3 Steps to Affiliate Marketing Success: Know Your Niche

There are plenty of things you need to have down in order to be an affiliate marketing success. For example, you have to know how to get traffic, how make a website (or where to outsource the task), and how to write or at least recognize content that pre-sells.

1. Know people’s problems. People’s problems may or may not be the first thing you notice when you research a niche–but they should be the first thing you look or. (After a while, you’ll come into the habit of noticing niche problems without even trying.)

Why? Because as an affiliate marketer, your service to your niche is to solve their problems!

“Wait,” you say, “I thought I was here to make money.” Well, you are. And the only way to make any significant revenue is to offer a product or service that solves problems for other people.

Knowing the major problem(s) that people in your niche face is the #1 most important thing you can know about a niche. But how do you find out what this problem might be?

There are several methods, such as studying your keyword list closely and seeing which ones people ask about on Yahoo Answers.

Niche forums, however, are the most tried-and-true method. Spend a couple of afternoons in the most popular forums and you’ll learn what problems people are having. You’ll also learn something of almost equal importance:

2. Know how people talk about their problems. Knowing how people talk about their problems will help you understand how to offer them a solution.

If they are broke, do they blame it on a political figure, their parents, themselves? If they have acne, do they talk more about how much they hate rough skin–or about the embarrassment they feel when they go to school every morning?

If you know the kind of emotional hot-buttons that flame up when people talk about their niche problems, you can address these hot-buttons with your web content, your forum messages, and all other means of sales & marketing communication.

3. Know which keywords work for you. Over time you will find out that certain keywords will sell for you better than others will. This may be because the approach you use works better for some keywords than for others–or it may just be that only a few keywords in your niche are profitable.

Whatever the case, you should implement tracking on your website and all sales pages so that you’ll know which keywords bring you the most profit. This is especially important with PPC (pay per click) advertising, where you can breeze through a $300 budget in an afternoon. The right keywords will make the different between $1000 profit and $300 loss!

Knowing your niche’s main problem(s) is the first but all-too-often key to affiliate marketing success. After that comes learning how people talk about these problems.

Only then will you be ready to undertake the task that most affiliate marketing “experts” consider the foundational step of niche marketing: that of researching your keywords.