points and metrics in place, there is no reason why you shouldn’t find success with your online business, or even just a niche site.
3. Become Unique and Provide More Value
Did you know that there are currently over a billion active sites on the internet today? It’s true!
With so many sites online, there is really no need to create a new site or web content just for the sake of putting it out there. If you do, you aren’t just wasting your audience’s time, but also your own.
To win on the internet, you need to provide a better experience (or content), over your competition.
When it comes to making money with affiliate marketing or with niche review sites, it’s all about going as niche specific as possible — then also grinding down on all relevant searches and products as well.
As perfect example of this can be seen when searching for an office headset review. Sure, this super generic and not a very sexy topic to write about, but it’s a service and product that people need. When visiting the review site mentioned above, not only will you be able to find product information on office headsets, you will also see how they provide articles and reviews on other relevant products and services as well.
This is perfect for the site owner and their audience for a wide range of reasons, such as:
- Giving the site visitor a bunch of options to choose from
- Making it easy for Google to see a specific niche topic on the site
- Finding relevant site partners for link building and content creation
- Always knowing when to write new reviews on the latest products
With so much competition on the internet these days, go niche — then be the best source for information out there.
4. Review Something You Understand and Value
As with any type of business, if you aren’t interested in it… then it’s just another job.
This is one of the many benefits to running an online business and being an affiliate marketer. Not only can you possibly turn your expertise and passion into an online business, there might also be a wide range of affiliate programs and opportunities out there just waiting for you.
Just like how we gave an example of office headsets above, we can do the same thing with a specific mobile device adapter or headphone. Again, not the most exciting topic in the world, but if you are already working with mobile devices and electronics, this could be something you have a lot of knowledge about… and maybe even a passion for.
If that’s the case, you will also know that there are different wires, adapters, headsets and plugs for different models and products out there. When it comes to searching for such products online, many people will plug in the product or serial number into their Google search as well.
If you run an affiliate site for anything that has a specific model or serial number, this could be a huge benefit to your audience and also help with improved SEO and search rankings as well.
Many of the top niche product review sites are using ‘ugly’ and simple tables to lay out their product information. It might not be the most attractive design, but it works wonders for getting your audience to click. Especially when using simple blue hyperlink text.
Another great example of this is Amazon.com. Search for any mobile phone devices, and they are not only going to provide you with results, they will also make it easy for users to filter results based on their actual device, model and brand as well.
When creating any type of review site, the easier you can make it for your audience to find what they are looking for, the easier it will be for them to take action — which means more leads, sales, and affiliate commissions for your site.
5. Focus on the End User’s Value and Your Call to Action
Yes, content is King, and it’s extremely important — but even more so, is your call to action.
In many of the examples mentioned throughout this post, it’s all about giving your audience exactly what they are looking for and also making it as simple and easy as possible.
We covered the importance of having:
- detailed reviews for your audience
- highlighting product and model names/numbers
- knowing your audience and what they want
- creating better content than the competition
However, even with all of this in place… you still need to have a great call to action!
If you ever needed to see what millions of dollars in split testing and CTA analyzing looks like, just take a look at any of these examples. The biggest and best sites in the world all have great home pages with immediate call to actions. This might not be the case with niche review sites, but they are still great for research and getting new ideas.
Of the many different things you need to consider when building out a successful site, this is the most important, but also extremely simple. Also, don’t over-complicate the process. KISS (keep it simple stupid) often works best.
“CLICK HERE” and “ORDER NOW” are still the call to action and trigger words that people know and look for.
Keeping them in large text and in blue is also a good idea to start with.
If you are advanced in site design, HTML, analytics tracking or what to get more fancy, feel free to run split tests with different call to actions, colors and images. If you have enough traffic and can monitor this closely enough, it could make a big difference in overall engagement and sales.
How to Get Started with Your Affiliate Niche Review Site
Getting started with a new website or blog is extremely easy. In fact, you can follow my step by step process here, and be live with a site of your own in the next few minutes.
However, as mentioned throughout this article — there is a lot of time, work, and effort that needs to go into the preparation process to make sure you are providing value to an audience, and also entering a market that you can compete it.
Just because you’ve chosen a niche market, doesn’t mean you will find immediate or eventual success. Even niche markets come in big and small sizes.
Factor in everything we outlined in this article and also make sure your content creation, promotion efforts, and business model makes sense.