As I’ve learned over the years, the niche marketing strategies that'll bring success are customer-centric. That's to say, ‘the customer is King, Queen, and everything in between’, the first and last rule is ‘Focus On Your Customer’. Have you heard the term ‘Laser Focus’?
Well, if you haven’t, then learn it. If you have, then inwardly digest it!
My 10 Steps.
If you have been following my ‘10 Steps To Creating A Successful Affiliate Marketing Site‘ you should have created your website for FREE and hosted the site, so let’s get down to marketing strategies and concentrate on the Laser-Focus on your customer.
You really can’t go wrong provided you know who your customers are.
As part of my 10 steps to creating a successful affiliate marketing site, I want to talk to about your marketing, but don’t forget to follow all my 10 steps list at the bottom of this post.
You can write the best content and have the best products, but if you don’t know who your customers are, then all the work is for nothing because your message will never reach them…all for the sake not doing your homework on a targeted article headers and content geared towards your target readership, or demographic.
Without this fundamental element, you can never move forward to the next stages. So, build a framework that you can replicate and scale.
All your strategies should start with the customer. You need to ask yourself serious questions:
*Who are my customers?
*What do they value?
*What do they feel?
*What products are they using?
*How can I turn them into my customer?
How Did You Find It?
You can start by looking at yourself and ask how did you last source and buy a product that resolved your problem.
What drove you to seek it? Why did you not stay with your previous product? Did you find this product via word of mouth, or on the web? What made it stand out from the other products just like it?
This is all about people to people and creating relationships, and how people and business relate to each other. If you can manage how your business of perceived by your customer, you can build a relationship which brings me to your ‘Customer Persona‘.
Is your customer based in the B2B world or a Service user, and what are their roles within their position. Let me make this simple by using a very basic example.
A B2B customer maybe and employee at any level with any number of responsibilities, the best B2B customer would be the one who either buys the products or has a deciding vote or influence in buying a product.
In the service industry, you are looking more at a social group that can be as simple as Parent, Child, Peer, Relative, all of which hold some form of influence over the other.
If you as a company can identify these roles then you can actively target the decision maker and convert more sales getting better ROI. Does this make sense?
Your Brand Story.
Humans love stories because telling stories is a bonding exercise binding people together making them stronger and building a relationship has a by-product of revenue. Do you have a story? Can you tell someone how you overcame your problem?
I don’t want you to tell people about a visit to the doctor, I want you to be able to explain how your company or business came about.
I have a story of how I got here and it was a long journey filled with frustration and disappointment as I tried to build an online business all on my own. You can read my story on my ‘about me‘ page, but the long story short is without the proper training and support it can be a heartbreaking experience to try and fail over and over again.
Can you explain your motivations for building your company and its product? Can you tell people you once had problems and how your product resolved that problem?
For a more in-depth look at this idea read Three Stories Every Entrepreneur Needs To Know.
Earning Traffic.
Here’s a crazy idea…What about finding customer rather than web traffic? Okay maybe it’s a dream and in reality, you need to get as much traffic to your site with as much qualification as possible, but try to aim for customers rather than traffic. Without complex marketing, this is really a note on top of the wish list, but I think it’s worth pursuing it you can at least understand your broad demographic.
Converting Traffic.
How do you get your reader to become customers and how do you get customers to become repeat customers? We have all heard of the dreaded conversion funnel and we have an idea what it looks like and what it’s meant to do.
What we don’t know is how to be friends with it. I mean just look at the example of a what could be a standard conversion funnel.
Awareness
Consideration
Conversion
Loyalty
Advocacy
This looks like a lot of hard work and all on top of the day to day writing of articles and running your everyday lives. But wait a minute, I may be being naive but I think this is part of a more general approach. Sorry gurus but everything I see in this funnel is what we at wealthy Affiliate work on every day.
From day one the Wealthy Affiliate program is drilling into its new members that value is the name of the game, and it’s value, that drives and informs our every word to build trust and give value to our content. We understand there are many people out there looking for answers to their questions and everyone at Wealthy Affiliate is focused on delivering on that basis, so by default, the conversion funnel is covered
Pay Per Click Campaigns PPC.
This is an important element but to my mind very much a personal choice so I want to pass you to the co-owner of Wealthy Affiliate to take you through starting your PPC campaigns. Please watch this video to get a handle on Pay Per Click campaigns.
Email Marketing Campaigns.
Another big subject in the niche marketing strategies sphere but one that can be simplified with a ten thousand foot overview. When you are working on your affiliate website promotion and thankfully receive an email address, it comes direct into your home, your device, your life and you never switch it off. Even when, and this is true….even when you are receiving spam emails, you will never turn off your email service.
So, already we know this is a powerful and personal relationship we have with email, meaning when we as an affiliate marketer gets an email address, we should never waste it. But listen closely…be careful and take the possession of an email address as a privilege and never abuse your good fortune.
What do I mean by this? It’s simple and you already know how annoying spam and junk emails are right? Well, you need to be the person who only sends email to the person who wants your email…got it?! This is the rule!
I have a very simple approach to this which will serve you well. Once you get an email address from a subscription opt-in, you don’t blast that address with BUY NOW! or OFFER EXPIRES TOMORROW!…..No, tranquilo amigo…take your time and build a relationship.
The best way to develop a relationship is to have a campaign set up introducing your leads to your world, offering advice and life hacks maybe, as part of a dialogue. Dialogue is a powerful word that I just stumbled across it as I wrote this post but it illustrates my point perfectly because it encompasses everything your affiliate website’s aiming to do, and that’s starting and maintaining a dialogue between you and your potential customers.
Coming Soon…. How to build and run an email campaign for FREE.
SEO The Hell Outa It!
This may come as a surprise to some but not to others. SEO is less complex than marketing, or should I say ‘relatively’.
That statement really comes from the idea that people seem to remain the same (in general) while SEO rules by nature tend to screw you around on a regular basis, but don’t let that stop you attacking and defeating the capriciousness of the major search engine algorithms.
Meet the challenge and SEO the hell out of it.
Many of you will know the feeling of finding your key phrase and seeing it on the top spot and those of you who dont…..just wait for that day.
Take action now and use your free tools like google, or get into fifth gear and sign up to ‘Jaaxy‘ for a more fulfilling experience. Whatever you do, you need to find your keywords and phrases before you start putting PEN to PAPER, as the saying goes. We have many lessons on SEO at Wealthy Affiliate or you can simply run searches on the search engines and slowly collate data but without the support of an active community.
It’s up to you. For a general introduction to creating an SEO friendly website read my ‘how to make an SEO friendly website‘ post.
Social Strategy.
If you have an online business then there is no way you’re not trying to get ahead with social networks. But as everyone knows from experience your social strategy needs to be planned and executed with forethought and precision if it’s going to produce fruit.
That’s not to say the requirement is to get it right first time, this is probably impossible, and most campaigns are created, sent live, and constantly tweaked through their lifetime to obtain best results.
What is the purpose of your campaign, is to gain more online presence, collect email address, perhaps affiliate website promotion or you’re publishing niche marketing strategy articles.
Whether you are running a B2B, e-commerce or publishing website the approach is similar but the tools may differ.
Choose the right tools for the job, so if you’re running a B2B organization, your social tool of choice would be LinkedIn. If you’re running an e-commerce site Facebook will probably give good returns.
Finally, if you are a publishing affiliate with time and mission critical promos, then Twitter with its constantly active fan base is your best choice.
This is just a starting point and you will need to leverage any social network you feel suits your needs more, but for a base reading please refer to my Social Netorking101 articles to get started.
Google+
Facebook
Pinterest
Twitter
It’s important once you have your strategy and your message ready to send, you send it at the right time. But when is that? The good news is you are able to post in your sleep using scheduled automation. My choice of tool for this purpose is Hootsuite which allows you to create a schedule tweets so you don’t need to to stay awake 24 hours a day.
For a brief walkthrough of Hootsuite and other social media, automation products read my ‘automating social media‘ post.
Join The Conversation.
Your Tweets, Pins, Emails, whatever tool you are using should all have one thing in common over the branding aspect of your campaign. You should be reaching out to engage in conversation, asking questions, encouraging others to ask you questions.
Build your following organically by letting the conversation over time take tangents away from your product or service and engage at a human level. When audiences opt into becoming a fan, they are doing so because they believe you offer value. Always strive to offer that value and maintain the highest level of content.
To help you grab the attention of your potential customers and keep them engaged you should use the best image available to you, and to that end, I am giving you
5 resources for FREE stock images.
http://morguefile.com/
https://pixabay.com/
https://stocksnap.io/
https://unsplash.com/
http://raumrot.com/
Do Not Attempt This On Your Own.
One of my main points of failure was trying to go it alone. I know it sounds silly because you want to branch out on your own and be independent, so why would you want any help? Well, the thing is, when you ‘re new to the game you will need help and support, and luckily there is help and plenty of it.
Unless you are on the top of the tree with a team of social experts, writers and other team members running your business for you, you’re going to need some help. The Internet marketing world is fast moving and it’s difficult to keep up even when you’re not busy writing and developing your site and strategy.
Can you imagine trying to create and grow a successful online business alone?
Don’t worry because there is an answer. If you could use help figuring out what your niche market should be, or how to build your website and where to host it. Perhaps you need help with keyword research or content writing?
You might need up to date information on SEO tactics, or just need to talk your problem through with another
Internet Marketer?
If any or all these things speak to you, then you have two options.
Free.
The free approach is joining forums, join blog sites and make comments and ask questions and build a presence online.
Paid For.
The paid for option is quicker but not necessarily the best. You could try Wealthy Affiliate Online University but only sign up for the free account to check it out. There are many programs like this one, some bad, some good. I'm not telling you to use any of them but out of all the programs I know about, the WA program seems the best.
I hope this article was helpful. Don't forget to read all my ‘10 Steps To Creating A Successful Affiliate Marketing Site‘. The next article looks at finding Keywords.
1.Build your free site
2.Hosting
3.Niche Market
4.Keywords
5.Google analytics
6.Mailing lists
7.Writing content
8.Affiliate links
9.Traffic generation
10.Testing!
If you have any question please drop me a line and I'll get back to you pronto.
Carl has been working in Internet Marketing for a number of years and has a history in the tech industry over the last 20 years.
He now runs a number of websites and in the online marketing space and wants to share some of the techniques that can help promote your site.
For more information and ideas visit http://cool-banana.net
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