Two affiliate ideas.Which would work? (if any)

Hey guys,

I am thinking about starting my first affiliate journey and been doing some research.

So experienced affiliate marketers all give the same advice:

• Look for a specific niche, ideally something you are interested in.
• Pick a niche with not too many competitors
• Google trends must show preferably an upward trend or, at least steady month on month
• And if you are using Amazon, where you only take a small % on each sale, make sure the articles are priced $50 and upwards.

Now I came up with 2 ideas and I would like to hear, which you think has the most chances of success.

My first idea was a niche which turns out to be very competitive for the actual products I would like to sell.
I am most definitely NOT going to rank on the first page. However, there are many long tail keywords with a low competition and some serious search volumes per month (100k - 1M).
I could try to rank for these keywords and drive a fair share of visitors to my website.
On the long tail keyword pages, I can include the Amazon products or lead them to other pages.

Another doubt I have is that the majority of the products costs between $15-$30, which means that in order to make some money I would rely heavily on driving a lot of traffic to my site and Amazon doing its magic by converting those users.

Idea number 2
I am aware of a specific pain a select group of consumers has and I work with various providers who solve this problem. All these providers have affiliate programs and they pay around 30% commission on every sale, which ranges somewhere between $40 and $70.
I could create a site which targets the long tail keywords and try to rank high for these pages.

When I checked the keyword, there are no massive volumes, (see image)



Are these global search volumes enough to proceed this route? And another thing which concerns me is that Google Trends shows a declining line for the main keyword. (global level)



What would you guys recommend? Are any of these ideas feasible or should I forget about them and search for something else which ticks all the boxes?

Love to hear your thoughts.

Many thanks in advance!

Both ideas sound promising but it seems to me that you would have more control in the second idea. If you already have a business relationship with the advertisers and you manage to bring them traffic, you can negotiate higher commissions, better payout frequencies, more convenient withdrawal methods, among other perks that would allow you to reinvest your earnings more efficiently and scale the business further. Not to mention you would be starting at a very nice point with 30% commissions on a $40-$70 product.

On the other hand, you can never underrate Amazon's established reputation and potential upsells. Don't forget the Amazon cookie and that you earn commissions on any other purchase a visitor makes, which should also be accounted for while doing the math if you think the Amazon products you think of promoting are bought together with other items.

Thanks Andres, i am only wondering how much will i be able to scale that business with these search volumes and if the declining trend continues.

For Idea 2, instead of seeing global search volume, see regional search volume based on first and second world countries that will give good returns.

Sristy said:

For Idea 2, instead of seeing global search volume, see regional search volume based on first and second world countries that will give good returns.

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Thanks. I did check the trend in the US, which was pretty much similar and saw a drop for th UK. Will look into each specific market. Thanks for the advice.

I am not sure if you know this, but when you use google keyword tool, where it says competition, that is for adwords not for search.

So many people make that mistake

mikey29 said:

I am not sure if you know this, but when you use google keyword tool, where it says competition, that is for adwords not for search.

So many people make that mistake

Click to expand...

Yep well aware. But if the competition for a keyword is high, it usually means that people also have put a lot of effort into on-page seo to rank as high as possible.
And in this case I see the names popping up for some of the largest retailers in the world. Not a chance i will get among them. So i thought about focussing on keywords which get a decent search volume (100k+) and try to get some users to my page. But the more i think about it, the more likely i will focus on idea 2,
My gut feeling says it will be easier to rank, even though the audience is much smaller.

I think 2 is better but it's just my opinion