Become an Expert In Your Niche
This takes a lot of time, and even more hard work. The Internet is amazing in that it basically creates a level playing field for everyone. It takes very little money to start a website of your own, and if you are not particular, you can even host your site for free at certain places.
This means that you have just as much of a chance as anyone else out there to make good. The bad thing is that this increases the competition tremendously. While in real life, it takes a lifetime of hard work to not only become an expert in a certain field, but to be accepted as such, it takes considerably less time online. Yet, this same factor means that there is no dearth of experts in any field on the net.
You will therefore have to put in a lot of hard work to show people that you truly are an expert and that what you say is reliable. This is because most of these so-called experts are really not, and all they do is scrape information off other sites and put it on their own. It does not take long before people find out that such people rarely have an opinion of their own, and discard them.
The true expert though will not only catch the fancy of the net going public, but will stay there for a length of time, and even build up a fan following. Let us take a simple example to explain the point. If you are going to set yourself up as an expert on cameras, you will find that there are a number of affiliate sites that push products by saying the exact same thing, that they are experts on cameras.
However, you invest in some time to build your site up as a place where people can come to for reliable reviews of cameras, you will find that pretty quickly there will be a number of people who do. As long as you make sure that your reviews are honest and accurate you are sure to become popular sooner than later.
If you start to sell cameras from your site, you are poised to take advantage of a lot of traffic that comes to your site looking for reviews. Even if most of them are only looking for the reviews but are not interested in making a purchase online, you will still profit from the few who do.
The reason why the reviews need to be accurate and honest is because if not, the same people who came to you thinking you were an expert will go out of their way to tell everyone else that you are a fraud. You will find bad reviews about your site cropping up all over the net, and all of a sudden you have lost everything you had.
This also means that you do not need to go searching for products to promote. Any new camera in the market that you do not have on your site is a potential candidate for promotion. There is little in the way of research or analysis that needs to be done, and all you have to do is to put in a review of the model and sit back.
The advantage of this model is that you have a regular income stream. Even if you have to do a little maintenance work like always making sure that your content is current, or ensuring that you have a new model up on your site within a few days of launch, everything else runs along pretty smoothly.
The flip side though is that you will not be able to take advantage of anything new on the market other than cameras. If Apple brings out its new phone, you won’t be able to do anything about it. Having a site that is too general is not good because you will not be able to focus on any one product or niche, bringing down the value of your whole site. You will also not be able to target your market properly because you really do not have any target market.
Online stores
Most affiliate sites go with the large online stores because not only is it easy to become an affiliate, it is also easier to sell the products. For example, if you have a site that promotes cameras, it is much easier to sell these cameras through Amazon or eBay than through some other site. With the number of scams only increasing, people are wary of making any sort of payment unless they know that the site is bona fide.
The second good thing is that most of these online stores really do not even give a good description of the product, far less a comparison with similar ones from other brands. This means that they are just a place where people can buy, but it also means that people who want to buy will look elsewhere for expert opinions. If you are the person with the expert opinion, they will visit you, and if you have been convincing enough, will purchase the product online thus crediting you with the sale.
For example, you have pitched on washing machines as your niche; you will find that Amazon stocks pretty much everything that you can find in your local store, in terms of brands and models, and then some more.
You have two choices here, you can go with washing machines as a niche for your site, or you can target specific manufacturers or even brands to sell. The advantage of doing this is just that you can focus more narrowly on a particular brand or model allowing you to go even higher in the search rankings.
Just looking through the most popular list on Amazon will tell you which model people are buying. Generally speaking, this alone is enough because if people are buying something, it means that there is a demand for the product. There are a few things that you have to do to confirm whether that particular model is what you want to go with.
Google it
This is the simplest way to check if the product you selected is already being marketed by other affiliates, and what king of competition there is. If you see a number of paid advertisements as well as a number of affiliate sites coming up high in the display page, you know that this niche has already been covered and continue your search for your product.
The reason for this is obvious. You will be investing a lot of time, effort and money in building a site dedicated to a particular model and if you are going to have to fight it out, it will take you that much longer to start seeing any returns. Going in for something where the competition is lesser is a better idea.
Probe your competition
This is the stage where most of us find ourselves. Most new niches are already taken and finding one where there is little to no competition is not as easy as it seems to when you read about it. This means that you have to probe your competition to find out exactly how good your competition is.
For example, let us take it that you are interested in selling washing machines. You are pretty confident about selling them because you know that there is a need for them. Everyone needs a washing machine. It only remains to be seen what the competition is like.
Searching on Google shows you that that particular niche is taken. There are a number of affiliate sites that deal with washing machines and some of them are actually quite popular and not only give you a good review of different washing machines, but also have a rating system that lets you compare different models.
If you search on Amazon for the bestselling washing machine, you will find that it is the Haier HLP23E. Yet, when you search with this “Haier HLP23E” as the search string, the results are completely different. You get six results in the display page and we will restrict ourselves to the first page alone.
In this first page, you will find that apart from Haier’s official company site, there are six affiliate sites. Yet, out of these six there is only one that offers anything approaching a reasonable review of the product. Most of the other sites either give you a general description of the functioning of a washing machine, that you really don’t want, or give you the features of the machine that you can get from the company site directly.
All the sites offer customer reviews, but barring one all the others have between two and five reviews, which is really not good. Even the one site that has what looks like a promising review by a customer looks like it has been written by a professional article writer rather than an actual user.
This fact immediately shows you how you can improve on your competition. When you come down to this level, you will be able to identify products that have lesser competition than others. Yes it is not a totally empty niche, but there are possibilities that are worth exploring further.