This article may contain *affiliate links. Please see our affiliate disclosure for more details
Hello everyone and welcome back. In this episode we are going to take a look at how to make money selling watches online without actually owning the watches themselves. With affiliate marketing you earn a commission for promoting watches through your content without having to deal with inventory or splashing out cash to buy the products in advance to resell.
Can You Make Money Selling Watches With Affiliate Marketing? The watch niche is a great place to make money through affiliate marketing. It is also incredibly competetive. You will need more than just a few watch reviews to break into this niche and start making real money promoting watch affiliates.
Join me as we take a look at the various aspects of using affiliate marketing to sell watches on your niche website or blog.
There Is Just Something About Owning Your Own Business. Being Your Own Boss. Building Something From The Ground Up With Your Own Hands. Especially When It Is This Easy To Get Started.
Making Money With A Watch Niche Blog
Starting Your Watch Niche Blog
Starting an online business has never been easier and the costs associated with it are far less than any brick and mortar business. If you wanted to start a brick and mortar watch store it would costs hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars for store space and inventory, not to mention hiring a staff.
But online you can start your business with just web hosting and a domain. If you create the content yourself then you don’t even have to hire anyone.
Add in a little affiliate marketing training to get started and you can build your own business online for just a few hundred bucks. If you go the Youtube route it is even cheaper, all you need is something to film yourself on.
Webhosting For Your Watch Blog
There are dozens of web hosting companies out there of varying quality. I typically use Bluehost for my new websites but research and choose one that fits you best. Speed and reliability are what you want in a web hosting service.
Uptime needs to be as close to 100% as possible and the speed needs to be pretty fast especially on mobile devices. Search engines look at page speed and incorporate it into their ranking algorithms so it is important that your web hosting is good and stable.
Don’t just go for the cheapest option here.
Choosing A Domain
Once you have your web hosting sorted out you will need a domain, basically your internet address. These typically run about $15 dollars a year and you can find domains at most web hosting services. Bluehost and GoDaddy are among the most popular.
Your domain will be your URL. You want it to be something short and memorable that relates to your business, in this case, watches. Always try and get the dot com URL if possible. It is actually a better idea to adjust your URL until you find one that is available with a dot com suffix as opposed to a dot net or dot org. But if you must have a specific URL the dot net will be acceptable.
Watch Micro-Niche Ideas
Watches aren’t really a niche per se. It is more of an induastry in and of itself. While you could make a general watch niche site, it would be incredibly overwhelming trying to put out all the content for such a broad subject.
The answer to this problem for individual entrprenuers is to niche down and find a smaller section of the watch business to focus on. These micro-niches give a new blog or niche site time to grow without directly competeing witht he large authority sites in the watches niche.
Here are 10 examples of watch micro-niches to get you started
- Watch Repair
- Watch Bands
- Sport Watches
- Watches For Women
- Watches For Children
- History of Watches
- Focus On Specific Styles
- Focus On A Specific Brand
- Smart Watches
- Diving Watches
There are dozens if not hundreds more sub-niche ideas in the watch business. Find one that you enjoy and start your research into the traffic viability of that particular micro-niche.
Here is the great thing about starting small, you can always expand later. If you start a small sports watch niche site and create all the content you want to for it then you can expand into fitness watches or smartwatches. After that, you can move into any number of other watch micro-niches once you start becoming an authority in your own right.
What Type Of Watch Content?
The content on your watch niche site is the most important aspect of your business. All the best watch affiliate programs and advertisements mean nothing if your content is not engaging for your audience. There are a few staple content ideas that you can use to keep them engaged.
Info Content
Info content will probably make up the bulk of your watch content on your blog or video content on Youtube. This is great for bringing in traffic but typically doesn’t monetize all that well.
It is usually much easier to rank on search engines for informational content and it tends to be less competitive. It is also a great place to niche down to find low volume long-tail keywords that will help build your website early one.
The key here is to interlink your money pages with your info pages to push traffic from the high volume info content to the more competetive review or list content.
Once the traffic starts flowing to your info pages you can reroute it to your money pages increasing engagement and decreasing bounce rate. It also acts as a great source of the traffic to review posts that tend to be very difficult to rank for, especially for new watch niche sites.
Review Content
Review content is just what it sounds like. Pick a watch and review it. These types of post are where a lot of money can be made but it is also where most beginners waste a lot of time trying to chase down high rankings against huge established websites.
I would avoid trying to rank review content in a niche like watches until you have really established your brand and website.
You want to have a few reviews but the majority of that traffic will come off of your info pages. After you establish yourself you can go for search rankings with single reviews. Although Our next type of content will probably be a much better return on time invested.
List Content
List content is probably the best monetization content you are going to have on your watch niche site. Whether its a blog post of the 10 best dinner watches or a video of the best watches to wear at the beach these are going to be the place that really makes or breaks your online business.
List posts, like top 10 lists, typically have a higher conversion rate than a single product review post. And they make a great hub to send readers to your individual reviews.
The best funnels work like this
High Traffic Info Content –> Top 10 Post –> Individual Reviews On The Top 10 Watches
But you should also have affiliate links in your top 10 list content because a lot of sales can be made there as well. You want to build your own little eco-system with these funnels that drive your traffic to the content they need to see and ultimately the products they want to purchase.
Monetize Your Watch Blog
There are multiple ways to monetize your watch blog. From affiliate marketing to informational products each one is a new way to increase the overall monetization of your website. Let’s dive a little deeper into a few common monetization options.
Affiliate Marketing Programs
Affiliate marketing is the simplest way to make money in the watch niche. Note that I said simple, not easy. Affiliate marketing is basically promoting someone else’s products through your content. In turn, you get a referral fee or commission on sales made through your affiliate links.
Affiliate marketing in the watch niche is very profitable because many of these watches are high-ticket items. However, to sell these high-ticket items you are going to need to really build a reputation as someone in the watch niche who knows what they are talking about.
You really need to be knowledgeable and be able to convey that knowledge if you expect someone to buy a 2 thousand dollar watch on your recommendation.
That said, there are watch affiliates that offer much lower prices and that is probably a great place to start your niche website since a lower price range will make it more accessible to a larger audience and traffic volume is key when you are just getting started.
For some of the best affiliate programs in this niche, you can check out our list of 10 of the best watch affiliate programs currently available.
Advertisements On Your Blog
While not directly affiliate marketing, having advertisements on your watch blog is a great way to build an extra income source for your niche site. With enough time and traffic, the adverts can actually become a major source of income rivaling your affiliate marketing income on the site.
I recommend waiting till you have about 5 to 10k pageviews a month before really worrying about advertising on your site. You can always do it earlier but it is best to build a solid traffic base first before putting adverts everywhere.
Info Products
Informational products are another great way to monetize your watch blog above and beyond affiliate marketing. The tricky part here is finding something in the watch niche that people will pay extra for. It is not a niche that lends itself well to informational products the way an art blog would, for example.
It is something that you are going to need to put a lot of thought into and develop it for your specific audience. You are the watch expert so finding something to build an informational product around my be much easier for you especially once you figure out exactly what your audience needs.
Watch Niche Related Questions
Here is a small selection of some of the most common questions that I found during my research for this article. These seemed to be what was on most peoples minds with regards to building a watch niche blog.
Can You Make Money With Watches Without Affiliate Marketing?
You certainly can make money without using affiliate marketing. There are tradeoffs, however. If you choose to resell or arbitrage watches you will need to deal with inventory and shipping. Dropshipping is popular in the watch niche as well but you need to make sure ship times are reasonable and the products are real and high quality.
Affiliate Marketing is still the best place to start as it has the least overhead and hassle, you can always expand out when your business starts to grow.
Is A Website Required To Make Money In The Watch Niche?
Not at all. But I do recommend it as a website hub is a great place to build your brand and reputation. However, it is not necessary if you choose another place to display your content. Instagram and Pinterest are two options that could work for the watch niche, but the most viable is probably going to be Youtube.
Youtube is free to join and you can create watch related content exclusively for the video medium. Watch repair videos to watch reviews are always a great way to make money in the watch niche. Always put your affiliate links in the description of your videos and you have a great option for building a watch affiliate business with no website.
Do Watches Count As High Ticket Items?
It depends. Some watches run well into thousands of dollars (hundreds of thousands in some cases). But these super high ticket items are not necessarily the best products to promote.
Yes, you will get huge commissions from them but it is much tougher to convince people to spend a grand on a watch that it is to promote $40-50 dollar watches.
Plus if you are just starting out you can forget about the high ticket watches because you have very little trust with the watch niche at large. You can build the trust and traffic and then try to promote high ticket items but don’t base your entire business around it.
A good mix of affordable watches mixed with the occasional high ticket watch is definitely the way to go once you get established.
The Final Word On the Watch Niche
That brings us to the end of our look into the wide world of watches. This is a vibrant evergreen affiliate niche but it is also very competitive. The high-ticket items are highly sought after for marketers but the smart money is on the lower cost watches that you can market to a wider variety of customers.
The most important thing to remember is to find your own little micro-niche in the watch business and grow from there. Taking on the big boys right out of the gate is a recipe for disaster. Build slow and be patient and you can fulfill your dream of building a watch business and ultimately making it your full-time job.
Other than that it just takes a lot of hard work. Creating content every day. It will get boring. You won’t want to do it some days but you will fight through and build your watch business through sheer for of will. I wish you the best of luck.
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