One of the most difficult concepts for any new affiliate to grasp is that of niche marketing.

Here I will take you through the process of how and why you should select a niche market to focus your affiliate marketing efforts on.

Affiliate marketing is a very easy way of making a comfortable living. Working from home, working your own hours and having cheques drop through the mailbox seems like a dream job. And it is if you do it right.

The fact is that for every 100 wannabee affiliate marketers only one or two will succeed. Most get as far as registering a domain name for their fantastic idea and then get no further.

The internet is a huge business opportunity for anyone willing to give it a go. However you need to be realistic in your ambitions and what you can achieve to be successful

Let’s take the poker/casino market as a case study.

Where nearly all new affiliates go wrong when they decide to build a new site is that they try to address too much of the market audience. You have to be realistic about what you can single handedly achieve.

Trying to beat the many well established poker sites out there is going to take too much work for one person and will usually end in frustrated failure.

A poker room “review site” has been done to death. There are hundreds of them. To compete in this market you are not only going to have to spend a huge amount of time writing quality reviews but also spend inordinate amounts of time gaining back links to push yourself up the search engine rankings.

In addition to this whilst you try to play catch up with the linking game your established competition is also gaining links at a steady rate to keep their market position. It’s going to be mission nearly impossible to try and break into this sector of the market.

In order to get a slice of the poker market you are going to need to isolate a particular sector of that market and focus on supplying everything that is missing from this “niche”.

Let’s break down the poker business into “do able” chunks to give you some ideas for a new site.

Poker room reviews – This is pretty much a no go area for any new affiliate. Unless you have substantial resources and access to a good search engine optimization team you should give this a wide berth.

Try to think about smaller sub sections of a market that you could reasonably hope to dominate.

For example how about a site dedicated to multi table tournaments? There are a few already out there but not many good ones. You could break this down further into a site that specializes in a rebuy only or freezeout only tournament.

Taking this idea further you could build a niche site dedicated to multi table tournaments of the freezeout variety for less than $3 and where to find them. You may not get huge amounts of traffic but what you will get is a small amount of targeted traffic that will convert a much higher percentage into depositing players.

You will also have success with this far more quickly than you ever will by trying to build a “please everyone” poker site.

Find a niche that you are interested in and then break it down into “do able” identifiable chunks of work that you can accomplish in a given time frame. This is the way to start your affiliate career.

Trying to build a bigger audience for your first project is going to sap your energy when you see how much work is actually involved. Start small, build one complete site and then move on. Don’t be distracted by the many other opportunities that will get in your way.

This one of the biggest reasons that new affiliates fail.

They simply try to do too much and never manage to see one project through to completion.

If that’s you then you need to prioritize your workload so that you only work on one project until it starts making money. It’s no good flitting from project to project and never finishing any of them.

Bio:

Tony Cooper has been affiliate marketing for over eight years.

His latest poker project is at Six handed