Broad or Narrow? How to Determine Your Affiliate Marketing Strategy
A broad site covers a lot of e-commerce ground and gives you access to a larger potential marketplace as an affiliate marketer. However, a niche approach enables you to build expertise and specialization in a concentrated set of product categories.
Before launching your business or making a business plan change, consider the following pros and cons with each strategy in affiliate marketing, and choose the approach that makes the most sense for you.
Broad affiliate marketing strategy
By casting a wide net with your business, you can list more products for sale and increase appeal to a wider range of customer types. Consider the large volume of customers that walk through the doors of a Wal-Mart every day because of the wide variety of products the company offers.
As you create landing pages for your products, you might find it more interesting to cover a broad range of topics as well. The ability to cross-sell other items to customers who purchase one product also provides a revenue growth strategy.
There are some significant challenges to a broad affiliate marketing strategy to consider, though, including:
- Lack of specialization
- Lack of product credibility
- Inability to capture consistent customer data
Niche affiliate marketing strategy
In contrast to a broad strategy, a niche business allows you to focus on areas of expertise and passion. If you love fashion, for instance, you’ll enjoy creating content and promoting fashion-related products to an audience that shares in your interests.
A niche site also enables much more targeted marketing efforts. You can brand your business to an audience interested in your primary offerings, and focus on building relationships within that marketplace. Because of this targeting, your site attracts more qualified customers and you achieve higher conversion rates.
The more specific your niche, the greater your ability to establish credibility and authority. Top affiliate marketers in certain industries are often invited to present at industry-related conferences and events, or to contribute to editorials.
Your expertise affords you greater capacity to keep up with industry trends too. This awareness helps you promote products that are of interest to your customers at the present time. To generate repeat business and loyalty, you need the ability to converse with your customers about your offerings. You want your customers to view you as a credible person whose recommendations are valuable.
A niche approach, more often than not, is the better alternative for most affiliate marketers. It is generally easier to start small, build traffic and sales, and then expand within complementary product categories. If you cast too wide of a net in the beginning, you will struggle to attract customers looking for reputable solutions from a knowledgeable provider.
Most importantly, before setting up your site, decide which strategy to take and which product categories to focus on. These decisions guide your development of an affiliate site that is intriguing to targeted customers, and that offers an excellent customer experience!