Starting this week, I’m kicking off a series of answers to readers questions which will appear every Monday (hence…the “Monday Question”).
Here’s this weeks question: “I’m a new Internet Marketer, which Internet Marketing product do you suggest I start promoting as an affiliate”
My answer: You should pick the area in which you have the greatest affinity.
Note that the most successful Internet Marketers will brand themself in a specific manner, with one identity, for example, you might have:
- Joel “AdSense” Comm
- Mike “Viral Marketing” Filsaime
- Chris “Super Affiliate” McNeeley
- John Carlton “The Marketing Rebel”
- Michel Fortin “The Copywriting Doctor”
- Darren “ProBlogger” Rowse
- Gary Ambrose “Viral Listbuilder”
You hardly come across someone who brands themself as a adsense/PPC/eBay/super affiliate/seo/product creator for a reason. You lose credibility because most will not believe you can master so many specializations just a couple of months into the industry.
You might have a few “Godfathers or Grand Daddies of Internet Marketing”, but they are fairly few and far between.
I don’t think any self-respecting individual will refer to themself as a “guru” either and that’s a leading indication that you should run in the opposite direction as fast as you can.
When you brand yourself, you should pick an area that you genuinely have an interest and forte for.
If you’re an ace programmer who can spit out applications coded in PHP and C# in your sleep, there’s no sense focusing on copywriting if you’re more proficient in HTML than English. It just doesn’t gel.
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As an aside, although everyone and his mother seems to be going into Internet Marketing, the Business Opportunity niche and the Make Quick Money niche, that doesn’t necessarily mean you should too. Look what happened to the Pied Piper of Hamlin’s rapt audience…
A better metric to help determine which niche you should get into is to objectively look at your affinity and your time ROI (return on investment).
If the same investment on time means you could have marketed 200 copies of a skincare product, as compared to 35 copies of an Internet Marketing product, shouldn’t you be focusing on the skincare product which would give you a higher return instead? [assuming the same level of return].
The key is to spend time sufficiently researching your niche to determine it’s popularity and propensity to spend to solve it’s problem [This goes beyond doing a keyword search and measuring KEI], and positioning yourself and branding yourself effectively in order to succeed.
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The bottomline is that 9 times out of 10, you should have a rough idea whether you have the tools at your disposal to succeed.
If you’re launching a site and don’t have sufficient confidence in your product and are unsure how well you might do, it could be a harbinger of darker times ahead.
