Internet marketing, sometimes called online marketing, is the business of selling products or services over the Internet. Many people have turned to Internet marketing as a lucrative way to make a living while working from home, sometimes only part time. While Internet marketing is a general terms for anyone who sells something online, there are also divisions of Internet marketing. Two popular divisions, you could also consider them specialties I guess, are affiliate marketing and niche marketing. While the two are similar in that both involve finding or creating products or services to sell online, it seems the main difference is the way the Internet marketer goes about setting up the business.
Affiliate Marketing
Unfortunately affiliate marketing has gotten something of a bad reputation due to some rotten eggs who set up horrid looking sites full of flashy and garish ads in hopes of selling something, anything to the poor souls who happened upon their websites. However, when done correctly and with the customer in mind, affiliate marketing can be a great way to make money while bringing valuable products to people who really want and need them. There are quite a few third part companies who handle large amounts of affiliate programs for the companies who make the products or provide the services. The two most popular are Clickbank and Commission Junction. The main difference seems to be that Clickbank focuses more on electronic products that can be instantly delivered to the consumer while Commission Junction deals with more physical products as well as some electronic products. Both have easy to use search engines to help you find products to sell.
Affiliate marketers will search for a good product that has a good track record behind it and develop a site designed to sell that product and associated products or services. The best affiliate marketers try out the products or services before trying to sell them so their testimonies are sincere and they are less likely to get returns since they only recommend good products.
Niche Marketing
Niche marketing is very similar to affiliate marketing in the searching for products and the developing of websites. However, niche marketers search for a market first rather than an affiliate program. Once a targeted group of people interested in the niche is found, the niche marketer then sets up a website, gathers affiliate products to suit that niche and begins to market using a vary of social networking and search engine options. Clickbank and Commission Junction are just as useful to the niche marketer as to the affiliate marketer.
The Niche Plan
Setting up a successful niche marketing business involves completing a series of steps and then repeating the process until you have a group of well-performing sites that bring in a constant, passive, flow of revenue. The following plan is one of the best ways to go about setting up a niche empire.
- Find a niche – A couple of good places to find niches are Ebay Pulse and Yahoo Answers. I prefer Yahoo since there are so many questions being asked in each category and each one of them is a potential niche!
- Check the niche – To see if the niche is a potential money-maker, go over to Wordtracker GT to see how many people search for your niche idea every day and what phrases are the best to go with the niche. The best thing about Wordtracker GT (other than that it is free) is that it shows you, with green checkmarks, which niches are worth marketing to.
- Learn about your niche – Odds are you won’t know a lot about the niche topic you chose, so your first order of business is to check out other sites and blogs that are focused on your niche. Learn as much as you can about the niche. This is the most important step and also the one that most people feel tempted to skip. Don’t try to take a shortcut, do the research.
- Write 3 articles about your niche – The articles should be between 400 and 700 words long. Pick a keyword or keyword phrase to focus on and write the article using that phrase in the title, first paragraph and last sentence.
- Use a free content platform to promote – Post one of your niche articles on a free content platform like Squidoo or Hubpages. Submit the other two articles to an article directory like Associate Content or EzineArticles (these are the two best sites for traffic from my experience)
- Add Affiliate Products – Once you have ranked on Google (you should be on the first or second page within a week) you can add affiliate products to your site and start making money.
If you follow all of these steps exactly like they are outlined and you pick a niche willing to spend money, you should start to see money trickling in. Once you are certain that your niche is a moneymaker, you can go ahead and buy a domain name (using your keyword phrase somewhere in the domain) and host a fully developed site with affiliate products. In the long run, you will want to develop a product of your own, perhaps an ebook, to make the most money in your chosen niche. Good luck in your niche marketing!
