Affiliate Trust

Niche is a word that most affiliates struggle with. They ask how, what, will??? If you’re lucky enough to hit on a niche that’s popular but not saturated, you can make money… but only for a while. Profitable niches are fleeting. Other marketers inevitably find out and your competition only grows, never shrinks.

Consider a niche within a niche. We run an eCommerce site that targets a particular audience. The variety of products that appeal to that audience is virtually endless. But call that target audience our top level niche. Now within the top level we offer a variety of product categories. Each is the next level niche. There may be several categories within categories. All of these are niches that become more narrowly defined as you drill down to individual products. Individual products can be even nichier if you want to consider colors and sizes. For instance, large size product niches can be lucrative.

What led me to this discourse? One of our product categories contains a selection of about twenty items with various features, prices, and brands. There are several brands that we carry just one product each of. We sold one of these single items this morning. I was curious as to why this one instead of another brand with a number of different choices. So I checked the traffic stats and found that there was a Google search for this particular brand that resulted in the sale. I’ve found that this is a pretty common occurrence. We sell more products through targeted searches than through more general searches where the shopper browses the site. Though the stats show that this shopper spent ten minutes on the site and viewed seven pages, she still settled on the product she originally searched for.

Though we continually promote our brand and hope that shoppers are attracted to our home page, this simply is not where the traffic arrives. It virtually always arrives at the very nichiest of pages, the individual product pages. So though you build a great website from the top down like we did, your traffic will usually arrive at the bottom.

This concept becomes critical to PPC (pay per click) advertising. I can imagine a graph in my mind. One line represents nichieness (an imaginary quantity) and the other represents CTR (click through rate). CTR will unquestionably follow nichieness proportionately. Add another quantity, [PPC] cost. Cost will graph inversely proportionate to nichieness and CTR. So theoretically, the nichier your campaign, the lower your advertising cost.

There’s a lot of talk about the magic bullet. Most experienced affiliate marketers insist that there is no magic bullet. I contend that there IS a magic bullet, but you have to mold it yourself. It can’t be purchased at the magic bullet store.

So how do you mold the magic bullet? Don’t labor so much over your top level niche choice. Build a top down website that gives you the flexibility to experiment within an established base. Build it to facilitate easy product additions and updating. Add appropriate products with unique detail pages and images. Optimize for searches at the nichiest levels (products) rather than the categories, or your website brand. Never remove non-performing products, but continually add products. When you hit on a success, leverage that success before it disappears by giving that product more attention than non-performing products. Fine-tune SEO (search engine optimization) and PPC campaigns. Let demand drive your promotion rather than promoting to create demand.

And… get nichie!

For insights and discussion about this and many other topics, visit the Affiliate Trust Forum.

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