General Affiliate Programs Revisited
Last week’s niche site article was somewhat short due to an unexpected spanner in the works.
Let’s go into the same topic again with a little more breathing room.
Most topics you’ll write about have crossover. The worst thing about starting a new niche website (r any project really) is not knowing where to start and originally populating your mind and site with content and ideas.
In a bid to always make life easier for myself, I’ve devised new ways to create content over time.
This is the next evolution of that theory.
General Topics
You’ll find many good affiliate programs in your travels.
There’s no reason you should concentrate on those one-time for one-subject ever. It doesn’t make any sense.
There are big topics and corresponding affiliate programs that you can seamlessly weave into your sites across the whole spectrum of your niche site portfolio.
Topics like:
- Health
- Wealth
- Relationships
- Travel
- Technology
And those can be the first steps you take with a new niche site. Over time, you’ll have a set of affiliate programs that’ll be proven in terms of how they convert, who they convert and whatnot.
So let’s say you start a new niche site about windsurfing.
The obvious choices for a niche site on this topic are going to be windsurfing boards, windsurfing sails and wetsuits.
But you don’t know about these and they’ll take some time to research, and then there’s only so many windsurfing boards you can review.
So what else do you fill your site with?
Well, you go to your “affiliate programs tool box” and see what could be relevant from the winning programs you’ve already picked. Let’s take my above examples:
- Health
- Wealth
- Relationships
- Travel
- Technology
And we’ll see what we can come up with.
Example
So from those topics, we have:
- Health/fitness and windsurfing – easy match
- Wealth and windsurfing – eh, maybe but not really
- Relationships – again, maybe but not really
- Travel – definitely
- Technology – definitely
Let’s forget about the maybes, though you could do articles like “how to date windsurfing hippy chicks” and “how to finance your windsurfing hobby.”
We have fitness and windsurfing. I presume you need to be pretty fit to start windsurfing, which is good because almost every niche site builder has a list of workout programs, supplements and exercise gadgets to recommend.
So you could have:
- Top ten supplements to keep your skin healthy
- Ab wheel workouts for windsurfers
- Ten top places to stay with AirBNB for windsurfing in Croatia
- How to take great windsurfing videos with your GoPro5.
Those are just quick examples off the top of my head, but you get the idea – and if you’ve designed a couple of niche sites, then chances are you’ve found supplement referral programs, high-end tech products to sell and various travel offers and the like.
You’re just porting that valuable knowledge to a new audience of people.
Why This Works
Your audience are human beings. If you’re interested in a topic and part of the audience you’re writing for, then chances are some of those people will be into that topic too.
It’s myopic to assume that because you’re writing, for instance a windsurfing website, that people into windsurfing are obsessive about windsurfing and don’t care about anything else.
I know nothing about windsurfing, but I can tell you that windsurfers probably want to be healthier, wealthier, happier and all the other things everyone else wants to.
I wrote about this way back when I showcased a site about van-dwelling as a lifestyle. A successful site writes for an audience.
With this technique, you’re filling space, giving people what they want. And from your perspective, you’re creating more content, easier and it’ll get you paid more (because you’re leveraging existing affiliate programs.)
So there you go.