If you are interested in building a website that ranks in Google and makes some money along the way, this guide is going to be a huge help to you.
Your first quest is to find a topic/niche that has four things:
- traffic,
- people who will buy stuff,
- not too much competition and
- enjoyable to work in while still helping people.
Find a niche and keywords to target
The first step you want to take is to make sure the idea that you have for a topic/niche has enough traffic to be worthwhile. There’s no point spending weeks building a blog if there is no one searching for information about it.
Tools like Majestic SEO are your best friends at this stage. They allow you to look at all your competition and see what keywords and backlinks they are going after. This is extremely useful when deciding on a niche to blog about as well as being useful every time you write a post.
Instead of going for wide subjects you need to custom-tailor your product to dozens of different “smaller niches.”
- Time Management for Stay At Home Moms
- Time Management for College Students
- Time Management for New College Students
- etc.
Now, if I am an overwhelmed dad who is trying to home-school my 5-year old boy, I find that I can’t get everything done and I go searching for time management information online, what happens?
I find a gazillion time management courses that all look good to me, but I also find YOURS that is SPECIFICALLY FOCUSED ON HOMESCHOOL FAMILIES.
All things being equal, I’d buy yours without thinking twice.
Why? Because it is specifically targeted towards me and my situation.
Get Traffic And Sell Stuff.
Your niche needs to have an offer that fits the users.
You spend $100 and 100 people now come to your site.
- 75% leave without doing anything…
- 24% click around and eventually leave…
- 1% buys the product… if you are lucky…
This is how most marketers end up when first trying out… they perhaps get a sale… and 99 clicks have been lost.
That means $75 of your marketing dollars went out the door in less than 3 seconds… then another $24 poked around and left without making you anything…
And if your lucky… the $1 you spent on that other guy… perhaps he orders or opts in or something.
If you want to sell products, you need to build a sales funnel.
“The money is in the list” — But how do you do it?
The one thing you have probably heard more than anything else since you got started with affiliate marketing is that you need an email list – a really freaking good one. Of course, the same people telling you to build a list rarely give you the actual
strategies you need to ensure that list is successful.
Sure, you need a list. And sure, you need to provide valuable content. But how? What kind of formatting, what kind of messages, what kind of hard and soft sells should you be using to drive your point home and convert readers into cold hard sales?
You’ve been told that you should rock conversion rates in the double digits with a good email list and you’re still looking at 0.3%. So, what’s the deal? What went wrong?
The basis of every good email list is value. You won’t make a single cent if you can’t both create and present value. Your readers are REAL PEOPLE who need REAL MEANINGFUL INFORMATION and they need to find something in every single one of your messages that they can take home, use, and remember as being useful to their specific problems.
Not only that, but the way you promote products needs to present additional value.
What Should You Sell In Your Emails?
A lot of people wonder what to sell and how often to sell it. In truth, a good newsletter sequence, over the course of a year, will focus on between 12-20 products. That is, of course, if you can come up with 12-20 good products to promote.
More realistically, if you can get 7 solid products you’re pretty much set. Some niches don’t even provide that many products, and while it may result in repetitive selling points in your messages, it really doesn’t hurt conversions all that much.
Think of it this way. How many times during one evening of television do you see the same ad for a product or service? Companies will repeat ads over and over again because they know the results don’t depend on originality – just consistency and the value of the free content offered around them.
Benefits
The vast majority of benefits come in one of two forms:
- Pain Resolving
- Pleasure Giving
Simply telling people what the product has won’t do any good. They might think “that sounds like a nice product”, but they won’t connect how the product can help them live a happier life. That’s what pain and pleasure related benefits do.
Your readers are used to being sold things. Most of them will only respond to messages directed toward them, with clear benefits embedded in the message and a reason to act right away. If you can offer that, you’ll improve your conversions many times over.
