The last days I thought about what would be better and easier to market, a niche product with small competition and less traffic or a popular item with lots of competitors and a whole bunch of traffic?
Well I haven’t got the excact answer for that yet, but so far I’ve already found some advantages and also disadvantages from both affiliate marketing methods. First, and before I’ve read some very interesting threads on the Warriorforum and other sites, I thought that going niche would be the ideal way for promoting products as an affiliate and making some good money from it. Indeed, niche marketing really works. I’ve already made some sales from my personal Clickbank niche test site that I created some months ago. But is it the “holy grail” of affiliate marketing?
A good question if you ask me. Although niche marketing has many benefits like having fewer competitors and an easy search engine domination with your choosen keywords, there are still some major disadvantages. The worst of all is traffic, simply as that. A niche market is, you may quess it, tailormade to a small group of people that are interested in a particular topic. Therefore potential traffic to a niche site is usually small too. Less traffic means few sales means less money. But doesn’t one want to make more money from affiliate marketing? What about choosing a more competitive “niche” with more traffic, more sales, more money to make?
You know what I want to say? No? Ok, let me explain. What would be better, to get a big piece of a small cake or to get a small piece of a (really) big cake? I would rather choose the smaller piece, not because I’m not that hungry… 
Establishing you affiliate business, the small piece of cake, in a highly competitive market, the really huge cake itself, has some benfits too. Although you have a lot of competitors you also have the chance to grasp a certain percentage of the high traffic that swirls around a popular product. You don’t necessarily have to get to the first search engine results for your particular keyword in order to get some of that traffic. Even if your affiliate site is ranked at the 5th or even 10th position, it will probably bring you enough traffic, depending on how hot the product/service is that you’r about to promote. Maybe even more traffci than from a tiny niche site.
So what’s the difference between creating a niche site that you have to get ranked on the topmost search results in order to get some traffic and creating a site in a competitive market with a ranking far behind the first sites but with a lot of traffic? I personally think, and that’s also the reason of this post and my thoughts, it’s the work involved in creating an affiliate site and driving traffic to it. What would be easier, to maintain a number one position in the SERPs or say position number 50? Sure, the second position.
To sum up my thoughts, I think going for a popular product or service should be easier to make money with than creating a niche site. First, a popular item means traffic, a lot of traffic. Second, you wouldn’t have to maintain a #1 position in the search results, hence less SEO work. Third, you have a lot of competitors that have choosen many longtail keywords that you can “spy out” (hehe, evil evil) and choose for your own site (which should be a bit better optimized than your competitor’s one).
Now my question, what do YOU think about it? Is niche marketing the fantastic affiliate marketing money maker or is it going after a popular product and so to say being a “parasite” that subsists from the huge traffic such a product has created?
As I already said at the beginning, I don’t have a correct answer yet, althoug I’ve read some other people’s thought about going broad is far better than niche marketing. Just want to know what you think about it.
So long,
Querblogger
