Affiliate marketing newbie

[shashu]

I've become interested in affiliate marketing. I've done a fair amount of reading over the last week and I'm on the edge of taking the decision to start ploughing large amounts of my precious time into learning how to launch a niche affiliate site, with the aim to generate the gilded four (or five) figure monthly income.

I have however become overwhelmed by the sheer volume of information on the internet published by others who claim to have made it. They all of course have their own opinions as to how success can be acheived.

I thought I would post here firstly to invite some reality checking from others who have more insight than me, but also to ask for any insight about how I can separate the wheat from the chaff in terms of all of this 'how-to' content.

 

[makeusvisible]

There has been a recent thread on this topic which would be worth reading;

http://www.ukbusinessforums.co.uk/threads/affiliate-marketing.337492/

I'm speaking from the perspective of an online marketeer, dealing in PPC and SEO, as well as design and web builds.....and to put it bluntly, you are entering into an incredibly tough niche....and heres why;

10 years ago Affiliate Marketing was about setting up niche websites, and advertising the client's product(s) on it....then generating some traffic to said website...either by PPC, SEO or otherwise.

Nowadays, Affiliate Marketing is driven by two dominant forces;

Deal Websites
Review Websites

These are the guys mopping up on affiliate traffic.

Affiliate Window for example has around 90% of traffic generated by a very small number of review and deal sites. Only 10% by people such as yourself.

The deal sites work on the following basis....using Quidco as an example;

The Affiliate offers 20% commission.
Quidco advertise the affiliates products and offer 20% cashback

yes...quidco offer 100% of the commission back to their users.

So....before delving into this hugely competitive, yet low yield industry....ask yourself one question.....how are you going to generate traffic, and how much is that traffic going to cost?

 

[shashu]

Thanks for your post. My intention is to generate traffic from organic search results by targeting low competition keywords and using SEO. I gather this strategy is yielding lucrative results for others. My understanding is that Quidco et al are not targeting 'niche' products but offer commission on large brand sales. I suppose my more direct competition would be the review websites, as you refer to them.

 

[StevePoster]

Targeting organic traffic will require time to establish your website in the search results. Consistent reach out to the users through your website's content will be one of the best method today.