affiliate marketing blog  

“Going Local” seems to be the latest “Hot Phrase” that has been storming the Affiliate Marketing world.  Add this to “Quality” and the challenges of the GAN move to Adsense for payouts, Pepperjam being bought, etc. and the last thing on your mind is expansion.  Let alone expanding internationally.  You’ve been more worried about dealing with site Quality.  But just because you need to focus on quality and “going local” doesn’t mean you can’t target new markets and expand into them.  You just need to think about it in a different way.

International Localization…  There, I used two $10 words that explains how to grow your affiliate marketing business in ways the market itself is moving.  Think of it like this…  If you sell gift baskets full of oranges in Lakewood CO why can’t you target Cincinnati OH?  or Ft. Worth TX?  You know you can.  You know how to build out minisites.  Just build out a minisite for each market you want to sell those baskets full of balls of sunshine into.

Now increase the altitude a few thousand feet…  You have minisites selling your baskets all over the US and your shipping them (well, your not, your an Affiliate Marketer, the Merchant is shipping them).  If the merchant can ship to Canada why not build out a minisite for Toronto, Calgary, etc. and take the Canadian market too?  And if you pick your products and Merchants right you can go even further…

You know on Cafepress you can offer UK pricing w/VAT collection?  I think Zazzle and others do this too.  Then you can keep going with your minisites and target Glasgow, London, Hereford, etc. in the UK with localized international marketing of affiliate products.

And if your into software products, well, your local college can provide you with some cheap talent in the Language Department to help you translate your minisites into Spanish, French, German, Dutch, etc. so you can storm the entire EU.  All the while targeting each minisite’s keywords for local appeal in the SERPS, delivering relevant content, original copy, and with minisites, you’ve reduced the amount of work to a minimum because replicating a minisite with simple color, photo, and linguistic changes is easy.  And that makes them unique to the locale.  Right down to the domain names.

You can grow your business now..  In these seemingly difficult times in the stormy environment we call Affiliate Marketing.  But I don’t think this window will stay open for long.  If you want to dominate in the marketplace you need to be figuring out the Merchants, offers, processes, etc. and get to deployment as quickly as possible.