When thinking about affiliate marketing there are two schools of thought; the first is to find small niches, and through less competition you are able to dominate relatively small markets. The second is to aim for very competitive markets which are so large that it is still possible to participate, although not dominate. I like to call this difference dominating vs. participating. The number one misconception that is constantly fed to those entering in to affiliate marketing is to find smaller niches to dominate, I want to set the record straight that success can also be seen with participation (in large markets) for a number of reasons.
Both Methods Work
In reality you will make money through both of these methods, but above all you always have to know what you are doing. If you haven’t read up on affiliate marketing, or if you are not willing to spend some time and money in testing, neither method will work for you. In order to be successful at affiliate marketing you have to be willing to learn by trial and error, testing, time and money. If you can’t afford to do that, the industry isn’t for you.
Big is (mostly) better
The problem is that people that are new to affiliate marketing are always told by the veterans to find smaller niches to start with. This does more harm than good for aspiring affiliate marketers as somebody new to affiliate marketing will not dominate smaller niches, they will merely participate. In order to make money from some of the smaller niches out there you really have to be the best, you can’t just be a participator – the volume will never be enough to make the exercise worthwhile. By being part of a large niche there will be a lot of opportunity to gain enough traffic to participate and make money.
Do as I do (not as I say)
Many so-called “gurus” of the industry will be in some of the most competitive niches; ring tones, dating, finance, ect. yet do they ever advise that others enter these niches? Nearly all the time they will say that (their) industry is great, but not for somebody just starting out with affiliate marketing. Wouldn’t it be a better idea to try to replicate success rather than replicate what a successful person is telling you to do? If you want to know how to get rich you look at what rich people of the world did to get rich, not sit down and read a book on how to get rich. It is the same with affiliate marketing; do what the successful people and doing, and try to ignore what they are saying. (And yes I am aware of the irony of this)
The big is tried and true, the small is untested and unsure
I have set up a few sites with only a couple of hours work (and promotion) in incredibly difficult niches; the sites receive only a trickle of traffic yet I still receive sales – for the number one reason that it is a tried and true niche – people buy this product online and it sells itself. The larger niches are usually large because they are profitable; e.g. travel is big online because people book holidays online, whilst “grey and white frilly socks” is nowhere near as competitive because of the small number of people wanting to buy them online as well as the small profit margin for retailers and affiliates selling “grey and white frilly socks” online.
Sometimes the smaller are for the more experienced
Going for a small niche is being thrown in the deep end. You have no idea how a niche will work out; often people new to affiliate marketing will spend a lot of time setting up sites/campaigns for niches that just don’t perform online. Experienced affiliate marketers can usually determine if a campaign is worth establishing before they commit time and money to it, and therefore can make a lot more money than their inexperienced counterparts.

A little success is better than a lot of failure
I lose money all the time, in fact, I can bet you that all affiliate marketers lose money on a regular basis. But failure is fine to me because there will be greater successes which outweigh the failures. You will always find that some things work out and others do not, and this is just the nature of affiliate marketing. The problem with those new to affiliate marketing is that they will put all their time and effort in to one small niche campaign, it will fail and then they will put more time/effort/money in to the same campaign (which will still fail). Some niches will inevitably ALWAYS fail. The good thing about trying to participate in competitive niches is that the surplus time/effort/money will probably pay off in a competitive market, however, it will never pay off in a non-performing niche. Seeing just a little bit of success after putting in so much time and effort is always better than having no chance of success through a bad choice of niche.

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I had a very demanding client about a year or so ago that would call me every day to check on their rankings, the problem wasn’t that they did this; it was that they never listened to a word I said. I have no problem with somebody calling me to chat about SEO if they are paying for my services, but at minimum I also expect that they should listen to what I have to say on the matter, rather than expect that I will always be there to answer the very same questions.

Unlike a lot of other clients I had dealt with this was a completely new website on a completely new domain name. The website had been developed by a web design company and was behind a relatively search friendly CMS, the site was visually appealing and had good useability. After doing various amends on the site and starting to optimise the site I received several phone calls, all about the current rankings of the website. I explained time after time that rankings take time to materialise and to wait it out for the duration of the campaign.

So they finally decided to wait… Within a month or two they were nearly dominating their niche – with top 5 rankings for very relevant phrases, they were also getting considerable traffic. This would make the client happy, right? Wrong. They were still not making any sales. After several more phone calls about sales my role of being a SEO consultant switched to a online sales and marketing expert; this isn’t what they had paid for, they had only paid for SEO, nonetheless I kept on offering more and more information to the client on promoting their business through both traditional offline initiatives and other online forms of promotion. This was the key to making sales.

SEO is not enough for a website, and rankings are not enough to sell. People more often than not overlook branding, consumer confidence and traditional marketing processes in creating websites; the online world is not that much different from the offline, you can create the online store, you can get top rankings, but this doesn’t mean you will sell anything. You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink.

Their problem was that they didn’t listen to me and were still focused on their rankings – a number #3 position was not enough for them and they wanted to get to #1 – they thought this would be the be all and end all of online sales.

Another client of mine in the same niche with lesser rankings was selling extremely well throughout Australia and internationally, whilst this new client sold nothing for at least 6 months. The simple difference – one had established an online business, one was simply a website.

So remember, if you want to create a business not just a website, there are so many more factors than just SEO that need to come in to play. People do not have confidence in websites that they haven’t heard of before, and the likelihood that they will buy something from a site they reach through searching for relevant words and phrases is minimal. Online promotion is so similar to offline promotion, and the several layers of overlap mean that processes such as SEO cannot be undertaken alone, they should always be part of broader online strategies.

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You will often hear search engine optimisation experts saying that directories do no longer work for SEO; this is just not true. Although submitting to directories by themselves may not provide you with a lot of traffic, it still remains of one of the easiest and most effective ways to get links. Directories may not be the best method but they still work, there are just a number of things you should remember when getting links from directories.

1.    Probably the most important thing to do when submitting to directories is look for quality over quantity. I have lists of thousands of completely free directories, yet rarely would I submit a site to all these directories. The best thing to do is look for niche and topic specific directories, these often provide the best quality links and sometimes even provide traffic as well.

2.    To find niche directories have a look on Google, do some research, and look where your competitors are getting links from. A good tool to use is something like this: http://www.webconfs.com/backlink-builder.php - allowing you to find sites/directories to add a link. Sometimes you will have to send an email to request a link, in this case write out a generic link request email and use this as a template for each site.

3.    As well as niche directories, regional directories are usually of a lot higher quality than average directories. Regional directories will often require your website/business to be located in the particular area and sometimes even require an address; the payoff is that they give high quality links because of their strict editorial process. If you have a high quality site that is regionally appropriate, it will most likely be accepted.

4.    A lot of search engine optimisation companies run a network of directories, and often these are open to the public as well as their clients. Once you find one of them, it is usually easy to find the rest of the network of sites.  These can be good as they are often heavily promoted.

5.    Do not focus on submitting your site to hundreds or thousands of phpLD directories. If there is such thing as Google devaluing directories, they would go straight to sites like these. A lot of non-traditional directories will provide a lot higher quality links than phpLD will.

6.    Same goes for Pagerank, do not focus on solely Pagerank. There are plenty of sites out there with low Pagerank that would provide a lot more traffic than those sites with a higher Pagerank. Do not obsess over page rank.

7.    Look on forums for new directories announced. Digitalpoint forums have a section where people advertise their directories. Often the directories are sometimes not the best of quality, but the one good thing is fast approval; the webmasters of these sites are usually very active in accepting new submissions. And a lot of the webmasters are intent on making something of their directory in the future.

8.    Make sure to include the keywords you are trying to target in your anchor text, but do not make them spammy. Do not use the same description and anchor text for every link. Try to change it around a bit and target different keywords. On higher quality sites and directories, vary your descriptions and anchor text for each submission. It is a waste to keyword stuff your titles, in most cases the submission will not be accepted.

9.    On lower quality sites, automate the process as much as possible. I like to use Auto Form Filler for firefox.

10.    Always aim for one way links, but where you can only get reciprocal or link swaps – see if you can link to them from another domain. Where it is an informal swap (i.e. through email) often works better – allowing you to explain your intentions to the webmaster – often they will be happy about the link swap.

11.    Avoid paying for links; there are a lot of directories out there that want you to pay for a link, but very few sites are worth paying for. Once you have exhausted all free opportunities, then it may be worth looking for paid directories – but stick to the big ones like Yahoo Directory, Business.com directory, BOTW, ect.

Whilst I am sick of people saying that directories ‘no longer work’, I also have to say that they should only be part of a broader link development strategy. Do not solely rely on directories, and you will see good results from SEO

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Whilst it is fine targeting the entire city or state for many services, the simplest, most overlooked optimisation technique is very simple: targeting to the suburb level. Both city and suburb targeting complement each other; city targeting is good to get the general traffic, but for many local businesses, suburb targeting will provide higher quality traffic, and above all, there is usually no competition.

The number one thing to remember is EFFORT vs REWARD. Small businesses want to put in as little money/effort as possible yet want the maximum rewards for the amount of effort. In an agency SEO context you can offer this cheap SEO on a purely suburb level. Whilst you cannot boast amazing rankings for more generic keywords, as long as they are seeing an increase in traffic/sales you have a happy client.

Take this example; if you are promoting a florist that delivers to a few select suburbs 20 minutes from the Perth CBD; you don’t try to target the term “florist” internationally. The effort, money and resources that have to be spent on this would not be worth that little bit of extra traffic that would actually be relevant. Most would then go to the city level – targeting “florist in Perth” rather than simply “florist” – this is OK, however, the florist isn’t really delivering throughout all of Perth, only to a few select suburbs. So, why don’t we just try to dominate some suburb keywords – “Florist in suburb” is much easier to rank for than “Florist in city”, isn’t it?

Now, you are probably saying that nobody searches for suburb names… this is complete rubbish. I have done SEO on hundreds of local business sites and watched the stats very closely for most of these sites: people search for suburb names all the time – if I want a hairdressers to go to, I want to find one in the immediate vicinity to where I live, not a 40 minute drive away. As such, I (and a lot of other people) search very locally.

Sure, on face value I would much rather for my business to rank when somebody is searching with the city name, but it just doesn’t make sense if I only service 3-4 suburbs. Think of what the visitor would want once they get to your site; they want to find what they are looking for, and if it’s a local business they want it to be local. They want to see each suburb you service listed right there on your home page.

In my opinion it is much better to be on the first position for a specific suburb phrase that will bring very few, but very targeted visitors, rather than be on the 3rd page for a more general city phrase. Google map listings in search results have taken a fair bit of suburb targeting out of the picture, but this has resulted in people forgetting about the fundamentals of SEO, and not even trying to get their sites to rank for specific areas/suburbs. From an effort vs reward perspective, targeting to the suburb level is fundamental, especially where businesses have small budgets yet still want to bring in sales/leads from their website.

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