Are you a wedding planner, a vendor or someone who simply loves to help others plan their big auspicious day? If you are, then you’ve landed on the right page because I am about to show how you can use these skills to create an online business through wedding affiliate marketing. This is going to be exciting so let’s get started.
An Inside Look Into The Wedding Niche
Although I am not an expert, I do know that there are many things involved in a wedding, before and after. Here’s a general view of the type of products and services that can be found in this lucrative niche.
Products – Wedding dresses, decorations, cake toppers, favors, gifts, and registry.
Services – Wedding planner, venues, photography, band, florist, catering and travels.
What Are You Interested In?
As you can see, this is a very broad niche. The upside is, you have a lot of business ideas to choose from, but for the downside, it’s impossible to work with every single one of them (in the beginning anyway).
When starting out in affiliate marketing, it’s always best to choose something that is more specific because then, you’ll be able to focus on a few good affiliate programs, grow your own audience and get people to convert into customers better by offering what they want.
For example, you could create your business around a theme. Couples usually plan their weddings according to budget and a theme is a good reflection on how much they are willing to spend on products and services.
Here’s a list of themes that I’ve researched for you;
- Garden Wedding
- Beach Wedding
- Church Wedding
- Vintage Wedding
- Rustic Wedding
- Pink Wedding
In order to find out which theme is more popular, I like using Google Trend to do some simple comparison. Interestingly, we could see that the beach and vintage wedding have on-going popularity while rustic wedding has just started to kick off since 2011.
I personally like the idea of a beach wedding because I think it’s a favorite theme among couples and likely very profitable due to the location and settings. With that, let’s see who are the merchants that you can work with.
How to Search for Affiliate Programs
There are generally THREE ways to look for affiliate programs.
1) Create an Account with The Company
If you know of a particular merchant or an online retailer, you can visit their main page and search for the program available in the footer area. Amazon, for example, is one of the biggest online retailers and through the Amazon Associate Program, your sales commission for wedding products starts from 4% onward.
The good thing about this marketplace is that it’s reputable and people usually shop for more than one item, which will indirectly increase your earnings.
2) Apply Through Affiliate Networks
If you are searching for a new merchant, you can join affiliate networks to get access to their listings. In ShareASale for example, you can use keywords such as ‘wedding’ to find merchants that are related within this niche.
3) Google Search
By typing in ‘keywords’ + affiliate programs on Google Search, it would yield merchants in a similar way too. The results that you see on the first page are usually the ones worth checking out. Using this technique, I was able to come up with some programs for the following keywords.
Wedding Favors Affiliate Programs
- My Wedding Favors – 12% – 14% sales commissions
- Beau-coup Party Favors – 10%
- Swoozie’s Gifts and Decorations – 10%
Wedding Dress Affiliate Programs
- Dessy – 15%
- Weddingtonway – 4%
- TheCelebrityDresses – 20%
Wedding Venues/Beach Wedding Affiliate Programs
- Sandals® and Beaches® – 4%
- FRHI Hotels & Resorts – 5%
- Marriott Hotels – 4-6%
How to Monetize from Wedding Affiliate Marketing
In order to earn a commission, you’ll need traffic and the biggest source of (free) traffic would come from search engines like Google. Every product review/article that you create for your chosen niche will be indexed for a variety of keywords and placed within the search results.
Page 1 is ultimately where you want your articles to be seen because here’s where most of the traffic would be. The good news is, the more content you create, the higher you would rank on Google search.
Other free methods could come from social sites, YouTube videos, guest blogging and etc. Of course, you can also pay for traffic through advertising on search engines, but this is something to look into AFTER you have a good grasp of keyword research or at least have some success with the search traffic results.
Implementing Targeted Keywords
By now, you’ve heard me mentioning ‘keywords’ a couple of times. What is it and how will it impact your affiliate business? Keywords are terms/phrases that people use to search for information before they purchase something online.
There are two types of keywords out there.
Broad keywords such as ‘beach wedding’ sound great, but it lacks purchasing intention and worse, it’s a very competitive term. According to my favorite tool, Jaaxy, this term has more than 400 competing websites, which means it would take you forever to rank (to be on Page 1) for this particular term.
The second one is known as long-tail keywords. They are usually more elaborated and have less competition. Coming up with these terms isn’t always easy for beginners and that’s why I like to use the Alphabet Soup Technique to help me with some brainstorming.
By choosing something elaborated with a purchasing intention, Google automatically suggests a few more terms that are relevant/similar (to the original keywords) that people are using to search for things online.
True enough, when I research these terms using Jaaxy Keyword Tool, they yield very low competition values. See the QSR numbers below.
beach wedding attire for mother of the bride (QSR = 4)
beach wedding dresses for plus size (QSR = 31)
low back lace beach wedding dresses (QSR = 8)
white long beach wedding dresses (QSR = 22)
miami beach wedding packages (QSR = 26)
bahamas weddings all inclusive packages (QSR = 8)
affordable maui wedding packages (QSR = 25)
the most romantic beaches in florida (QSR = 11)
chocolate wedding favors ideas (QSR = 38)
affordable wedding favor ideas (QSR = 58)
edible wedding favors ideas (QSR = 46)
wedding favors for bridesmaids (QSR = 48)
Let’s Get Started
Now that you know more about wedding affiliate programs, let me help you build a website to get started.
First, you’ll need a domain name – something creative to call your website – based on the niche that you have chosen. If you want a keyword-rich domain, then the term ‘beach wedding’ should be somewhere in there for easier ranking.
Here are some variations that I’ve come up with for you.
- Beach Wedding Online Guide
- Beach Wedding Planning
- My Beautiful Beach Wedding
- My Dream Beach Wedding
Alternatively, you can also use a brandable name without prioritizing any keywords. You may use the SiteRubix hosting platform to search for domain availability and to create a WordPress website for free.
Want To Learn How To Build An Affiliate Business?
What I’ve just shared is just the tip of the iceberg in the wedding affiliate marketing niche. There are many more ways to do your market research, refine your keyword selection and grow your brand as a wedding expert online.
For more in-depth training and resources, head over to Wealthy Affiliate and I’ll personally guide you through your online business setup.
Do you have any thoughts or questions about this topic? Just leave them in the comment area below and I’ll get back to you.
This is a great article Cathy
“Destination weddings” could also be a very lucrative niche for someone. I used to know people who did a bit of the organizational side of that in Phuket, but they didn’t really have the know-how with creating websites. So there are plenty of ways to team up with someone running a small business to get decent profit on the work too and possibly get things going even quicker. I wish I’d seen this article a few years ago!
Some great ideas for affiliate marketers to use. Thank you Cathy. The advice you have given is really helpful and you have even given keyword ideas for people who want to start with this niche.
Say I had to start a niche site like this, how long would it be before I would start getting visitors and making some sales?
That depends on how much you know about driving traffic (aka visitors) and writing content for your niche. If you are just starting out, I would say 1 year is a good time frame to learn all the basic and see where the effort takes you. You might make a couple of sales, but that doesn’t mean you can’t make more. If you already have some experiences, then investing in paid traffic will definitely yield better conversion.
This is so interesting. I have always loved helping friends and relatives plan weddings and it is so good to know that there are affiliate programs available in the wedding niche. I am seriously thinking of getting into this niche as I know I am going to enjoy it. I think I am going to do some exploring on this.
I am into affiliate marketing full time now and have been generating some good income from my ventures. It’s interesting too how you do your keyword search using the alphabet soup technique. That’s a good way to generate a lot of keywords and niche ideas.
I also have been using Jaaxy for quite a while now and I also think it’s one of the best keyword tools in the market today. The QSR feature is one of the things I love about it, saves me time and effort in trying to get information on competition, a vital aspect if we want to get good rankings.
Thank you so much for writing this post! In my day job, I am a caterer and we do a lot of weddings. I don’t know why I have been working on affiliate marketing for six months now and never thought to look at wedding affiliate programs.
We are about to redo our website on to a WordPress platform so I will be able to make regular blog posts and you better believe I am going to target some wedding keywords.
Thanks again!
Hey Jeremy, I am glad you got some inspiration out from this post 🙂 Do keep us posted on your progress.
You are so right about targeting a niche as you will be able to target people effectively searching in the search engines.
When people search for beach weddings, you will eventually have a plethora of posts all related to beach weddings and become an authoritative business firmly established on the web achieving high rankings in the search engines waiting for visitors on the first page of results.
This all takes a bit of time creating posts regularly to achieve high rankings but as you say if you concentrate on all types of weddings this is far too big a niche to market every one and every type, ending up with an inefficient website.
Great post with sensible information which most bloggers fail to see regarding a targeted niche.