Tapping into a new affiliate marketing niche is as exhilarating as daunting. On the one hand, you have to build your audience from scratch, which is never easy. On the other hand, by expanding into new markets, you can grow your bottom line exponentially, especially with the right affiliate strategies and software by the side.
Jeannine Crooks, Partner Acquisition and Development Manager at Awin, joined Phonexa CMO Talar Malakian for Phonexa’s Amplify webinar on establishing a strong online presence, engaging audiences, and eventually carving out a place under the sun.
If you’re new to affiliate marketing or expanding into a new niche, the webinar is a must. The ideas presented throughout this informative conversation are effectively a roadmap for overcoming various affiliate marketing challenges you may face in unexplored territories.
Let’s break down a few of the key points.
How to Choose the Right Niche for Affiliates
According to Crooks, when evaluating a market from an affiliate marketing standpoint, first and foremost, one must evaluate the traffic potential for that niche, which can be done by answering the following questions:
- How many searches are being performed for keywords in this niche?
- How many long-tail keywords are there?
- What kind of searches are being performed?
- How actively are people searching for the products you’re going to promote?
Crooks advises affiliates to do their homework ahead of pursuing a particular market, keeping in view what their competitors are doing. This way, they can zero in on a new market: know what competitors are doing and what one can do differently to outperform them.
| “What can you bring that somebody else isn’t doing right now? Are you passionate about it and able to convey in your language and tone that this is a product you really believe in?” asks Crooks. “People are going to pick up on that, and they’re going to respond to it.” |
Talar Malakian summed this approach up so succinctly:
| “If you’re doing a competitive analysis, don’t do it to look back – do it to look forward,” says Malakian. “Ask ‘what is my path to achieving this without replicating what’s already been done.’” |
Check out our comprehensive e-book to maximise your ROI: “How to Scale ROI Across Publishers & Partners: An Affiliate Network’s Guide,”
Developing Affiliate Expertise
Learning and finding opportunities go hand in hand when analysing the landscape of a particular niche. You also are learning quite a bit about the product while you’re pulling out information, understanding it, and then delivering captivating content.
| “I’m a big proponent of really getting to know your [niche] … you need to have inherent knowledge of the product,” said Crooks. “Take enough time to really know that product to where you can go and have a conversation with a salesman and [educate them] about it – then you’re ready to start pursuing a niche.” |
Educating yourself and establishing expertise help you spot the merchants you want to work with and differentiate good products from bad products. This way, you can instil trust so consumers rely on your recommendations and ask for advice every time they need it
| “It’s important for you to know and understand what [their] challenges are, the right products or services for whatever the challenge is, and where to research to find that [information],” says Crooks. |
Engaging a New Audience
The discussion highlighted key strategies affiliates can use to build and engage a new audience.
Crooks advises that the new niche affiliates should do keyword research to understand what challenges people face and what they are looking for in general. Then you can create content that solves those problems.
| “Don’t try chasing the big keywords when you’re getting started,” said Crooks. “There’s going to be a lot of competition for those – anybody else who’s already established in that niche is going to already have a leg up on you for those big keywords – so start with the little ones as a blog post topic … then you’ll start ranking on the bigger keywords.” |
Crooks also emphasised that conscious consumers would seek to see your credentials when making the decision whether to trust your offers. In this regard, an About Us page may actually tilt the consumer in your favour:
| “That’s a place where you can really make your sales pitch on why you’re amazing and why the recommendations you’re giving are to be trusted, so don’t make it just fast, and don’t make it too salesy,” said Crooks. |
Monetisation After Engagement
Having engaged a new audience, you can start creating your monetisation strategies. Crooks explained that niche affiliates do not need millions of audiences – all they need is an engaged audience:
| “If you have a site about pasta or cooking and want to go wide, you can talk about different kinds of noodles – spaghetti, angel hair, elbows, lasagna, [etc.],” said Crooks. “Or you can go deep [by discussing] wheat noodles versus egg noodles versus vegetable noodles versus lentil noodles. You can always find those areas to go deeper or wider on any given topic.” |
Talar Malakian added to that by highlighting how affiliates can use their expertise to promote multiple options:
| “I can help tell you if you want X, Y, and Z, this is an option. If you want these other things, this is also an option,” said Malakian. “I think being able to help people see through the weeds is that role that you’re playing and can also help you scale considering you’ve now provided more options, and that’s going to create more monetisation opportunities.” |
Crooks added a pretty effective monetisation strategy:
| “Any noun can be an affiliate link, and I find that text links outperform banner ads … if you can put in a text link, you’re more likely to have somebody click on it than an ad,” said Crooks. “Interestingly enough, if you’ve got a banner ad on the same page as a text link for that product, the text link will perform even better.” |
How To Measure Affiliate Success
The final stage in the roadmap to success for an affiliate starting up a new niche is the identification and tracking of crucial KPIs:
| “I pay attention to what topics people are reading and focus on those topics…I also look at how many pages they’ll go to so I can do a lot of cross-linking within the site,” said Crooks. “Do you have just one page on that [topic], or can you get them to go to [multiple pages]? [Search engines] want to see if people are continuing to find information on your site.” |
Crooks cited time on site as an important metric because it correlates with the value of the content: the more time people spend on the website, the more helpful it is, as they willingly peruse the content and dig deeper into the webpages.
| “Keep putting out more content … I go for quality over quantity because it will help me with those other metrics,” said Crooks. “People are going to want to spend more time reading that whole article that they really love … they’re not going to go to five different useless articles just because you’ve got five on your site.” “I would rather put up one or two really good posts a week than put up something every single day that the reader could’ve gotten anywhere.” |
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