Where Do You Start?
You generally want to choose one thing at a time and make your site specific to that one thing. A lot depends on what your interests are. Take Weight Loss for example. You would want to pick a specific program or technique for losing weight, instead of having a list of five different programs for visitors to choose from.
You wouldn’t look as professional promoting five different programs for the same thing, now would you. But then again, would if you chose something like Golf. Now your main topic of your site would be about golf, but there are many things you could incorporate into a site like that which would relate to your main topic. Here are some examples – techniques for putting, your swing, you’re driving. You would also have products like bags, clubs, and accessories of all sorts of things. But your focus should remain on the topic of golf and not the accessories of the game of golf unless your website was focusing on a specific brand of golf bag, clubs, shoes or whatever.
As you can see that first question is not the easiest thing to answer, which is why I said to write down some things about what your interest are. The main thing is to have your main focus on one topic. Whether you can compliment that topic with many other accessories, or not doesn’t really matter because your main topic is your Bull’s-Eye, the accessories are just the outer rings of the target.
If You Want Targeted Traffic
If you want targeted traffic to your site whatever you decide it will be about you have to have one specific topic that is your center focus and will target the traffic you want to get to your site. Does that make sense to you? Everything else is just related to your topic.
That brings us back to our main question, where do you start? How do you choose what Affiliate Program to join, or what topic you should choose from. Or what product it is you would like to promote.
Choose Something You Are Interested In.
You should choose something that you are interested in, something that you know something about, or if you don’t know are willing to research. Something you have a passion about, or that you think is fun and won’t mind spending the time needed to get it all together and working for you. Only you can make that determination, but try to come up with a list of topics so you have a number of items that interest you to choose from.
Choose One Topic To Start With.
From your list you want to only choose one topic to start with. You want to do a little research to see if it is something that is marketable and is going to make you money. You also want to see what kind of competition you may face in your chosen topic. Don’t let any of that scare you, you might have to be a little more creative in the way you market your Idea, or drill down into a less competitive part of that same market, but it is something you will want to know before you invest to much time in an area that is to competitive for you.
Affiliate Marketing has a number of topics that are very competitive and I mentioned two of them at the start of this article, weight loss, and golf. Now that doesn’t mean that you can not break into these markets, but doing so with the broad terms weight loss, and golf would be quite hard to do. You would have to drill down into those markets with your keyword research and find less competitive terms or brand names to base your promotions on.
We will get into keyword research, competition and how to figure it all out later, but you can do a quick check to see if your topic, or idea is something that you might be able to market just by doing a search on your topic and seeing if there are any ads on the results page. Then put your topic in quotes and look to see how many competing pages is shown on the results page.
Results
Results 1 – 10 of about 308,000,000 for “golf”. 308 Million competing pages for the term golf in quotes. As you can see it is a very competitive search term. But it is also a very broad term. This is what I received for “golf swing tips” in quotes. Results 1 – 10 of about 155,000 for “golf swing tips”. Still competitive at 155 thousand pages, but a far cry from 308 Million don’t you think?
Drilling Down In Competitive Markets
I hope from my example above that you see how drilling down into a competitive market you can still compete. Also I hope it gave you an idea on how to look at competition for your chosen topic and get an idea on choosing the right keywords to focus on. It is a pretty basic example, but it does give you a quick idea of your topic’s marketability and competition.
Next up is question number two so I better be getting to work.
