Diversifying Your Niche Site Income
For those of us who have made money online, we have the tendency to stick to one area that does very well for us. “Stick with what works” is a great motto for a lot of things, and it can be a good motoo for niche marketing as well… but it can be just as dangerous. A better cliche would be, “Don’t put all of your eggs in one basket.”
As I mentioned in another post, I love the Amazon Affiliate program. I made quite a lot of money last year, and I’ve continued to make a lot already into this year. In short, niches are easy to pick, sites are easy to create, links are easy to build, and Amazon is great at upselling products, meaning more money for me.
But what if Amazon reduces their affiliate commissions? What if they begin to start delaying their payments? What if they start skimming some of the sales and not crediting me with all of the earnings I deserve? If all of my sites are Amazon-based sites and something goes wrong, a huge portion of my online income is gone. I don’t expect that to happen, but you never know.
There’s many different ways to earn money online with affiliate commissions. Here are a few of them:
Amazon sites – Picking a product-based niche does well for Amazon. If people are searching for a product, they may be looking to buy that product, and Amazon probably sells that product.
Adsense sites - Information based sites do well with Adsense. Keyword selection is very important. Whereas “hypertension reduction” might be a good Adsense niche, “blood pressure monitors” are a product and would probably work best for Amazon.
Clickbank/PayDotCom sites – If you want to provide information about a topic, and then sell software or an ebook related to to that topic, then selling Clickbank or PayDotCom sites can do very well for you. I know some World of Warcraft sites that sell Clickbank WOW Books that do very, very well.
Your Own Information Product - Taking the previous section a step further, you can offer your own information product. The downside is that you either need to spend time or money to get the product created, but then you’ll be able to keep 100% of the profits of each sale, instead of splitting profits like you would with Clickbank. You can also receive the money instantly through Paypal or another payment processor.
Membership Sites - One of the best affiliate models. You get to keep 100% of the commission as with your own information products, but you can also create the site so that you can get recurring income each month.
Whatever methods you choose, be sure to diversify. Don’t put all of your hope into one membership site. Don’t create all Amazon sites or all Adsense sites.
For me, I am stepping out from under my Amazon rock, and starting a Clickbank website and an Adsense website. It was hard coming up with the right niches for these types of sites (for me at least) but I found some, and am going to go hard at it.
Leave us a comment letting us know what types of affiliate programs you use to monetize your sites successfully… We’d love to hear.
No related posts.
more Niche Marketing articles?
Subscribe via RSS Feed
or get free site updates by email:
I would agree. I had one niche site I spent a good chunk of my free time on, and it was doing very well (over $3k per month), but was focused on one credit card, and most of the income came from referrals for that card. All was great until they pulled the program, now it only gets pitiful income from adsense.
I haven’t yet begun to diversify. The only income of cash I have is the one adsense advertisement on one of my niche sites.
Hi there,
Saw your tweets on twitter today. I’m a new Affiliate Marketer, found BlogWorld execs on Twitter and wrangled a free pass in exchange for videography tasks. Won a dinner with Shoemoney, John Chow and Chris Brogan. Very cool!
Won an Affiliate Summit West pass and Affiliate Summit East 09 pass as well. Have seven blogs (!) I know.. market reseach using blogger and wordpress blogs to see if traffic is present to focus PPC campaigns.
Main challenge is PPC click-budget, and hoping commissions pays the freight.
Great website!
Respectfully,
Nicholas Chase
http://www.twitter.com/nachase
I agree 100%, I was doing paid posts almost exclusively mid last year and then Google took my rankings away!!! I was screwed to say the least but learned a lesson and started to introduce a bit of variety into my work.
Now I have trouble juggling tasks and switching mindsets but I enjoy it…
One thing, any chance you could help me out with the basics of setting up an Amazon site, I would be very interested in learning more about this.
Thanks,
Forest.
A good information site will provide the opportunity to diversify by including AdSense (limit of 3 per web page), a relevant Clickbank product with a high gravity and an Amazon widget plus a link to an Amazon store all on the same site. And rather than using the same Adsense template being used by hundreds of other marketers, making a little extra effort and creating your own using PLR and real research eliminates the problem of duplicate info… and it’s a great way to optimize for all of the keywords you dig up for your topic.
It’s a good information
I’m into affiliate marketing and so far I have been able to generate around $2000 per month. The income is coming from ebay and adsense. I’m in the process now of diversifing my future sites to include many affilates on one site and to branch off into making amazon sites.I believe in multiple streams of income as a smart way to success.