Research Your Affiliate Marketing Competition Before You Enter a Niche

This is the second post in a multi-post series on
how to dominate an affiliate marketing niche.
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Previous Installments: 
Select Affiliate Marketing Offers that Will Make You Money

Before you start any new online or offline money making venture it’s a good idea to poke around and see what others are doing in the niche before you jump in with both feet.  By doing your homework first, you can save a LOT of time, money, and effort.

After I found a niche that satisfied my search criteria for multiple offers across several networks with good payouts, I needed to see how stiff the search engine competition was for organic traffic.

I pay $99 a month to subscribe to Shoemoney Tools (currently in beta at a discounted $99 rate).  You can do some of the same research I do using Shoemoney Tools by accessing other various websites on the web at no cost.  However, Shoemoney Tools has the APIs to query Google properly unlike many of the hack and slash tools on the web that get gummed up every time Google changes their algorithm.  This package is worth the price for its consistency alone IMO.

First, I did some keyword research using Shoemoney Tools to identify what keywords were common for my niche.  Not only does Shoemoney’s keyword research tool give me keywords, but it also gives me key phrases with the words in the order they are typed by visitors.  These small advantages are what can push you over the top with your SEO.

Little Competition in my Niche

Next, I did some Google searches on those keywords and phrases to identify what websites rank in the highest search engine spots for those keywords.

I was surprised to find that the niche I selected actually has little competition among affiliate marketers.  In fact, all but one of the results on the first page were for sites that had little or no monetization at all.  They were all genuine information websites there to serve their visitors.

This means I am going to have to really ratchet up my content to fit in with the top dogs.  On the other hand, the under commercialization of the niche means that the visitors should convert more easily because they are not being bombed with offers every second.

I spent some time on each of the top competitors’ websites and I quickly began to notice which sites rank for just a few keywords and which are really permeating the niche from every angle.

A HUGE Statistical Find

While I was looking at one of the more comprehensive competitor’s website, I found a GOLDMINE.  A lot of the sites in this niche are 1990’s era information pages built with some kind of out-of-the-box website design software.  The website holding the #1 result for my most critical search terms was nice enough to leave a counter link on the bottom of their home page to a public statistic page!

I now had the EXACT search terms and keywords, referring websites, traffic counts, and pages on their website that are bringing the most traffic.  This information is golden because now I can create pages that directly compete with their top pages and I know exactly how much traffic I can expect to get when I beat them.  I can use this information to focus my initial content generation and SEO efforts to drive immediate traffic to my new site ASAP. This is HUGE.

I used Shoemoney Tools backlink checking tool to find out that the same competitor is getting 20,000 visitors a month coming in primarily through 24 pages with only 270 backlinks elevating them in the search engines.  This should be a pretty easy target to go after, especially considering the SEO on the pages I am chasing is way out of date.

I now have all of the information I need to craft a website with specific content pages that should quickly rise to the top of search engine results and draw organic (free) traffic to my website.

What is Coming Tomorrow:

Tomorrow I will post about the three different methods of creating content for your new niche website.  I will cover what kind of content you need to have, how it should be constructed to rank in the search engines,and the ups and downs of buying your content or creating it yourself.

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