Think about niche marketing in this context. You can’t really choose the products you’re going to market until you know the niche you’re going to address. You can’t really choose the niche market unless you know there are niche products that you can promote profitably. Of course, you can’t choose either the niche products you’re going to promote or the niche market you’re going to address without knowing that a smaller, well-defined niche audience of buyers ready, willing, and able to buy exists.
What is meant by this? Niche marketing is going after a smaller, specific, defined area of the market. You’re interested in serving the subset of customers who are interested in this smaller, specific market area. So the first benefit of niche marketing is that you can more closely customize your approach to meet the customers’ needs and desires.The second benefit of niche marketing is you’re able to avoid being crushed by either well-funded corporations or experienced marketers fighting for top position in areas where the potential payday is much higher because of the higher number of searches. Do you want to be going head-to-head with the NFL, BBC, ESPN, and other well-funded corporate giants?
Niche marketing is crucial to the beginning affiliate marketer. It’s even more important to the beginner than a more experienced affiliate marketer who has built up some credibility and a reputation. Why is that? Two words: competition and position.
Today many affiliate marketers are looking for affiliate profits. Many of those affiliate marketers may be competing against you. They may be more experienced than you; their domain may be older and more established, which gives them more credibility.
The products and niches that pay the best and have the most searches — which mean the biggest paychecks — have the fiercest competition. Do you want to go up against these affiliate marketing gladiators, who are often major corporations armed with million-dollar budgets? You could try, but getting in on this subsection of niche marketing would be like pounding on a brick wall.
Rather than being a small fish (you) in a big pond (a high-competition area), you have a much higher chance of success being a big fish in a low-competition area (your niche).
Beginning affiliate marketers are often seduced by the dancing dollars of high-competition markets. They start calculating in their heads — “Well, if Google says football gets 7.5 million searches a month and I target football, I’ll be rolling in dough even if I get just a tiny, tiny fraction of those web visitors visiting my site and making a purchase.”The Google search also shows there are 4.3 billion results (competitors) for this niche. But Google tells a different tale than the one the dancing dollars are telling you. In your Google search for football, you can see the top listings are the National Football League, ESPN, Wikipedia, BBC Sport, and CNN.
As you can see, the first page of results consists of all major corporations or news organizations that have multimillion-dollar budgets, are well established on the internet, and surely have staffs of hundreds if not thousands of people to run their websites. If you were trying to get on the first page, you’d have some formidable competition.
Enter niche marketing. A niche is a small, specialized area that may not get many searches. Since the imagined income is so much less, it attracts fewer affiliate marketers, which means less competition. Less competition means you have a reasonable chance, as a new affiliate marketer, to build a website or develop a social media campaign that will rank reasonably high, and you will make money.
You’re also looking to cultivate a small, specific group of potential customers who are looking for the product you’re offering. For comparison, take the niche “football snack helmet.” It has a very low search volume, which means a much lower potential income, but it also has less competition.
Google tells a much different story when you type “football snack helmet” into the browser. The top listing on the page is an affiliate marketer’s site selling Amazon football snack helmets and making a profit.
So you, too, can find your own specialized niche, build your website to address the needs of your specialized market, and start to build your affiliate business around this niche by answering the needs of this specialize audience. How do you do this? By writing informative articles that answer the needs and questions this group may have or provide information they may find helpful.
Niche marketing can help you from drowning in the competitive pools and let you find that specialized audience.
