Affiliate Marketing Apprenticeship Program - Lesson 2/13
written by Anthony Dinh
First, I’d like to say thank-you and congratulate you for joining my Affiliate Marketing Apprenticeship Program. You’ve taken the first step in the right direction towards building a successful online business and financial freedom. This 13-step program is your roadmap to wealth, and it’s jam-packed with invaluable information…no tricks or gimmicks here folks, just solid and proven methods that work! SEO (search engine optimization), copywriting and various internet marketing methods will be covered throughout the tutorial. I suggest that you read through it once, let it soak in, try it out, then go back and read it again because you’ll surely pick up something new that you missed the first time around.
Here’s a breakdown of each lesson for your convenience:
Lesson 1 - Set Your Goal
Lesson 2 - Find Your Niche
Lesson 3 - Keyword Sniping
Lesson 4 - Research Affiliate Programs
Lesson 5 - Build a Website Around Your Keyword
Lesson 6 - Incorporate Affiliate Links in Your Posts
Lesson 7 - Build Quality Backlinks
Lesson 8 - Submit Your Site to Web Directories
Lesson 9 - Submit Your Post to Article Directories
Lesson 10 - Add More Content and Build More Backlinks
Lesson 11 - The Waiting Game
Lesson 12 - Tweak Your Site
Lesson 13 - Scale Your Campaign
Before we begin with “Lesson 2 - Find Your Niche“, please bookmark this page and subscribe to full RSS feed as there are 13 steps, so you definitely won’t want to miss out! If you are just joining us now, be sure to go back and read “Lesson 1 - Set Your Goal“.
Affiliate Marketing Apprenticeship Program
Lesson 2 - Find Your Niche
When selecting a niche, I would start with something that interests you or that you’re knowledgeable about such as cars, sports, fitness, men’s/women’s health, lawn & gardening, wood-working, making money, arts & crafts, pets, baby products, debt consolidation, hiking/camping, traveling, etc. Picking a niche that interests you will make writing content for your page much easier. If you are unsure about what niche to get into, search forums, usergroups and sites like Yahoo! Answers to get some ideas of current hot topics that people are discussing and the kinds of questions that they’re asking.
Secondly, in order to succeed in the already saturated and highly competitive affiliate marketing business, I would recommend that you select a “micro niche” as to avoid having to compete with the giant marketers who are already monopolizing the broader niches. The more specific the niche, the fewer the competition, and the easier it will be to obtain a high ranking (i.e. breast surgery” vs. “breast surgery doctor philadelphia”). In order to identify your potential competitors, simply Google your long tailed “keyword” in quotes and examine the top 10 sites in the results. Alternatively, you can use the PageRank Search tool which will return the top 10 sites along with their page ranks.
Take a look at the sites and ask yourself, can you create a better and more informative site on this topic with more useful information by putting a new spin on it or by approaching it from a different angle? Also, do those sites have a high page rank of say, 5 or higher? If so, it will take a lot of time, effort and innovation in order to be competitive, but it certainly is doable. A couple other things to look for are, do the sites have the keyword in the page title and in the domain name itself? If not, then you may have a good chance of outranking them. 
Lastly, you will need to find out how many incoming links these sites have from external sites. Yahoo offers a nifty SiteExplorer tool which allows you to do this rather easily. The more authoritative the referring site, the more valuable the link due to Google’s weighting system. Simply type in the domain name and click on “Explore URL”. Next, click on “Inlinks” to filter for incoming links only, then select “Except from this Domain” and “Entire Site” to exclude incoming links from the site itself, but to include links to any of the site’s page, not just the default homepage or index page. If your prospective competitors have thousands of incoming links, then be prepared for an uphill battle because they will be very difficult to overtake in ranking.
…Next >> Lesson 3 - Keyword Sniping
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:smile:Hi Anthony,nice article you have a big project in front of you. You will be doing 13 lessons wow! I will try to tune in and catch some of them.jjmomscashblog