The Best Tools for Affiliate Marketing
You will also find tools that will supposedly help you find weaknesses in your competitor’s websites. These tools are generally paid and will do everything from checking the keyword density to checking if your competitor has the ideal address in his URL.
The effectiveness of these tools is debatable, but then it is something additional that you can try if you want to. If you can do all the research yourself, it is probably the best, but where you cannot, you’ll have to rely on tools, even if they are not as good.
The one thing that you need to remember is that all the pages that have made it to the first page on Google are those that have Haier HLP23E in the URL itself, which shows you how important it is to target specific products.
Identifying products is all about legwork and although we have taken Amazon as the basis of our search, this can be done in many other ways.
Affiliate networks
ClickBank and Google’s affiliate network gives you a list of all the products you can promote on your own site. All you have to do is to sign up with them, and this information is made available to you. The sign up procedure is free, and if you go through the procedure of finding products and marketing it, you find that it is one of the simplest there is.
You can search by product categories or you can go with specific keywords. If you want to go with the categories, you will get a list of all the products including the “vendor’s pitch” which gives you relevant information about the product. This information may often not be enough, but it will at least help you shortlist likely products. You will have to do further research before you choose individual products.
The stats button shows you how much your commission is for each sale and the promote button generates a HopLink that will link your site to the vendor’s. This is the link that you will have to use in your site, as if you copy the URL of the vendor, you will not be credited with any traffic you drive to the vendor.
Such a simple process has seen them grow tremendously and they are one of the more preferred affiliate vendors in the market.
When compared to online stores, they also offer much higher commission rates, meaning you earn more. The difficulty though is in you making the sale. Everybody knows Amazon and is comfortable with purchasing from them. When they have to give out their credit card details in other places though, many people will refrain from doing so meaning that you will find selling that much more difficult.
Going with the products that have a number of affiliates is a good place to start off. The more the number of affiliates, the more the chances are that that particular product is a large selling one. This is a different take on aping your competition, and your whole strategy is based on the simple fact that if everyone else is selling something, and making a profit out of it, then you can as well.
Yet, this logic is not without its pitfalls. Just because a particular product has a number of affiliates, it is no guarantee that you will be able to sell the same product. It also means that the competition is already stiff, and breaking into the market is not going to be easy.
Moreover, all the juicy sounding URL addresses would have already been taken which will make it more difficult for you to get the product name into your address. This is especially true of you are going in for a totally unrelated product from what you are selling now, or are starting out new.
The other way is to look at the products with the maximum commission and then figure out a way of driving sales. Unfortunately this is easier said than done, and in many cases the commissions are high and the competition low because making a sale is so difficult.
The second thing that you will have to think about is that you can drive any amount of traffic to a particular site, but unless the home site is written well, no one is going to buy the product. For example, if you become an affiliate to sell eBooks for someone else, however much you do your part, unless the home site itself has something that will make the people you send, buy the product, you are not going to get any sales, and all your effort will be to waste.
Generally speaking going for the sure shot ones, like the ones that have a lot of competition is better, because if you work hard enough and get the ranking on your site up, you are at least guaranteed success. If you go for the hard to sell products, you cannot be sure that even after all this effort you will make any sale.
Promotional tools
Many times the affiliate site will offer all the promotional tools that you will need, like page banners, informative articles, and even email promotions. Of course, the articles cannot be used as is but you at least have all the basic information about the product to help you create a wonderful sales pitch.
If you find a seller that does not do this, it is better to stay away from them. This is because it shows that they are not serious about marketing online. It also means that you will have to put in that much more effort at marketing their product and their commission may not justify this added effort.
Use keyword tools
Most search engines offer free keyword tools that you can use to find related keywords. There are also other paid software programs that will help you do the same thing, but with increased functionality. While usually these tools are used mainly to find related keywords, they are also useful to find the most often searched strings.
This process is time consuming and takes a long time, but will give you solid information to move forward on. For example, if you feel that washing machines are a good option, just typing washing machines into the tool will give you all the related search strings that are being searched for, their local and global numbers for the month.
This gives you an approximate idea of the number of people searching for a particular product. For example, if you type in Yorkshire Terriers, you will get a number of results that range from more than 80, 000 to less than 2,000. You therefore know that there are at least 80,000 searches for the Yorkie on average every month. On the other hand, if you put in Labrador retrievers, you will find that this number triples. It is pretty obvious that there are more people searching for them than for the Yorkie.
This gives you a good baseline to start off on. While looking in online stores like Amazon may give you similar data there are two advantages of using the keyword tools that search engines offer.
First, you get actual numbers of the number of people searching for a certain product while all Amazon can do is tell you which products sell the most. While you may be more interested in promoting products that sell more, you may be losing out on a good opportunity to convert sales.
Amazon gives you data for sales converted, while Google gives you data about potential for sale. There may be innumerable reasons why there may be more people searching for a product than there are buying it, and one of them could be that the sellers are not doing a good job. This gives you the opportunity of entering into a market where even if there are other competitors, the competition is really nothing much to talk about.
The second advantage is that Google offers you the ability to find niches that are as yet untouched. While this may be difficult and may take a lot of time, the possibility at least exists with Google, while with any other way this possibility is not an option at all.
Of course, doing random searches will mostly be a waste of time. You will have to approach it in an organized manner. The way to do this is to brainstorm and note down as many niches as you can come up with. Then go through Google with all these niches one by one. If you hit something, good, if not you continue the same process.
It is simply because this process is so time consuming that many people prefer to go with the affiliate network or check on online stores. Yet, doing this is still not useless as if you do get lucky and chance upon a niche where there are a number of people searching, but very few people selling, you are on to a sure thing.