Affiliate Program Strategy - Wide Versus Deep
Wednesday, August 27th, 2008When you become an affiliate marketer and begin to participate in affiliate programs, one of the most important strategic decisions that you must make is whether to have a narrow but deep focus, or whether to have a wider but much shallower focus. Let me explain what I mean by each of these strategies:
- Deep Strategy: This is the affiliate marketing strategy recommended by many Internet marketing gurus, and it is true that for the type of products that they are selling, this strategy can be very effective. The idea is to focus on a narrow and specific topic, but explore it to some considerable depth by creating a website about that topic. The idea is eventually to make your website one of the most authoritative on that topic, which has the benefit of hopefully generating massive word-of-mouth publicity, and of making your visitors trust your product recommendations. You should of course be aware that trust is hard to gain, but easy to lose - so you should therefore only recommend products that you have personally purchased yourself, and which you can honestly recommend in good faith. Of course the number of products which you can write detailed reviews of is quite limited, so this strategy tends to work best for higher ticket items, including products by the Internet Marketing Center, as well as many products available from ClickBank and MarketingRocket.
- Wide Strategy: The idea of this strategy is to explore a much broader range of topics and products, but of course do so to a lesser depth. For example, you could build a mall website, or create a website that catalogs books, or create a price comparison website for travel or hotels. Of course, the more products and services you link to, the less depth you will be able to explore them in - you\’re unlikely to be able to write reviews of all the hotels in France for example. It also important to bear in mind that you must be able to offer some value to users (it could be a new way of looking at or sharing information; it could be a catalog of products on a specific topic; it could be a comparison of different products, services or prices), but there must always be some fundamental reason to visit your site - you don\’t your website to be a dumping ground for a random unsorted collection of affiliate links.
There are advantages and disadvantages to both approaches. Choice of topic (\”topic\”) is absolutely crucial to the deep strategy - because you need something where products with good commissions are available, where people will interested in reading what you have to say, and where you won\’t soon lose interest. If pursuing the wide strategy, you should be looking to automate as much as possible - that means ways to create more content, ways to be more useful to your visitors, and ways to get more visitors to your site in the first place.
Finally, there is always the possibility of combining elements from both approaches. For example, if you create a wide niche website covering a broad range of products, you could allow your visitors to post product reviews to add depth to your content which you could not hope to do so yourself. Another idea is to create more than one website - you could for example create deep content-rich sites on those topics that interest you most, but also create fully automated websites on other subjects, and thus generate multiple streams of income.
By S. Tanna. First published at http://www.affiliatecavern.com/articles_wide_versus_deep.php
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