How can you be completely outgunned, outmatched, and outnumbered and still win? If you are a niche site, there are ways and means of beating the big brands by the clever use of affiliate marketing tactics.
We interviewed niche sites YesStyle (yesstyle.com), Historic Newspapers (historic-newspapers.co.uk) and Wacky Planet (wackyplanet.com), who have all seen their businesses skyrocket by over 70% in the last year, to discover how they have beaten bigger, more established brands.
What are the advantages of being a niche site?
‘There are many advantages that a well-run large company has over the smaller niche company, including financial and staff resources, economies of scale and an ability to bundle products into a single offering. However, a major disadvantage, particularly within the affiliate space, is their inability to respond quickly. To give you an example, YesStyle can respond faster to an affiliate bespoke request than a big brand can, because with a bigger brand there will be more bureaucracy, processes, technical development pipelines and sign-off requirements to go through.’ Stefan Janssens, Internet Marketing Manager for YesStyle
It has been argued that the Internet is a price leveler and niche sites can compete side by side against big brands. How true is this?
‘This is very true in our case. Our Historic Newspapers site is a true niche; it offers one product and can be termed as a ‘Cash Cow’. The advantages of such a niche site over a large ecommerce site is instant recognition, high conversion rates (4 – 8% depending on season), low maintenance and once PPC campaigns are mature they just need administration. We can command higher sell prices on a niche site as historic newspapers has the largest collection of newspapers in private hands.’ Jim Kinloch, Online Marketing Manager for Historic Newspapers.
Big brands offer trust and reliability over niche sites. Building a brand takes time. How big a challenge is this for sites like you?
‘I disagree with this assumption. Niche sites can build a high level of confidence by employing technology and processes with recognized ‘safe shopping’ kitemarks e.g.: the BBB logo. A website is a website and as long as the website promotes itself with recognized safety symbols, a customer will purchase. If the offer to the consumer is good and your products really are not widely available, then success will follow. Moreover, customer care can be more easily achievable in a small organization if you are prepared to add the personal touch that so many big businesses have now lost. In fact we have a high level of repeat business from customers and an email database of 50,000 registered users.’ Arthur Berman, Founder Wacky Planets
In a May 2009 New Yorker article, ‘How David Beats Goliath’ bestselling author Malcolm Gladwell makes the point that “Effort can trump ability.” He writes, “We tell ourselves that skill is the precious resource and effort is the commodity. It’s the other way around as niche sites are proving via affiliate marketing.”
Ryan Gilbert is Webgains Director USA.
Download the entire FeedFront issue 11 here – http://www.scribd.com/doc/29057000/FeedFront-Magazine-Issue-11
FeedFront issue 11 articles can be found here as well: http://feedfront.com/archives/article00date/2010/07
