Selling to your Internet Marketing Niche
OK, so you’ve heard that small fortunes can be earned from Internet Marketing and that you too can take part in the revolution. In this series of articles I am going to show you how you can succeed. In the previous article I discussed how to identify customer niches and then find the right products to satisfy them. In this article I’ll discuss the various techniques you can you use to successfully sell to your Internet Marketing Niche.
Getting Started for Free!
Remember it is your role as an affiliate to advertise on behalf of your chosen merchants(s) and take customers to the merchant’s product page(s), your affiliate ID will be attached and if a sale is concluded you will make your commission. Before you rush off and open a Google (or Yahoo, etc) Adwords account let’s first look at other ways you can advertise and these are free!
Firstly, you do not even need a web site to write articles, post to forums and blogs or newsgroups and there is potential for you to promote your chosen products using these free resources. Be very careful and aware however that you must not spam or be perceived to be spamming. Forums and newsgroups are particularly sensitive to this and most Article resource sites have strict rules that must be followed or your articles will not get published. However you can usually write and post an article in your chosen subject (which may even be a review of your niche product) and most Article Sites will allow you to include your merchant link in your Author bio or failing that a link back to a web site you own where you are promoting your chosen products.
Another obvious and very good way to begin Affiliate marketing is if you already have a web site whose focus is in your chosen niche. Simply add your merchant links to the appropriate pages. If you don’t have a web site, build one and create relevant pages that effectively ‘pre-sell’ your niche product to your customers. I will be looking at building effective web pages in a later article.
A good tip to remember is that even if your main focus is on targeted PPC Advertising it is also beneficial to have other techniques available that you can use in conjunction to further drive additional traffic to your merchant’s site.
PPC Advertising
As discussed above there are a number of ways to generate free traffic, but the fastest way to get results is to advertise using pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. For the purposes of this and subsequent articles I’ll focus on Google Adwords but the other search engines (Yahoo, Msn, etc) operate in similar ways. You are probably familiar with these Ads which are usually located down the right hand side of a search results page under ‘Sponsored Links’. There isn’t a set cost to have your ad placed there rather the cost depends on how many times your ad is clicked and the cost of each click can vary enormously depending on the niche you are targeting, on the relevancy of your ad and keywords and in particular the click-through-rate (CTR) your ad achieves.
Google prides itself on providing ALL advertisers with a level playing field and it is not those with the deepest pockets who always achieve the best listings. Remember always that you primary focus is to deliver to your customer niche exactly what they want. Well you won’t be surprised to learn that that is also Google’s primary focus. Ads therefore, that are the most relevant and targeted and that are subsequently clicked, are placed higher and this can be regardless of the cost-per-click (CPC) the advertiser is bidding. Google rewards relevant ads with a higher quality score (QS) and the higher your score the better. The price you pay per click will go down and your ad placement position will go up!
It is extremely important therefore that you proceed with caution. A badly conducted campaign will not only cost you money (with no sales) but can adversely affect your QS with Google and not just for that one poor campaign but any you are running. So the key is to set up your campaigns correctly in the first place. I will look at how you should approach this in my next article.
Conclusion
There are a number of ways of selling to your internet marketing niche for free but the fastest way to get results is using PPC advertising. However, proceed with caution or you could lose a lot of money. To even begin to succeed you must understand how to correctly set up a PPC campaign and my next article will show you how.
Good. Luck!
About the Author
PS. Are you pulling your hair out trying to master Adwords? I review the TOP Guides AND you can GRAB your FREE e-book “How To Find Hot Markets & Keywords” here! – http://www.moneyreality.co.uk. David Brown is a successful affiliate marketer who has learnt the hard way that THE key to being a success is perseverance.
Written on July 27th, 2007
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