Why You Are Failing With Affiliate Marketing

Let’s kick this article off by stating the obvious. Being involved in affiliate marketing is privately awesome and publicly embarrassing.

Why? Because privately, affiliate marketing can be incredibly in-depth, strategic, and challenging — publicly however, it can be shameful because if you are not successful, it sounds and feels like a “get rich quick” scheme.

Your Niche Is Not “Niche” Enough — Trust Me

Gone are the days that you could imprint on a primary niche and gain results. In fact, now, when you select your niche I want you to think about all of the sub-niches that are involved in your primary topic. Then, when you do that — think about more sub-niches.

In all honestly, these days it’s best to sub niche down a several levels, the more the better, we will crunch a few numbers in a bit.

For example in my personal experience, my business focuses on website maintenance and development, we used to lead the niche for “website maintenance” for years back in 2013 — over time and let me tell you those were some sweet times, our lead became impossible to sustain, even being an authority in the space.

Beginning in 2016, we needed to niche down even further to acheive the same results, for example “real estate website maintenance”, restaurant website management” etc.

So, What Is Niche Enough?

I would suggest picking a niche that is already scaled down X2 or X3 in which you can further define the topics — this would look something like:

• Primary Niche — Healthcare/Wellness
• Sub Niche X1 — Weight Loss
• Sub Niche X2 — Keto Diet
• Target Niche X3 — Categories/Topics Surrounding Keto Diet

The target niche is where you would want to base your blog, website, or affiliate products and links off of to have the most effective organic SEO footprint.

How Do You Select The Right Keyphrases To Target?

There are so many “experts” and affiliate marketers who tasted a few sales (making them official affiliate consultants) and will try to teach you how to use all of these advanced metrics and ridiculous tools for keyword selection.

Ignore all of that nonsense.

Your best tool without a doubt is simply using Google suggestions for long-tail key phrases.

Since you are in the affiliate space, use identifiers such as “best” and “reviews for”, etc. When you see what Google suggests for you, then run a search with that example in quotes to see how many active results come up.

If the results are between 300k to 1M, you have a winner and should target that keyphrase.

The secret formula for affiliate sales and performance in your niche are — proper sub-niche keyphrases + content = traffic = sales

My advice would be to ensure that your landing pages for your affiliate products are geared up specifically to generate targeted traffic for said product. This way your niche is better utilized.

For example, let’s say you are selling nutrition supplements — your landing page for a specific product should be less about “nutrition supplements” in general but more about the benefits of the specific product.

I would recommend each landing page only focus on targeting up to 5 key-phrases (roughly) relating to the product— research is key.

Making use of general long-tail key-phrases for your affiliate landing pages is also effective for generating targeted traffic for affiliate sales. In this case, focus on long-tail key-phrases that yield between 1000 and 3000 searches per month.

I hope you found this helpful.

I would love to know your feedback or tips, tricks, and methods that have been effective for you for affiliate marketing.