Worst Niche Site Mistakes

Easy to get started with affiliate marketing on the Web. It’s also easy to make mistakes. Let us look at the common affiliate marketing mishaps that webmasters need to avoid if they want to succeed in this business.

1. Irrelevant products. Are we stating the obvious? Sure. But too many marketers devote valuable time to finding a good niche and terrific keywords, then blow valuable web site real estate on the same banner ads for mortgages or debt consolidation.

If your site is financial, those banners are fine. But if it’s about parent-child relationships, why would you choose a product
that fights against the theme of your site? Hundreds of new affiliate merchants have emerged in the last year, and many of
them not only offer great commissions but plenty of niche marketing opportunities.

How to avoid this mistake? Choose your merchants BEFORE you build your site. Then do everything you can to match your
target market to your chosen products. This way you’ll always be selling something RELEVANT to your niche.

2. No niche. It’s amazing how many niche marketing sites don’t have a REAL niche! Just to make sure the concept of a niche is crystal clear, let’s look at an example:

“Home buyers” is NOT a niche – it’s a HUGE mass market audience. “Home buyers with credit problems” is a niche, though it’s going to be way too large and competitive. “First time home buyers with no credit history” is much, much better – with a niche like that you’d have a lot of work ahead of you, but you’d also have a fighting chance. “Single mothers with no credit history buying their first home” is probably getting into the realm of challenging, but doable.

There’s nothing wrong with trying to make a few bucks with mass market sites and truckloads of cheap traffic. For a few
people, that’s what online marketing is all about – millions of visitors, each worth a penny or two. But it’s not niche marketing. So don’t build a niche site the way they do.
If you’re stuck with a site that doesn’t have a real niche, you can do one of three things.
   1. Get rid of it – either by selling it or abandoning it.
   2. Revamp it by choosing a tighter focus, splitting it into smaller sites, or paring away what doesn’t belong.
   3. Forget about niche marketing, and go for quantity – not quality – traffic.
3. No opt-in mechanism. Niche markets tend to be members of a community. They share the same interests and passions.
And the more targeted your site, the more likely your visitors will be to sign up for your newsletter or updates list. So why would you pass up this chance to collect their email addresses and other contact information?

Correcting this is easy. It costs almost nothing these days to get an outstanding autoresponder service. Sign up, then spend a few hours getting an ezine, mini-course, or update list sign up box on every page of your site.

4. No virals or follow up. Know what’s worse than not having an optin list? Having one, and not doing anything with it! If you’ve
got a tightly focused niche site, it’s not difficult to create a set of follow ups. The more narrow the niche, the more hungry your subscribers will be for any kind of news or updates. So once you’ve followed our advice in #4 above, write up a series of 50 short follow-ups.

Now don’t run away screaming! Sure, 50 messages of 300-400 words each will take you a few days. But they don’t have to be elaborate. Each one can be a brief hello, followed by a simple link to some content or a free download on your site. In the case of an updates list, all you need is a template where you can fill in a URL or two every time you update something on your site.

No matter what kind of content you send, “train’ your subscribers to accept advertising messages. Include a line or two of promotional language for your affiliate products in every mailing, no matter how brief.

5. Site design mistakes that no visitor will tolerate. All sites – whether they’re targeted to a micro-niche or meant for a mass market – should follow the rules of useabliity.

That means your site should load fast (even on a slow dialup connection), have logical navigation, and be easy to read. And any niche site that doesn’t pay attention to SEO is making a big mistake. Keywords are the primary way your niche is going to find you. If your niche site isn’t performing as well as you think it should, take a long hard look at its design and your SEO strategy. If either are lacking ,it’s time for a redesign.

Worst Niche Site Mistakes