Why Do Market Research

One area where many affiliates seem to fail is the lack of time given to doing market research before jumping into a niche market to promote the products.

Some find that the market they have entered have sub standard products to sell so the returns in commission are very minimal. Others find after building their money sites that the keywords chosen are so competitive that they can not get a good listing in the search engines without having to spend they money and time promoting the niche site aggressively.

Understanding Market Research Is The Key For Success

In saying that, and with so many people’s finances getting even tighter due to the recession and the never ending Google updates, the idea of making money online is becoming even more alluring, and one of the first things loads of webmaster’s hear about is what’s called affiliate marketing. Whilst there is a enough information out there to confuse nearly all webmaster’s at first, the central concept is fairly simple. To get a handle on if you know where to look.

Researching Keywords Is The First Step

When starting out you need to find a niche market you are interested in and conduct market research for profitable keywords.

Essentially, market research is going to be the backbone of your affiliate business and should be you online strategy for every site that you build, and you can accomplish this by finding out what your potential customers are looking for before you start to build your site.

One of the main reasons that market research is done is firstly so that you can see what traffic you can expect to receive from your selected niche. And secondly once you have established your keyword phrases and traffic estimates you can then go and do market research on what products you can promote from your list of keywords as an affiliate.

You will notice that I said “what traffic you could expect” this is not the only research or analysis you need to do to be dominate your niche, other considerations are where you will be getting the content for your sites from as well as how are you going to be promoting your site such as link building, article submissions, social networking Twitter and so on.

Just building your website and posting it the internet is just not going to be enough for you to experience success online.

If you are thinking that you would like to increase your affiliate marketing commissions to a higher level then maybe you should consider using CPA (Cost Per Action) Marketing take  a look at Zero Friction Marketing for a better understanding of how CPA works.

This is the importance of market research finding the tangible terms or keyword phrases that people with problems are typing into their Google search box every single day to obtain answers to their problems, and you can be clear in your mind that if you do not do your research, you will be sorry for it later.

When you start out your goal should be to get traffic as fast as possible so one way to do this is to target “Long Tail Keywords” meaning three or more words in the keyword phrase, however you long-term goals as an affiliate and once you start to receive traffic and sales is to target the more competitive terms in your niche so you can firstly build your affiliate business and commission payouts by attaining allot more traffic to your site.

By constantly doing keyword research and revealing and using keywords that customers are actively entering into the search engines, you will be capable to help your site and promotional pages rank higher, causing a nonstop flood of organic, targeted traffic. As an example for every article written that is relevant to your site you should be using the keyword tool to generate a new list of keywords that you can target with in your article.

Using those terms in the title of the page and well as the meta description and the body text.

Researching your keyword terms doesn’t have to be a difficult assignment and it does not have to be expensive when you first start out. Although as a serious marketer you will want to look at tools such as Market Samurai or Wordtracker down the line.

You can start off however with a free Keyword Tool that is provided by Google, and you can find it by using this link here Google Keyword Tool, and then merely enter in a keyword term or phrase that relates to the product or service or niche that you are interested in marketing as an affiliate.

If for some reason you really can’t think of any keywords to start your keyword research with then all you need to do is find a website that is relative to the niche market you want to enter and then go to another free service offered by Google called Search Based Keyword Tool and just place the URL of that site into the search box and you will get some keyword ideas.

Once you are at the site and are ready to do your market research all you need to do is just click the get keyword ideas to get 100’s of pertinent keyword suggestions and view the keyword competition of the market by taking a look at the number of times people are searching for your main keywords per month.

This is only going to give you a very broad idea of what you can expect from the market but it is a good starting point for those that don’t what to spend any money. If you are looking to really dominate your niche then you will need to look at the keyword tools mentioned above.

But if you are going to stick with the free keyword tool then what you need to do is find a market through market research with existing demand that also has existing competition and products readily available for you to promote, but not that competitive that getting a good search engine listing is next to unfeasible.

What’s significant here is that you need to remember there must be an audience for whatever you decide to market with your niche site. Since you are an affiliate, your costs for going into a market are not very high, but it’s still a first-class suggestion to reserve enough time to do the market research needed in order to not waste your valuable time in going into a market that is to competitive or has minimal traffic and sales.