This is the second instalment of follow-ups from the earlier published Evaluating Niche Opportunities For Affiliate Marketing.
Just to recapitulate the second point at the end of the “Evaluating” post:
Analysing Potential: Critical Metrics for Niche Assessment
- Analysing keyword difficulty and search volume
- Utilising conversion rates to gauge niche profitability
- Leveraging customer lifetime value in niche evaluation
- Assessing Seasonality factors and growth potential of niche markets
Before elaborating on each of the 4 points here, let me add that since this post is already getting too long, I have decided to break into four separate parts, this being the first one, “Analysing keyword difficulty and search volume.”
Now to the question of learning itself — or rather, learning how to learn. Engaging in this enterprise is also engaging in an educational project, no less. You have to be clear in your mind about what its nature is.
As you work towards your new business, you will notice that knowledge acquisition takes effort — intellectual effort. Becoming successful in this enterprise — as in any other — can be a challenging prospect, primarily because: you’ll be overloaded with information.
There will also be lot of background noise . . . you’ll experience several lines of thought going through your consciousness at once, a process that may be likened to a roomful of people, all talking simultaneously and often at cross purposes.
Realistically speaking, you can’t eliminate it completely and neither should you try to — that’s how consciousness works; that’s part of being human. However, you can reduce it to a manageable level. How do you do that? First, use a notebook and write down the random thoughts in bullets — on the fly. Later, come back and turn them into specific questions. And the process doesn’t end there. You have to to be prepared to refine your question — repeatedly, if necessary.
Writing — the very act of it — is transformative. It’s also the necessary transition from the abstract to concrete. When you come back to it later, you may discover startling new possibilities you hadn’t considered — a completely new angle, perhaps. Mere ideas are never enough. We have to be able to turn them into utilisable tools.
Asking a question is naming the problem that’s to be solved. Without the question there’s no problem to solve.
As you progress, you may find that this habit paves the way for good content creation. Let me tell you a great secret — great content creation is all about leveraging the power of language — don’t tell me you can’t make money from writing.
So — to get to the big question, the question about the question . . .
What are the critical metrics that lie between success and failure?
Let me explain. Affiliate marketing is at once a prime example of digital technology as well as the byproduct of digital technology. And, as such, by definition it is driven by numbers — zeroes and ones, all the way. This numerical underpinning means everything within this world is measurable. Everything within the emerging digital economy — as it’s called — is interpretable or decodable. (The statistician is the modern shaman).
For example, Amazon’s ecosystem logs every customer and their preferences — a veritable gold mine. Similarly, Google has the same characteristics, or even more so since it’s purely a data company. Every time we do a search, we’re logged into some register. This is data. In the end, all online businesses are data companies.
It’s but one small step from data to data analysis. In fact, the whole point behind data is data analysis. These two things are what we use to light the way — to set the direction. Without these, we’re shooting in the dark, hoping that something will come about eventually. That adage, build it and they’ll come, is a recipe for failure.
We need a design — a goal, a purpose — for our enterprise.
A metric is a measure — a measure of what works and to what degree. In our case, it can be reduced to the four:
- keyword
- conversion rates
- customer lifetime value
- growth potential
These are the four metrics we need to focus on, primarily — but not entirely. The more sophisticated the business becomes the more nuanced the data becomes. But for the moment these four will suffice.
How are they relevant to us? That’s precisely what we’re going discuss in the succeeding sections — stay tuned.
Analysing keyword difficulty and search volume
The main principle is choosing high search-volume, low-competition keywords — that’s the winning ticket.
For A Readymade Solution Click Here For JAAXY.
These are the two dimensions of the problem and to address it, therefore, the task needs to be broken up further into two categories.
- i Keyword Difficulty Analysis
In this regard, the main question is: how hard it would be for you to rank for your chosen keyword/s? The tools I have suggested will provide a specific numerical value — anything over 200, for example, is considered too high; anything below gives you a fighting chance. While at it, it’s also possible, however, to find out what other keywords are suggested within that range (<200). Go after these, if the other keywords are too competitive. This is essentially, a quantitative form of analysis and with the right tools can be mastered easily.
- ii Domain Authority
It ‘s equally important to ascertain where the keywords are occurring — what sort of websites? what are their domains? how authoritative are they? what page do they occur on? The beauty of running an online business in these contemporary times is that with the right tools everything is discoverable. Not only can we find out the type of websites the keywords occur on but also on which pages. This is what we call granular data. Mastering your business, therefore, comes down to mastering the technology.
I understand that this might frighten off some folks. You need not fear because these technologies are meant for wide public use, not just geeks. Let me reassure you that the vast majority of affiliate marketers aren’t statisticians or rocket scientists. And so, there’s hope for us. The knowledge required to decipher trends comes to down to this in the end: which number is bigger than the other. That is a simple measure of magnitude. In simple terms, the higher the competition level (indicated by a corresponding no.), the more difficult it will be to rank for it. However, that means looking for something lower than 200. In quantitative terms, this means: as one measure goes up, you look for a lower measure, but to raise your overall ranking higher.
While up and down may be easier concepts, it is far more important to understand what the relationships between the various moving parts, as it were, are, which in this case can be expressed in the simplest terms as:
UP, DOWN, UP
Grasping the ultimate meaning — the sum of the parts is greater than the whole — is more important, once you have grasped the simpler concepts. Let me add: there’s no complexity — or, enriching complexity — without simplicity. The simple is the building block of the complex and therefore cannot be dismissed either.
Of course there can be more complex forms of quantitative analyses but we needn’t worry about them at this stage.
One straightforward strategy is to leave behind highly competitive keywords and look around for low competition keywords — that a good research tool will generate for you side by side.
See JAAXY.
You only need look at the numerical value assigned to each metric in this tool. The overall assessment is further colour coded with a clear message such as “Great,” in green to help you your choices easier — no brainers.
We now have two further aspects to consider and they are: domain authority (DA) and page authority (PA).
This is, however a qualitative aspect of this exercise where your human judgement is required. What is the quality of the competitor’s content? How long is it? How well structured is it? How well do you think they have addressed their audience’s concerns? What graphics have they used? How appealing do you think they are? These questions will help you ascertain how hard it may be to beat their act — or where the gaps are their in their efforts — gaps that you may be able to fill with your well-researched low competition keywords and better graphics. You can easily up the game on structure and length as well — with better, more lucid explanations, for example. Reinvent the game — on your own terms.
This calls for nothing less than creativity.
So if you’ve been ruing the quantitative nature of affiliate marketing (Oh, what have I got myself into?), then you may elated to know that creativity isn’t dead — we still need subjectivity or aesthetic judgement to assess certain issues such as likability, artistic appeal, resonance and so forth. After all, there’s a human audience at the other end of the business regardless of how digitally it is driven. Can you assess what impact a certain page design will have on your intended audience? Will they prefer broken up or continuous text?
You may be pleasantly surprised how many things — such as empathy — aren’t intrinsically digital (although they may be potentially digitalisable, as some have argued). Fortunately for us, human judgement is still required.
SUMMING UP
As you may gather, under the broad heading of this post today, we have only been able to touch on only one of the subtopics. And we’ve already run out of space — time flies when we’re having fun, I suppose. Considering that each of the subtopic requires its own post, I’ll postpone here the next item, “Utilising conversion rates to gauge niche profitability” till the next post.
Cheers.