What is a niche website for affiliates? Affiliates create niche websites to attract a specific sub-section of the online marketplace through organic marketing. By creating content in a specific topic, they can attract the attention of the SERPS – Search Engine Results Pages.
When your niche site starts ranking on the search engines, you can attract traffic for free. This traffic can be monetised either with affiliate marketing products or through advertising space.
So, a niche website is built with a specific destination in mind. That is, to generate traffic from the search engines and sell affiliate products. If successful affiliates can make a passive income from a niche website.
What Is A Niche Website For Affiliates?
Before building a niche website, you need to decide your topic/niche. Choosing a niche to build content around can be tricky. There’s over 600 million blogs on the internet and there’s lots of competition in pretty much every topic. So before you rush off and build a site around your favourite topic, it’s worth doing some research first. Certain topics are hugely competitive and therefore it will be much more difficult to obtain free traffic due to all the other websites competing within a popular niche.
Before you choose a topic ask yourself a couple of important questions:
- Will I enjoy writing/creating content within this niche?
- Can I sustain it for several months?
- How competitive is the topic?
- Can I monetise this niche?
A niche website can become profitable within a timespan of a few weeks or a few months. Certain competitive niches will take much longer. It really depends on how much content you can create in that topic and the relative competition on the SERPS. A busy niche will usually take longer than an uncompetitive one.
Choosing A Product To Sell
Another way to choose a niche, besides picking a topic you’re interested in, is through the product/s you choose to sell. There’s thousands of affiliate products available online and your product choice can be another way to help you decide on a niche.
Without a useful and valuable product to sell, your niche site won’t be profitable, however much traffic you can get to it. Some of the best products are digital products such as tools and software. Digital products also pay much more than physical ones too. Typically a physical product will pay between 5%-10% commission whereas a digital product will pay a lot more: between 30% and 40% commission. So even if you sell fewer products from your niche site, you can earn more with digital items to sell.
High ticket items are also worth a look. A typical high ticket affiliate product will pay at least ten times than of a standard affiliate product. So again you earn more even with fewer sales.
Subscription affiliate products are another consideration. They can let you earn recurring commissions from each sale.
Selling Affiliate Products From A Niche Website
A niche website is designed to attract traffic. This is generally done through content creation and SEO – search engine optimisation. But most website visitors don’t buy on their first visit to a site.
In fact, research shows that before making a purchase someone will visit a website 6-8 times! To help this happen, most niche websites will have an email opt in offer. This allows the website owner to collect email subscribers from their site and follow up with email messages.
Products can more easily be sold through email marketing because it gives you more opportunity to create more touch points with your visitors. On a website, most visitors are gone within a few minutes. Most never return. Once on an email list, you can follow up with them for months, and even years and decades, promoting your products to them many times.
Choosing Your Keywords To Build Your Site
Once you have decided on a topic for your niche website, you can use Google’s keyword planner to find keywords around your subject area. Type your main keyword into the planner and look for suitably uncompetitive keyword combinations which would make a good match for your topic.
You can then use a specific keyword to build your site around. While this isn’t absolutely vital, a keyword domain name can help you rank a site. This site, for example, was built around the keywords affiliate marketing mentors.
See also how to build a niche website.
Once you’ve started your niche website, you can use the planner to dig out all the other keywords within your niche. Use them to write article titles and get an SEO tool (such as Yoast SEO) to help you write SEO friendly articles.