Posts Tagged ‘clickbank’

You Found Your Niche; Now Find Your Nano-niche.

Tuesday, February 10th, 2009

ramachandran-photo.jpg The world of affiliate marketing is immense. Those who are already in the affiliate marketing space know that breaking into this world can be a challenge, especially if you’re trying to promote a product or service that thousands of others are already promoting.

Many successful affiliates have found that if you really try to promote your “niche,” you will have greater success in driving sales. However, now that many current and prospective affiliate marketers know this trick of the trade if you will, it’s time to take it one step further.

What we are talking about comes from the idea of nano-niche marketing. Just like the Apple Nano is the smaller version of the iPod, a nano-niche is a smaller, more specific version of your niche.

Everyone has a niche, whether it is a hobby, or a sport, or simply some topic you know a lot about. For example, common hobbies include crafts, art or music. A nano-niche is breaking the hobby down one step further — a craft could be knitting hats, art could be painting landscapes, music could be the clarinet for beginners, etc.

The point is, the smaller you can focus your niche, the more focused you can make all of your affiliate marketing efforts (i.e. your blog, your video, etc). By honing in on a specific audience group, you can tailor your efforts and really engage with your audience. And the fact of the matter is, the more targeted your niche can be, the more likely it is that there will be an audience out there that has yet been reached.

Ultimately, successful affiliate marketing relies on driving sales through promotion. Therefore, if you are able to target and drive very specific traffic to your website, your conversion rates will be higher than just marketing to a huge general audience – driving your sales up immensely.

Although many people new to the affiliate marketing industry think to go big right off the bat, it is in fact more likely you will find success in the nano-niche, in the targeted and specific areas that others have yet to discover. So instead of going big, take that one extra step to go small – right to the audience that really wants and needs your product or service.

Dush Ramachandran is vice president of sales and business development at ClickBank.

Making Sense of Monetizing Blogs

Wednesday, October 15th, 2008

dunlap.jpg One of the most frequently discussed topics at the recent BlogWorld conference was how bloggers can monetize their blog. A blog is a labor of love for many, but as they pick up steam, bloggers realize that as long as they’re putting in the work, they might as well earn some money too. Many bloggers have found that ad programs such as Google AdSense are good for earning pennies, but ultimately don’t deliver the kind of profits they’re looking for.

The real opportunity in monetizing your blog, discussed at length by several industry experts at BlogWorld, is through affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing is where you place links on your blog for products that relate to your topic. For example, if you write about personal health and wellness, you would choose products such as diet and exercise books to promote on your blog – as your readers would naturally be interested in products that will make them healthier.

When you place a link, you become an “affiliate” of the person selling the product. If someone clicks the link on your blog and then buys the product, you get a commission on that sale. Commissions can be as high as 75 percent of the sale, depending on the product you’re promoting. In general, digital products like ebooks have higher commission rates because they have no manufacturing or inventory costs.

Because affiliate marketing is an Internet-based business, there are literally thousands of people talking about this subject online every day. Take your time to read reviews and comments, and pick which affiliate marketing opportunity is best suited to your needs. Like any other important business decision, doing your homework will pay off in the long run. It will give your blog the best chance to bring in significant cash, as many other bloggers have already discovered.

Bob Dunlap is director of marketing for ClickBank.