Affiliate Marketing Profit Tools

A common question I see on Internet and Affiliate Marketing message boards frequently, tends to go something like this: “Should I target a large niche market or a small one?”

And the most common answer is to target the smaller niches, because they’re considered to be much easier to get ranked for in the search engines.

The problem I see with that advice is that it’s extremely limiting. If you target a tiny little niche that you can barely find 30 keywords for, then there’s only so much you can do to build a website for that niche and drive traffic to it.

Now, if all you want to do is create hundreds or thousands of websites on obscure little niches, then absolutely that’s the best way to go. But think about this for a minute: Sometimes the combined search total of 100’s of tiny niches still does not equal or exceed even a fraction of the search totals for large niche markets.

My personal preference is to go for the larger niche markets. I don’t target giant ones usually, but I do go big. The primary reason I do this is because it gives me plenty of room for growth. I know from both observation and experience that the larger, authority-style websites are the ones that have the most staying power. And staying power is one of my ultimate goals.

I want to be able to put a website into place that will continue working - and earning money for me - for many years to come. And it’s this reason that has led me to create some of the tools I’ve created over the years, like ADPS and ZipPoster.

Let’s look at the health market as an example. You could try to enter this giant market by covering every single health topic you can conceivably think of… and if you have enough writers you could probably succeed. That one’s a bit too broad for my taste though, so I look at the next tier of niches within that market. There you’ll find popular topics like Diseases, Weight Loss, Nutrition, Fitness, Alternative Health and so on. Each of these is a niche market themselves, and they’re generally still broad enough for you to be able to create thousands of pages of content about.

Now if you were to follow the common advice given on message boards, you’d probably pick one of those niches and try to narrow it down further. In weight loss for example, you might choose low fat diets, low carb diets, vegetarianism, low calorie, etc, etc. And if you tried to narrow things even further, you might try The South Beach Diet, Atkins, Protein Power, and so on. You could even narrow down more and choose tiny little niches like Atkins Low Calorie, or South Beach Vegetarian or some such.

Now creating a whole bunch of tiny sites like that isn’t a problem, particularly if you stick to the same general niche. Creating a separate site for each of those tiny sections of the niche for example, is an excellent way to build a network of related sites which can link to each other. And this strategy works well.

I feel the better way to do it though, is to create one site that includes all those little tiny niches as categories, or sections of the same site. This allows you to focus on creating an authority site over time, and it allows you to focus your promotional efforts too. Instead of having to build links and traffic to 50 different types of weight loss sites, you can point it all to just the one site.

So big sites (and big niches) are much easier to create content for, they’re much easier to promote, and they’re much easier to make money from too.

That last point is a sticking spot for many. The standard thought is that if the niche is too large, the competition is too fierce, thus a newbie can’t make money in that niche. Wrong.

The best way to make money in any business, is to provide what people are looking for. And the more people there are looking for a given product or service, the more opportunities there are for people to make money providing them. So competition is actually an excellent gauge to how profitable a given market - aka Niche - can be.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 21st, 2008 at 10:17 am and is filed under Tips & Techniques. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.