Affiliate Marketing: A Shortcut to Profits?
Of all the ways for both newbies and seasoned marketers to make money online, affiliate marketing is probably the most often used. It gives the marketer the opportunity to focus his or her energies just on the marketing aspect of the sales funnel.
After all, the hardest part of starting a business online is to develop a great product with sizzling sales copy – elements already taken care of when you’re promoting affiliate products. With these two milestones taken care of, your energy can be focused on driving traffic to the affiliate sales site.
Think of it this way: someone writes a great product that teaches specialty dog training – but then doesn’t know how to reach his or her audience. On the other hand, you know that there is a huge market for specialty dog training, and you know how to generate traffic to a site, but you have no personal knowledge of the dog training niche.
Enter affiliate marketing. You do what you do best – market and drive traffic. In this way, you become a traffic driving expert rather than an infopreneur that sells a dog training course.
At the same time, it helps the owner of the dog training product because they would rather write and teach dog training tips than have to find ways to research hot keywords or write articles.
Affiliate marketing is a perfect opportunity to help immerse you into the world of Internet marketing. While there are many dozens of ways to make money online, affiliate marketing definitely offers the most flexibility and variety for the serious online entrepreneur.
Here are 3 ways to slash your affiliate marketing research efforts to the bare minimum so that you can get on to the fun of promoting and marketing:
Head over to the ClickBank Marketplace and choose any category you might be interested in promoting. This will bring back the top ten most popular products in that category. You might check the second page, too, if you don’t find something that interests you on page one.
Don’t be put off by the fact that a product seems too popular where you fear saturation. Affiliate marketing is all about sleuthing out the potential customer – and maybe you have an “eye” for that market that others don’t.
Another place to “read” your market is to go to the niche forum, say in the Forex market. Listen to the members there. What are the recurrent questions and problems that a certain product can serve? You make sure you become a helpful contributor and then note which affiliate products can best serve those people.
Head to your favorite bookstore and notice the most popular magazines. If advertisers are spending money on ads, enough to support at least one magazine, then you know there’s a market for an affiliate product in that same niche.
These are just some of the simpler ways to get in the head of your market. If you enjoy digging into the minds of potential customers to find what wants, needs or desires they have…then affiliate marketing may be just what you want to make money from home!
