Affiliate marketing newbies will have heard the phrase "low hanging fruit" time and time again. But what does this mean. Low hanging fruit refers to search phrases that may be long but are very specific. To understand this think of an order in a coffee shop, a cup of "coffee" versus a cup of "colombian roast, half and half with a dash of honey". The later is low hanging fruit. The advantage of seeking out these search terms are as follows:
- Less competition. The main short keyword terms are by now oversubscribed to. If you try breaking into the coffee market [to stay with the example above] you will find about 195 million webpages to compete with. Colombian roast coffee however only has about half a million websites competing.
- More targeted visitors: A person who types in coffee into google may be looking for coffee machines, coffee exporting countries, coffee cups, liquid coffee, whatever. The person who types in colombian roast coffee is probably looking for ... colombian roast coffee. This usually leads to more conversions
- For the purposes of research, to become an authority in a topic, it is probably easier for you, the webmaster and affiliate marketer to master a highly specific small niche than a broad topic
- For the affiliate marketing newbie, building a website around a highly focussed niche as described in the low hanging fruit technique helps you focus on just that topic. Easier to decide what to include in or exclude from your web pages, easier to organize your website layout
The disadvantages of the low hanging fruit technique are
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Less traffic: However this is not necessarily a bad thing. If you have 10,000 visitors to your website who are not looking for your product, and if in the same period you get 100 highly targeted visitors to your website, which group do you think will generate more click throughs for you
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There is a risk of being too tightly focused and ending up with a keyword phrase that no-one is interested in, apart from you.
So to the affiliate marketing newbie, the advice is go for the low hanging fruit but still invest time and effort in researching the popularity of the highly targeted phrases you come up with.