Are you just simply buried by the sheer quantity of internet-marketing information there is available?You are not alone.  In fact, that’s the most common complaint voiced by new entrepreneurs attempting to create a viable income online.

Let’s evaluate some of the best ways to stay on-course and eliminate all the noise.

First, it’s absolutely critical to realize that “internet marketing” is a truly vast term.  So vast that, in essence, it really becomes meaningless.

It’s essential to break it down.  You need to specialize.To start with, let’s delve-into a sub-section of the gigantic internet marketing pie: Affiliate Marketing.  Granted this sub-niche is still MASSIVE, but we’re beginning to get more manageable.  

What should you do next?

Well, if you are a burgeoning affiliate marketer just getting-started ponder getting custom-tailored assistance from an recognized Affiliate Assassin.

But, even before this necessary stage of seeking expert help ask yourself these basic probing questions, and make sure that you can answer them all clearly and succinctly.

What is Your Prospect Really Looking For?

If you don’t know the answer to this before you start you are basically just spinning your wheels.

You need to identify with your clients and deliver real value. Otherwise, you will fail in the end.

Assuming that you have the clients true best interests at heart, what then?

In order to be able to become profitable and, hence, be able to stay in business and continue to deliver excellent value to your clients you must get a tiny bit self-centered for just a moment as well.

So, ask yourself the question:
What Customer Need or Want Are You Satisfying With This Particular Affiliate Offering?

This is the heart of your profitability, because your entire marketing strategy relies on it.

Allow me to illucidate, if your chosen affiliate offering is essentially a lead in to obtain customers for, say, consulting, speaking or different business ventures down the line, you do not need to stress too much about the preliminary affiliate product’s price.

But, if selling the affiliate information is your exclusive profit center, you need to sweat the pricing level details a lot more intensely in order to maximize your profit.

That points to the next logical progression.

What Else Can You Sell to Give Your Customers Increased Value?
This is very critical because in the large majority of cases, affiliate-marketers do not make a ton of income on their primary sale.

Sometimes, up-sells and continuity programs are what really makes your affiliate venture to prosper.
Therefore, developing a portfolio related to your initial offering is a critical step in making your affiliate-marketing venture viable for the long-haul.

In-short, at the end of the day, your marketing business depends on completely understanding the answers to the above questions.

If you can get a handle on these tough issues right at the very beginning you are well on your path to maximizing your long-haul security.But, if you ignore them you will definitely leave a lot of cash on the table and, maybe, even more critically you’ll be accidentally short changing your customers as well.

At the end of the day, putting together the right team and affiliate ingredients – initially – are essential pieces in attaining affiliate-marketing profitability!

This will be the first article of a 3 part series on the big question what makes a successful (as defined by profitability) blog or mini site. I believe there are 4 components and the series will contain 1 article on each of them.

Let’s get started.

The first key to the success of a blog or mini site is that it has to target a group of people (a niche) who are hungry for information of a specific nature. In other words, I’m talking about the selection of your niche.

The group of people that your blog or mini site targets has to be a group of people who have problems. Problems in the sense that they are looking for a solution to something, looking to improve something. Furthermore, in a great niche, that SOMETHING, is something that causes pain. Financial pain, physical pain, emotional pain, some sort of pain, for the simple reason that people who have pain are the people who will want to buy solutions to that pain, and hopefully from your website.

If that sounds a bit sick, trying to exploit people with pain, it’s not. It’s called marketing. You’ve had marketers doing it to you your whole life and you probably never even knew about it, why can’t you do it too? And what’s more, you’re actually going to provide these people with a real solution, so you’re being helpful!

Anyhow moving on.

So you’re looking for a group of people with a problem, but that’s not all.

Your next concern has to be whether there are enough of these people searching for solutions to their problems on the internet. How many is enough you ask? It’s a good question. With certain kinds of sites, all you need is 10 visitors to your site a day and you can turn a nice monthly profit. Other niches and products that you promote you might need thousands per day. It all depends on what you sell, and who to, AND how much commission you make when you sell to them.

The things you should do are look at the search volume, as indicated by a tool like Wordtracker. Here you’re simply looking at how many searches per day a particular keyphrase gets in the search engines. Then after that, you want to look at whether there are other sites or blogs that are competing in the same niche.

Contrary to what alot of people think, NO competition isn’t necessarily a good thing. NO competition could and often does mean that it’s not a profitable niche. What you actually want is SOME competition, but CRAPPY competition that you can DESTROY by making a better site, providing better content and in a better way.

The final piece of the puzzle of finding a good niche, is whether the niche has a quality product for you to promote. You need something to sell to these people, that is high quality, has great marketing material (sales letter etc, so it will convert your traffic well) and pays a decent commission.

This is of course assuming you’re looking at the affiliate marketing model of making money with your blog – which I suggest if you’re looking to retire from your job and earn a full time passive income, you SHOULD be. There are other ways to make money where you might think about some different factors in your niche selection.

So if you can combine all of the above factors when selecting your niche, you’ll be giving yourself and your new blog the best possible chance of success. I hope you’ve found this valuable.

To Your Success

Richard & Cheryl