Niche Affiliate Marketing – The Best Kept Secret Online

In the pre-internet era if you wanted to start a business, you generally needed a building and inventory and thousands and thousands of dollars to invest.  But the internet has changed all that. 

Now you can certainly still sell physical products that you own either through your own website, or a portal like ebay.  This can certainly be profitable, but can still equal a whole lot of upfront costs.

But, what if you could set up blog or websites and link to other peoples products and make a commision each time that product was sold?   It would be a very low overhead business and great to start on a limited budget, right? That is exactly what affiliate marketing is.

With affiliate marketing:

• You don’t need to carry any product

Why Niche Affiliate Marketing is Not Some Get Rich Quick Scheme

I make my living marketing products and services that I don’t own to specific groups of people (called niche markets).  I’ve been full time since June 2007, and got my start in October 2006 when I joined Wealthy Affiliate University, where I am still an active member.

By the way, if you click on this Wealthy Affiliate University link, Kyle and Carson (the owners) will give you a FREE internet wealth guide.  Just wait for the pop up and enter your info.

I know from experience that their is a lot of misinformation out there about how to make money being an affiliate, and plenty of sales letters that will lead you to believe that you can make $10,000 this month if you follow their method.  If you are very experienced, you can take a new technique and generate $10,000 and more in a single month.  BUT, the average newbie has no such luck, and because of the huge promises that these products make a lot of people become discouraged and quit.

If you decide to pursue affiliate marketing (and I do recommend it) based on my experience, here are some realistic expectations:

To make money being an affiliate marketer:

Does Your Audience Care About What You Are Saying?

Niche affiate marketing is on the surface a pretty simple concept.  You make a commision selling other peoples products and services, and they take care of shipping and customer service.  Pretty easy right?

Then why do so many people fail at niche affiliate marketing?

The answer is simple… Relevancy.

The internet is incrediably diverse and you can get almost anything you could possibly imagine online.  Because of this the best salespeople don’t try to "sell ice to eskimos" as the saying goes, but rather are extremely relevant in their offers.  So if their target audience is eskimos, then they would be selling UV therapy lighting or top of the line heating systems to them, not ice.

Let’s take the weight loss niche as an example.  How to lose weight is one of the most searched for things online today.   Targeting the whole niche is nearly impossable, but lets say that your target market is brides that want to lose weight for their weddings.  If you send them to a generic weight loss page, and their are plenty of those, you might get a few sales.  But, if you build a custom web page or Squidoo Lens that shows pictures of happy brides talking about how great they feel since they look fabulous in their wedding dresses, don’t you think your sales rate will go up?  

Of course it will.

This is exactly what relevancy is about… making more money through good customer service.

Being Relevant Puts $$$ In Your Pocket

When you are relevant you will make more sales at a higher profit margin because you will be solving your target markets exact needs.  If you can do this even 10% of the time you will make a ton of money online.

If you are new to affiliate marketing and want to learn how to be successful, come join me at Wealthy Affiliate University.  I have been a member there since October 2006, and with what I learned at Wealthy Affiliate I was able to quit my day job in June 2007and pursue affiliate marketing full time.  Look me up once you get there.  My forum name is HnoelH

My mentors Kyle and Carson are also currently giving away a free 30 page report on how to choose a profitable niche.  It is excellent, I have used some of the ideas to make money already.

Grab your free niche marketing guide here.

If you have any questions please feel free to email me at contact@myworkathomeblog.net, or leave a comment on my blog.  I do moderate all comments to avoid spam, but am very interested in what you have to say.

Wishing You Success!

Heather