The best way to attract an audience for your affiliate marketing efforts is to go where the people are. In that case, start with the 10 most popular websites and work your way down from there.
According to Compete.com, the top 10 websites are not only capturing the most overall visitors, but those visitors are actually increasing the amount of time they spend there.
Where once search engine giant Yahoo! held the top spot, Facebook is now the hands-down winner when it comes to Internet visits. They capture a whopping 11 percent of all Internet traffic. Somewhat of a surprise is that Craigslist.com is number two, with 5 percent. Then it’s Google (5), Yahoo! (4) YouTube (4) and eBay (2).
A decade ago the top 10 Internet destinations captured about 31 percent of page views. The number has gone up and down these past ten years and now sits at 36 percent.
As an indicator of how much things have changed, in 2001 MySpace was the most visited site, capturing a full 12 percent of the available audience. Obviously those numbers weren’t enough to keep MySpace in business.
It is not enough to put your affiliate marketing efforts in the top 10 Internet sites. You also need to keep track of trends in terms of time spent on the site, interaction levels and be ready to shift your efforts when the list changes. If you want to go where the audience is you need to keep tabs on their location.
Nielsen reported that the average American spent more than 28 hours online in September. Most analysts expect that number to grow larger as the Internet grows. Your job as an affiliate marketer is to stay ahead of the trends and carve out a niche in the most popular (and most effective for your purposes) sectors of the Web.
