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Affiliate Marketing Strategies: Wide versus Deep
When you become an affiliate marketer and begin to participate in
affiliate programs, one of the most important
strategic decisions that you must make is
whether to have a narrow but deep focus,
or whether to have a wider but much shallower focus. Let me explain
what I mean by each of these strategies:
- Deep Strategy: This is the affiliate marketing strategy
recommended by many Internet marketing gurus, and it is true that for
the type of products that they are selling, this strategy can be very
effective. The idea is to focus on a narrow and specific topic, but
explore it to some considerable depth by creating a website about that
topic. The idea is eventually to make your website one of the most
authorative on that topic, which has the benefit of hopefully generating massive
word-of-mouth publicity, and of making your visitors trust your product
recommendations. You should of course be aware that trust is hard to gain,
but easy to lose - so you should therefore only recommend products that
you have personally purchased yourself, and which you can honestly recommend in
good faith. Of course the number of products which you can write detailed
reviews of is quite limited, so this strategy tends to work best for
higher ticket items, including products by the
Internet Marketing Center,
as well as many products available from
ClickBank and
MarketingRocket.
- Wide Strategy: The idea of this strategy is to explore a much
broader range of topics and products, but of course do so to a lesser
depth. For example, you could build a mall website,
or create a website that catalogs books, or create a price comparison
website for travel or hotels. Of course, the more products and services
you link to, the less depth you will be able to explore them in - you're
unlikely to be able to write reviews of all the hotels in France for example.
It also important to bear in mind that you must be able to offer some
value to users (it could be a new way of looking at or sharing information;
it could be a catalog of products on a specific topic; it could be a
comparison of different products, services or prices), but there must always
be some fundamental reason to visit your site - you don't your website to be
a dumping ground for a random unsorted collection of affiliate links.
There are advantages and disadvantages to both approaches. Choice of topic
("topic") is absolutely crucial to the deep strategy - because
you need something where products with good commissions are available, where
people will interested in reading what you have to say, and where you won't
soon lose interest. If pursuing the wide strategy, you should be looking
to automate as much as possible - that means ways to create more content, ways to be more
useful to your visitors, and ways to get more visitors to your site in the first
place.
Finally, there is always the possibility of combining elements from
both approaches. For example, if you create a wide niche website covering
a broad range of products, you could allow your visitors to post product
reviews to add depth to your content which you could not hope to do so
yourself. Another idea is to create more than one website - you could
for example create deep content-rich sites on those topics that interest you
most, but also create fully automated websites on other subjects, and thus generate
multiple streams of income.
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