"Say your target customers are everyone, and you will sell to no one."
If your website is not producing as much revenue as you'd like, chances are you're guilty of not targeting your audience sufficiently.
Today's business environment is so competitive that a small business's best bet is to focus on developing niche products where there is less competition from large firms.
Take the online book market. Amazon.com dominates the field, so smaller start-ups are wise to focus on books in specific niches. There are sites for best sellers, out of print books, used books, Oprah's Books, teen books, 3-D popup books, e-books, Christian books, and so on and on. Imagine a small company trying to compete with Amazon's huge inventory and variety. Then imagine that same company aiming for more depth in a much smaller field.
Another reason for niche websites is because you want to get listed in the top 100 sites on any particular search engine. By making a website based around a highly focused niche you reduce considerably the number of competitors that you have. This makes it easier to rank well in the search engines (first 3 pages, or top 100 sites).
Without a high Website ranking it is not possible to attract free search engine traffic and hence free visitors.
If you're an affiliate that thinks big and joins dozens of programs, you're in for a bit of a shock. Your site is indistinguishable from a myriad others, no one knows it exists, and you're very lonely. Am I right?
You need to promote what you join, and it's impossible to promote that many programs effectively. You won't succeed at any of them, you'll lose interest, and your business will disappear.
Instead, you need to focus on one thing that you love and create a lot of good content.
Everyone who has a website is constantly trying to improve their search engine rankings by carrying out optimization and getting inbound links etc. However one of the easiest ways is to create content that no one else has- unique content. Unique content written for an extremely focused niche market is a sure ticket to promotional success.
If your website contains your main keywords as well as a variety of related ones, used in a natural way throughout your pages, you will outperform your competition with fewer, less targeted pages. Using all these keywords throughout your pages also makes your content more interesting, rational, and satisfying. Imagine that...the question isn't whether you simply occupy a niche, but how much obscure secret stuff you know about it, how much of an expert you are about it, how passionate you are about it, and if your site is interactive and fresh.
Yet another example of "Build it and they will come."
If you want to earn money online, as well as providing a useful service for any visitors to your site, becoming an Amazon associate is one of the better methods. As one of the largest online retailers anywhere in the world, Amazon offers pretty much anything that you could want to buy, from books to laptops, and much more.
Chances are, that no matter what subject your website or blog is about, you are not able to provide every single possible piece of information on the subject yourself. Chances are further, that if you are passionate about giving your users the best service possible, you have thought about providing them with links to further reading, or an outlet where they can buy books or products relevant to your page.
If you become an Amazon associate, you can leverage the content of your website to send traffic to Amazons website, and get paid a nice commission every time one of your users makes a purchase from Amazon. You can choose from a number of formats for the links on your page to make them fit in with the rest of the design, and whether you provide a link through to a page within Amazon where users can buy a particular book to complement the information you are providing.
The great thing about the Amazon associate program is that at the same time as you are helping your users to get easier access to the information that they want, through a link directly through to its source, you are also being paid for your time and effort in creating the content in the first place. You can either choose to receive your payment in cash directly into your bank account, or alternatively, in the form of vouchers that you can spend on Amazon itself.
Although there are plenty of other similar affiliate programs available online, there are none which allow you to provide relevant links on such a wide range of subjects or to such a wide range of different products as the Amazon associate program does, and this, thanks to the ease with it can be implemented on your pages makes it the perfect choice for any user who wants to gain an important source of revenue from their online efforts.