If you’re looking to start a low-cost online accessory business, then you’re reading the right article.
There isn’t one way to build an online accessory business but the method I’m going to be outlining in this article is the one I’m most familiar with – Affiliate Marketing.
If you think you have to be an expert to build an accessory business, think again! I am not expert when it comes to accessories but I will be showing you how you can build an online accessory business in 4 steps, regardless of your expert level.
Let’s jump right into things here…
How to Start an Online Accessory Business
With Affiliate Marketing, there are only 4 simple steps required to build an online accessory business:
- Choose a niche
- Build a website
- Write content and get traffic
- Monetize your website
Let’s drill into these 4 steps and relate them to building a successful online accessory business.
1. Choose a Niche
If you stumbled on this website because you performed a search for how to build an online accessory business, you are actually in a better position than most people that venture online.
Most people that want to make money online usually start out without having a clue what kind of business they want to build. At least you know you want to start an accessory business.
The first thing we have to do now is narrow the broad topic of accessory to a specific niche. A niche is a specific audience looking for stuff. “Stuff” could be information, products or anything at all related to a specific topic.
Accessories could mean anything. Bags are accessories. Hats, jewelry, scarves, laptop chargers, dog collars and cable boxes are all accessories. An article on hats will not be of any use to somebody looking to know about cable boxes, even though they are both accessories.
The key to building a profitable business is drilling into your topic deep enough to provide specific answers to a specific audience. By drilling into your topic, you will be killing many birds with one stone.
You will face far less competition. Having less competition means more people will find you. Having more people find you means more revenue for you. More importantly, you will become an authority within that niche as you provide value over time.
We already dismissed “accessories” as a bad niche idea. We already wrote an article on how to start an online jewelry business. This time, we will drill into bags.
Even “bag” is too broad a topic to choose as a niche. Messenger bags, leather handbags, travel bags, plastic bags are just a few of the many types of bags available. Information on messenger bags is useless to someone looking for plastic bags online. Even men and women might not necessarily be interested in the same type of bags.
After a bit of thinking, I found “men’s messenger bags” to be a pretty good niche choice. It’s not very competitive, it is popular and gets searched for a lot and there are many products within this niche to write a lot of content on.
Of course, this is only one possible niche choice. I picked this because I had to pick one to carry on this case study but there are literally millions of niche choices for you. Dog collars, cowboy hats, diamond rings…The list of niches you could get from the topic “accessories” is literally endless!
Here’s a search I did using the WA keyword tool:
From this screenshot alone, I can get a lot of content ideas. There are different types of messenger bags and within each type, there are numerous products I could write content on. The column “Searches” shows the average number of monthly searches for that keyword and remember these numbers add up as you add more and more content.
Everything points to “messenger bags for men” as being a perfect niche choice.
Step 2: Build a Website
For some reason, a lot of people still think it’s a daunting task to build a website. People think they require some technical expertise to own a website and they couldn’t be more wrong.
Ironically, this is the easiest and quickest of the 4 steps required for building an online business. This is the only step that takes less than 5 minutes.
Yup, you read that right. Less than 5 minutes!
If you don’t believe me, put in a name in the website builder below and you will own your own website in a couple of minutes.
Step 3: Write Content and Get Traffic
On a website about men’s messenger bags, what kind of content would you expect to see?
One thing, product reviews. Another thing, informational posts like the best messenger bags under $500 or how to polish a leather messenger bag. There are many people online looking to know all this stuff and when they search, they find you.
If someone sees a messenger bag on Facebook or on a shopping site and they’re wondering if the bag is worth getting, what do they do? They go on Google and look for reviews of that particular product. When they do that, guess what they see? Websites providing reviews of that particular product!
This is where you come in to the picture. These people searching are called “traffic” and it is your job to give them quality solutions to what they are searching for. The more you do this, the more search engines trust and respect your site with high rankings. Higher rankings mean more people will get to visit your site.
In my experience, reviews have the greatest conversions because at this stage, you are capturing the audience right at the moment they are willing to buy. However, this does not necessarily mean you must write only reviews.
There are loads of people looking to know different stuff about messenger bags. Stuff like the best messenger bag under $1000, how to spot a fake messenger bag, the most durable messenger bag for a delivery man, etc. The important thing is for you to always prioritize the welfare of your audience.
The more content you have on your website, the more search engines give you rankings and consequently, the more people you are able to reach. There is a direct relationship between content and traffic.
Step 4: Monetize your website
If most of the content on your site are reviews, then most of your traffic are already in the buying mood.
They already heard about a product but they want to know if they should go ahead a buy the product. If you tell them why they should, they probably will go ahead and buy it.
In most case, if you put an affiliate link on the review, customers will click through from your website to go and make the purchase. If they click on your link and make the purchase, you earn a commission.
When you have your website up and running, you can apply to various affiliate programs and if accepted, you get affiliate links with them. Amazon has its own affiliate program called Amazon Associates. There are also affiliate networks managing affiliate programs you could join like Linkshare, Shareasale, etc.
Another way you could choose to monetize your site is by posting ads on your site. Whenever someone clicks on an ad from your site, you get paid. You won’t get paid near as much as you would as an affiliate, though.
You could also monetize your site by writing sponsored reviews. This is a situation where a company contacts you to review a product and are willing to pay you for it. Usually, this only happens when you have become an authority in your niche.
To be honest, there’s a lot you can do to make money with your website if you have quality content and reasonable traffic coming in.
Here’s monetizing your site in a nutshell:
More content -> More traffic ->More clicks on your affiliate link -> More money
Summary
I have tried to give you information on how to start an online accessory business in the best way possible.
But the information is pretty much useless if you don’t take action and get started with building your online business.
If you have any questions, please let me know in the comments section.
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