Affiliate marketing has been one of the best ways to make money online for quite some time, and the good news is that’s still true today. While sometimes you would hear people say, “Affiliate marketing is dead” or ‘some popular money-making method’ is dead; in reality, these are all just marketing gimmicks to grab your attention. After all, if you think about it from a marketer’s perspective, it’s just good advertising practice to grab your attention by sounding controversial, isn’t it?
To those who are new, as its name implies, affiliate marketing involves you being the affiliate to a product vendor, where you get paid to promote somebody else’s product. The whole beauty of it is that you don’t have to create your own product from scratch. You get to leverage on someone else’s efforts in creating their product, all ready for you to just promote. But be warned, it’s not as simple as it sounds…
Besides being highly competitive with so many affiliates promoting a popular product, a key question that pops up is on how to promote differently from the rest to stand out from the competition? Should you go WIDE in your promotions, which is by promoting many different products in different niches, or should you go DEEP, being more focused on a single product or a single niche?
So let’s start with going wide in many different products and niches. It’s good to have a variety, since there are always seasonal ups and downs for certain products in certain niches. So by promoting say a product on weight loss, followed by an internet marketing product, another on self improvement, gaming, and home energy all at the same time to different niche crowds, then you stand to potentially make more sales than promoting only a single product, assuming you are driving the same amount of traffic to each offer. Why is this the case, you may ask?
Well, it’s basically still a numbers game. Since more traffic tends to equal more sales provided it’s targeted traffic, more products and niches provide some sort of a portfolio diversification effect, where you get to diversify between various products. Generally speaking, it’s easier to make 1 sale per product in 10 different niches (assuming equal traffic and conversion rates per product), than it is to make 10 sales for 1 product in just 1 niche. The odds of sales are just a lot higher when you spread out across various niches, capturing potential buyers at various points in time.
But what’s the problem with going wide to as many products and niches as possible? Simply, you tend to lose focus and face information overload. Far too many affiliates are losing their core central focus in the process of promoting various different products. Not to mention how often products are launched these days, particularly in the IM niche. So when this problem happens, the affiliate who is going wide ends up being too shallow in his or her promotions.
So how about going deep now? This is where you start focusing your promotions on just one or a few products in a single niche. So let’s take the IM niche that we affiliate marketers are probably familiar with, since you’re reading this article. Going deep would mean going all out to promote that product or a few related products in a single niche only, using all the marketing methods at your disposal. This usually includes both free and paid traffic methods, be it solos, JVs, PPC, PPV, articles, Youtube, and so on.
So guess what’s good about going deep in your promotions? You gain FOCUS, and by being more ‘specialized’, you will understand your niche better and will end up marketing much more effectively.
So to conclude, while I can say that it sounds ideal to be going both wide and deep in your affiliate promotions, it is usually tempting to go wide in the beginning to pick up some sales volume. But later on down the road, it pays to go deep when you really want to scale up your affiliate profits and dominate your niche. That’s how bigger affiliates win those competitions.
If you’re keen to go deeper in your affiliate marketing while on a tight budget, I’d recommend you check out this new course called No Cost Affiliate Marketing
