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AllanGardyne
Site Admin
Joined:
02 Jul 2003
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6326
Location:
by the beach, Australia
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Posted: Mon Apr 02, 2007 3:27 am
Post subject: Can many affiliates promote the same product successfully?
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A new member of this forum, gertie, posted the following question in the Introductions section.
| Quote: | | I'm glad to have found this site as I'm becoming frustrated, overwhelmed and disillusioned with researching affiliate marketing! ... My yet to improve scarcity mentality has me wondering how LOTS of people can make money selling and competing to sell the same product... |
I think this is a really a good question, so I'll have a go at answering it.
Gertie, The really good thing to remember is that the Internet is HUGE. One recent estimate is that in North America and Europe alone, well over 500 million people use the Internet. And that's not counting English speaking countries such as South Africa, Australia and New Zealand, and all the English-speaking people in fast-growing markets such as India, China, Malaysia, Indonesia, South America.. The total world market is MASSIVE, and growing fast.
Although I earn a good living from affiliate programs, I'm just like an ant nibbling at a few crumbs at the edge of a large picnic.
Let's assume you're going to be trying to get free traffic from search engines.
You've probably heard pessimists point out that only 10 websites can fill the top 10 spots in Google for a particular phrase. While that's true, we need to look at a bigger picture...
For example, let's say you were an optimist and decided to try to get into the top 10 for the intensely competitive phrase "web hosting". To keep it simple, let's say that in Google, you have 10 competitors for that phrase. That's pretty accurate, because most searchers don't go beyond the first page of the search results.
To increase your chances of being found, you could create 200 web pages, each one targeting a primary phrase and a secondary page. You now have 400 phrases working for you.
For each phrase, there'll be winners and losers. The more phrases you target, the more chances you have.
So now instead of having 10 immediate competitors, you have 10 x 400 = 4,000 different chances of being found for phrases in your niche.
And that's just for Google. If you consider the top 10 results in Yahoo! and MSN, you have 4,000 x 3 = 12,000 chances of been found.
Adding to the picture is Google personalization. The results which visitor A sees will sometimes be slightly different from the results seen by visitor B. In future, results could vary much more than they do now - increasing your chances of being found.
Also, someone in New Zealand or Australia or South Africa often sees a slightly different top 10 from the ones seen by residents of the U.S. Search engines have different servers displaying different results in different parts of the globe, so your chances of being found somewhere by someone are increased again.
However, it doesn't end there. If you own a good, large website with lots of good links to it, your site will not be found merely via the phrases you deliberately target. When you examine your logs, you'll discover that your site is being found via all sorts of obscure phrases which you hadn't anticipated.
I'm often surprised when I see the phrases people type in to find my websites. A good, popular website can be found via 10,000 or even 20,000 different phrases each month. That's something for you to aim for!
That's not all... Google commented last year that of all the phrases typed into Google about 50% of them are NEW phrases - ones which have NEVER been typed into Google before. This is a mind-boggling statistic. Pages are found simply because a rare combination of words occurred. It means that if you create good, useful, interesting, UNIQUE pages and get links to your site, you'll often be surprised by the ways people find your site via search engines.
Want to improve your chances more? Let's say you're promoting product A. You can also create pages which talk about product B or C and compare it with product A, or you can talk about four or five closely related topics which users of product A will be interested in. So the thousands of phrases you're targeting have increased again.
Let's take a practical example. Say you've looked at my top 10 affiliate programs and decided to promote SBI. One unimaginative way would be to build a website about "web hosting", comparing web hosts and targeting all the various web hosting keywords you can discover. You'd find this was a terribly competitive niche to try to break into.
Another option would be to target the "work at home" niche. While this would give you many thousands of new keywords, it's also an intensely competitive niche. Not one for the beginner.
Likewise, you could choose to target the "make money online", or affiliate marketing", or the "work at home mom" niches - all different ways of approaching the promotion of one product, each with hundreds or thousands of potential keyword combinations. Unfortunately, those niches are all VERY competitive, so you'd probably want to dig deeper for a less obvious idea.
Instead, you could carve off a much smaller niche. You might, for example, do some research to see what different occupations you could target. Reading the SBI case studies you'd see that there's a dentist, Dr Burch, who does really well with his Site Build It site. Perhaps you could target dentists and direct them to the Dr Burch case study. (Note: I haven't done the keyword research for this. I'm just brainstorming here to show you that there are often a number of different ways of promoting a product. The more you study a product and how it's used, the more ideas you'll discover.
Even in a really competitive niche, sometimes you can create your own little sub-niche and become the expert in that sub-niche.
However, for beginners, instead of tackling a tough, competitive niche, a more practical approach to identify a niche which is NOT too competitive and if necessary carve off a sub-niche.
Start small. Build your confidence by getting traffic and sales in a small niche before you consider tackling the tough stuff.
Remember, there are tens of thousands of affiliate programs and millions of different products. That's an almost infinite number of potential keywords.
The Internet is an awesome place, crammed with an almost endless number of wonderful opportunities. You can focus on its disadvantages or you can focus on its advantages. The choice is yours.
If you start your first project right now - today - one day you'll look back and appreciate how fortunate you were to have had the opportunity to establish a business while the Internet was still young.
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Allan Gardyne
AssociatePrograms.com - You're here. Explore it! |
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crush123
Joined:
01 Sep 2005
Posts:
178
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Posted: Thu Apr 05, 2007 1:39 pm
Post subject:
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Thank you AllanGardyne,
your post is very encouraging and informative.
Internet is so large that it is full of opportunities.
Just as a physical product can be be sold in different places by different persons, products in internet can be promoted by many affiliates through many websites.
Every new web site starts with few visitors, less or no income, few backlinks, zero pagerank and with most of the disadvantages.
However, as time passes, it can be developed as we aim it to be.
It only needs time and effort.
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cdorob
Joined:
30 Jan 2007
Posts:
39
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Posted: Fri Apr 06, 2007 8:40 am
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I also think it's all about choosing the right niche.
I'm personally a great Honda fan, but building a site and competing with other affiliates on the generic Honda subject won't help much. Instead I would go for the "naked" Honda motorcycles (which I especially enjoy an know about) and even better going on a specific model, which is CBF600. Not too crowded here in terms of affiliate competition, but merchants still want to sell parts, gear and accessories.
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Cristian Dorobantescu
Affiliate Network Coordinator / Avangate BV
Start selling software on your site and get paid for it!
http://www.avangate.com/affiliates/ |
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generalinq
Joined:
08 Apr 2007
Posts:
20
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Posted: Sun Apr 08, 2007 6:51 am
Post subject: Great Post
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Allan
Great post. You took the words right about of my mouth  |
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