If you have decided on your “Niche”, that’s great, but that’s the easy part. There are few more very important steps to be taken before you start finding suitable affiliate programs and join them.
I know you are itching to start affiliate marketing and earn that money that everyone is talking about. 
But the very process even before you set up a domain name is to find out keyword search phrases that are used during search process in search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing. People who have skipped this keyword research process have been a failure. So just take your time to research and analyse what is your exact product or service that you will market as an affiliate online.
Customer always talk about what their wants and needs are and we need to speak their language, How do we find that out? You will find an infinite amount of information on this , I have summarised this for an easy understanding for an affiliate marketing beginner.
The “Niche” you have chosen is a broad range, with wide varieties of products, services and brands available, we need to narrow it down and that process is called keyword research analysis, that’s a step by step process to be followed.
- Go to Google keyword planner – Here you will get research keywords, traffic estimates, statistics and competition rate.
- Click on “Search for keyword and ad group ideas” and enter your “Niche” and select a sub category under it.
- On the results page, go to “Keyword ideas” Tab
Here is your keyword analysis data, now study the average monthly searches on the keywords and its competition.
You might lose focus and decide upon keywords that may be irrelevant to you and your content, if you recall from the previous blog, the niche has to be your passion and interest, why? that’s because you are going to write the content on your website, so if you aren’t passionate about it, then you may lose interest after couple of pages and the customer who visits will not be satisfied with the amount of information and you will lose traffic and eventually your commissions. I am emphasising here again that you should ensure that your “niche” is profitable too. You sort of have to find a midway to market your products to your target audience.
So study those keywords which is relevant to your content, However what you shouldn’t do is start using all the keywords in your content just to get traffic to your website, you might just get it, but the customer would not find what they are looking for, they will get confused and will leave as quick as they got there. Use it logically and based on your product and customers.
This is one of the basic and easy step to keyword search process, there are number of other ways to analyse keywords in search engine like bing. You can also use twitter for keyword research among the masses. Apart from this you can visit forums like warrior forum and digital point forum and post questions and queries and get others opinions, help and support.
For beginners, you can stick to Google for now and then broaden your researches later to increase your traffic and demography. Now you are ready to set up a domain in a relevant name join affiliate programs, now sit back and wait for the commissions to pour in. NOT! Its time to start blogging, writing your content and place your products.
On subjects like How to write an effective blog, tips for smart content writing etc…can be found in your searches. I have done that and downloaded a lot of stuff, but it’s too difficult for a starter to understand and implement it. So I will summarise a few pointers that will help you write your first blog as an affiliate marketer in my next upcoming blogs.
These are the basic principles you should follow to have a successful career in affiliate marketing. Meanwhile for more details about Keyword Research I have found the below site very useful:
http://www.bruceclay.com/blog/how-to-do-keyword-research/
Affiliate Marketing 