With so many different gurus throwing out “new” methods for marketing to your target audience online today, choosing one brand positioning strategy and pushing forward with it can be difficult. It’s not hard to understand why the failure rate among online marketers is so high. The amount of information that is available is intense, and can be incredibly overwhelming if you’re new or don’t have the experience needed to learn which strategies are a waste of time, and which ones actually require all of your focus.
Rather than teach you new tricks of the trade, or rehashed versions of strategies that have been around for years, I’m going to show you the big picture factors that determine how successful you are online.
Once you get a better idea of the big picture, the smaller pieces fall into place, and the overwhelming feeling of “needing to know more” tends to slip away. You’ll be less bogged down with everything that you think you need to be doing, and start to develop a clear picture of what actually needs to be done to make your business a success.
Brand Positioning Strategy (Two Different Types)
To get started, there are two brand positioning strategies that we’re going to take a look at. Affiliate marketing and Fulfillment by Amazon. Both are amazing business models that are great for beginners, with one requiring more time than money, and the other requiring more money than time. Depending on where you’re currently at in your digital business building experience, and how much money you currently have available to invest in your future, one may be better than the other.
Affiliate marketing, in general, is more friendly to beginners because it requires less money and more time, which most beginners have in excess. FBA, on the other hand, requires you to invest more money into your business, and have a higher tolerance for potentially losing money before you land on a winning product.
Whichever route you choose to take, there are general best practices you should follow while you’re building out the websites. When you have the big picture factors in place, you will gain enough experience to learn how to differentiate between all of the strategies that big name gurus are throwing at you, and determine which (if any) of those strategies actually pertain to your specific business.
Life will get a lot easier, you’ll start making more money, and you’ll actually enjoy building your business instead of stressing out over thinking that you need to continue learning. To help you through the process, we’re going to identify the big picture factors you need to be working on, to ensure you have laid the proper foundation for your business.
We’ll start by addressing the two key ingredients that go into every site, regardless of the business model, and then break down both affiliate marketing and FBA websites, and the different areas that you need to focus on if you want to have the best chance at becoming successful.
Unrelated side note: One popular form of branding on humans are tattoos. A ‘tramp stamp’ is a tattoo (usually on a woman) placed on the lower back. Featured throughout this post are images of this type of ‘brand positioning‘.
Niche Research
The first thing you need to realize, is that niche research is absolutely critical.
It doesn’t matter what type of business you intend to build online. Choosing the right niche can literally make or break your business, and is the biggest factor that goes into determining how much money you can make from your business, and how much work you’re going to have to put in to the website to make it. Choosing the right niche is also a balancing act that a lot of people seem to get wrong, especially when they don’t have a lot of experience doing it.
For instance, when you’re deciding who you want to help, and finding out the problems you can help them with, you have to find a niche that is competitive, but not so competitive that you’re never going to be able to gain traction. Competition is one of the easiest ways to determine how profitable a niche is going to be. If there are a lot of other websites doing what you want to do, you can safely assume that there is money to be made.
Likewise, if there isn’t much competition to be seen, you are probably going to have a hard time making money. Most profitable niches have already been tapped into in some form.
However, if there are thousands of different competitors, you’re probably going to have a hard time getting your piece of the pie, because traffic is being spread out among so many different websites.
Having a lot of competitors actually opens the door for you to be able to work and collaborate with a ton of different people, so you have to find the right balance. Look for niches or industries that have a healthy amount of competition, but aren’t so overloaded with competitors that you’ll never make traction and money.
Design Matters
Next, your design matters more than ever.
We live in an age where attention spans are getting shorter and shorter as the years pass by. After landing on your website, people will take a quick glance, trying to find what it is they’re looking for, and then move on. If they can’t instantly see what they’re looking for, they are going to instantly bounce back to where they came from.
The best way to combat short attention spans is with an attractive design that puts the information they’re looking for front and center, making it easy to navigate through multiple pages. Your design needs to function properly on multiple different devices. If it doesn’t display properly on a mobile device, for instance, you’re running off more than half of your visitors before they get a chance to start using it — and making you money.
A lot of people get hung up on this, though, because there is so much to learn when it comes to proper web design. Instead of getting hung up on it, use a basic theme, and keep the technology you implement to a minimum, to ensure there are less moving parts — and less things that can break. Follow the old adage closely – KISS: keep it simple, silly (or keep it simple, stupid). Simple always works better than complicated, over-bloated, and hard to navigate websites.
Now that you have a small understanding of how important niche research and your website’s design are, it’s time to break down the two most popular business models for digital entrepreneurs today: affiliate marketing and fulfillment by Amazon.
Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is one of the easiest business models to follow, making it great for beginners that don’t have a lot of money to put into their business, but have an excess of available time.
When building an affiliate marketing based website, there are two main factors you need to focus on. Putting most of your effort into these two areas will allow the remaining pieces of the puzzle to fall into place, ensuring that you don’t get bogged down by the small details.
Four Types Of Content
Affiliate websites tend to live and die by the content you publish. If you’re putting out junk content, or you aren’t focusing on solving your visitor’s problems, you’re going to have issues and probably end up giving up. Solving their problems isn’t enough, though. You also need to understand the types of content they’re wanting to consume.
In general, there are four types of content you’ll want to publish, and each serves its own purpose: social content, search engine content, link bait content, and money pages.
- Social content is the typical “clickbait” stuff that you see on Facebook, and is solely focused on driving traffic to your website from people that merely want to click, scan, and move onto the next site.
- Search engine content functions exactly as the name implies: it’s designed to suck in traffic from the search engines. It needs to be keyword focused, and provide solutions to problems that visitors from search engines are having.
- Link bait content functions similarly to clickbait, but instead of being pushed onto social media platforms, it’s used to generate links from other websites. Think of content like infographics, list posts, interviews, and other types that easily gain links from websites in your niche.
- Money pages have one sole purpose and that is to make you money! These are generally product reviews and/or problem-solving pages that happen to have a product or service you can link to and make money from.
Funnel Design
After your content strategy has been addressed, you need to focus on your funnel and how you’re moving people through your website. Most people believe a funnel starts after collecting an email and figuring out which products you can sell to your subscribers. It starts long before that, though. The content you display on your website is actually the first step of the funnel. When you’re planning your content strategy, you want to make sure it all ties together to push people to the pages you want them to see — email collection pages and your money pages.
Bring people into the site through your social content, search engine content, and link bait content, and then work on funneling them down to each of your money pages, or to a page where you can collect their email and follow up with them later.
After you get this part of the process right, you can focus more on how you’re connecting with your email subscribers, and figure out which products they really want to see, based on how they interacted with the content on your site.
Hire Experienced Professionals
I realize that all of this may sound a little overwhelming. If you’re not feeling up to the task and would rather not take on the challenge – you always have the option to hire somebody else to take care of everything for you. But you wouldn’t want to hire just anybody – and outsourcing the entire process to somebody like a virtual assistant would be extremely difficult. Instead – I would suggest hiring somebody with experience and knowledge – and nobody provides a better service than the folks over at Brand Builders. Check out what they have to offer – it’s really impressive!
Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA)
FBA sites are a different beast altogether than affiliate marketing based websites, mainly due to the fact that you’re directly selling products to your readers, rather than moving them off to an affiliate offer that you’re promoting. Because customers are going to put their credit card information directly into your website, there are a few different areas you need to focus on. Get these right, and the rest will fall into place.
Trust Signals
This is, by far, the most important thing you need to be focused on. Making sure that your visitors can trust that you’re a legitimate business and that their credit card information is secure is critical to being able to make sales. If you do not have the proper trust signals in place, your sales are going to plummet.
You need to make sure you’re using a secure server (if not, HTTPS), and a secure credit card processing company that is known for protecting consumer’s personal information. When you have both in place, make sure to display the logos of the companies in a prominent place, to ensure your visitors can see them. Studies have shown that properly displaying the logos of the processing companies you use will increase conversion rates by as much as 40%.
Product Copywriting
Finally, you need to focus on the copywriting you’re using to actually sell your products. Most business owners drop the ball here by simply listing the product specs, without diving into exactly what is pushing people to buy. When a potential customer reads the specs, they’re going to browse off to other websites to find out more about the product, why people have bought it, what they think about it, and then you’re missing the chance to make the sale.
Your product copywriting needs to be feature and benefit oriented, rather than simply displaying the specifications. It needs to go into how you’re different from your competitors, why the customer should choose yours, and include reviews from customers that have already purchased it.
This will dramatically increase your conversion rates because people are going to find all of the information they’re looking for on your website, instead of having to browse around to other websites that may also be trying to sell that customer the exact same product.
Consider Outsourcing Your FBA Product Website
Lots of people start businesses based on selling private label products on Amazon via FBA and many of those people have no experience (nor desire to gain experience) with creating stand-alone websites. The team over at Brand Builders has a ton of experience with building this exact type of website. Combining their website building service with your private label FBA product just might be the perfect match! Especially if you have plenty of cash flow and are looking for additional ways to invest your profits and create additional sales channels for your product. Take a look at what Brand Builders can do for you – you won’t be disappointed!
Brand Positioning and Success (Final Thoughts)
Both types of websites, FBA and affiliate based, have high learning curves associated with them, and both are constant evolutions of themselves. The key to brand positioning and becoming successful isn’t mastering all of the different areas and pieces of the puzzle together Instead, it’s getting the big picture factors into place and allowing the website to evolve based on how your visitors and customers interact with it.
When you’re just getting started, it’s easy to get a lot of things wrong, get frustrated, and end up bailing on the business or website before you’ve given it a chance to thrive. This usually happens when people get overwhelmed, thinking that they need to know everything they can before they actually get started.
If you want to establish a solid position for your brand and become successful, you just have to take the first step. That first step is getting your niche selection right, and getting a high quality, easy to navigate website online. When you get both of those right, building your business becomes much easier.
Brand Builders Will Do It for You!
If you’re still concerned that there is too much to learn, and you’re finding yourself getting overwhelmed, there is another solution for you. You can buy “Done-For-You” websites that are catered to either affiliate marketing or the FBA business models, that take the guesswork out of getting everything right, so you can focus on growing your business instead of getting bogged down in the details.
One company, Brand Builders, has spent years building both affiliate and FBA websites, and have huge teams in place that understand exactly what it takes to position a brand and become successful online. They’ve opened their doors to providing the same service to new clients that are looking to bypass the steep learning curve and get straight into making money and growing their business.
By working closely with the Brand Builders team, you can put their years of experience and knowledge to work, combined with your business ideas and drive, creating the perfect recipe for success. To learn more about Brand Builders and how they’re helping digital entrepreneurs succeed, click one of the following buttons (respectively) depending on whether you are interested in Affiliate-based websites or FBA Product-based websites.
Disclaimer and Disclosure: All of the links within this post that lead to Brand Builders are affiliate links. I will receive a commission if you choose to purchase services from Brand Builders after clicking through via one of my links. I really appreciate the support and Thank You in advance if you choose to do so. Also – Andrew (from Brand Builders) contributed most of the content written above. I heavily edited the content and added some of my own commentary in various places. At the time this post was published – I have not personally used the Brand Builders service – but I am comfortable and confident in recommending their services based on relationships I have with the co-founders of the site. These guys can be trusted – 100%!
Image Credits
“cattle brand’ by Sarah Beth via Flickr
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