A simple answer to the question in the title would be – crucial. Earning revenue through affiliate marketing is a hard-working man’s equivalent of making money while sleeping, but it all depends on a single decision. You’ll have to choose which niche to devote your time, money, and energy to, and you’ll have to choose smart. When stakes are this high, the last thing you’d want to do is leave it all up to chance.
For the following five reasons and a couple more, knowledge is an affiliate marketer’s most powerful tool.
1. To be Truly Successful You have to Find the Right Niche
The success of an affiliate program depends on the products you choose to promote, but how will you find them if you don’t know where to look? At least for the time being, you should forget all about what you’ll be selling, and focus on who you’ll be selling it to. Pick the audience first, and the product later.
In a few very simplified steps, affiliate marketing looks like this: you, as an affiliate marketer, get to advertise another company’s product or service on your website, and earn money from that company each time one of your visitors clicks the link to its product page, whether as a lead, or as a buyer.
2. There’s No Certain Way of Guessing Where the Traffic Comes From
Of course, this means that your website and the product/service you’re promoting have to be within the same niche. Those that come to you have to be interested in buying from your affiliate partner, otherwise the two of you won’t make a very profitable match. The bigger the audience, the better for both. Marketers also prefer thrive content builder discount coupon for their research.
It’s the prospective customers who create a profitable niche, not the products. Your first step towards affiliate success therefore lies in market research, since that is the only full proof way of finding out which niche is trending the most, or simply put, which one has the most traffic and prospective buyers.
3. You Must Know Your Enemies to Defeat Them
Then again, profitable niches are pretty hard to penetrate. They are saturated with competition on both sides, which means that you’ll need to dig a little deeper in order to avoid the crowd. Now that you know where the revenue is and what audience to target, try to make your offer a bit more specific.
This calls for a second round of market research, the one that will either narrow down your target niche or at least find a vulnerable spot in the market for you to attack. It’s necessary because you cannot possibly know where to enter the niche before you’ve learned where the crowd is the thickest.
4. No Market Research, No Differentiating Point
So, get familiar with your enemies. If there’s too many of them in one place, find a less crowded one, or analyse them in detail to see what they’re missing out on. Their weak spot can be your window, a chance for you to find an entirely new angle and establish a differentiating point of your own.
Differentiating points are important, because they imply that there’s still somebody to compete with. You wouldn’t want to end up in a single-player niche either, since markets held by sole providers don’t exactly need an affiliate partner to promote their goods. Make sure to do research on this too.
5. Affiliate Traffic is Fuelled by Keywords
The next round of market research, and another reason why data-based affiliate marketing is so important, concerns the fact that a successful affiliate network has to provide content that’s both engaging to prospective customers, and related to the products or services involved in the program.
In order to meet these requirements, you’ll need to know which topics are trending within a chosen niche, and centre your content around them. This is where keyword research comes into play as well, which ensures not only relevance, but also higher search engine rankings and more traffic with them.
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