How To Choose Profitable Affiliate Niches
Debunking the Myths About Niche Selection
One of the absolute most prolific pieces of advice for prospective affiliates is to work within their passions—to find their niche market in an area of personal interest and stay with it. While there is a place for niche marketing in affiliate marketing, it is not what you have been led to believe that it is. For sure, “work within your personal niche” is one of the worst pieces of advice given to new entrepreneurs, and the cause of multitudes of affiliate failures.
Do what interests you
Do what interests you; find your niche; do what you are passionate about; sell the products that interest you the most…
These are the pieces of advice that entrepreneurs are told time and again. And there is some basis to this thought, some method behind this madness.
The overall belief is that if you choose to do business in an area or ‘niche’ that you are deeply interested in, that passion will shine through and you will make sales almost accidentally. The feeling is that by selling products or working within your most favorite niche you will have a built-in sense of urgency and desire that will compel you to work on your business and to succeed.
Moreover, by working within a niche category of personal interest you will come prepared. That is, you will come armed with bucket loads of knowledge and experiences with various products so that you don’t have to ‘waste time’ getting up to speed. You’ll already know the products that deserve promotion. And you’ll know all the promotional background information almost off the top of your head.
The belief is that if you focus on promoting products that are in some way of interest to you, you can easily take care of business. You can construct websites that will sell the products; you can write articles to submit to directories and gain links back to you, the niche expert; you can build blog upon blog and never run out of something great to say about your favorite little widget that so transformed your life as a widget collector (whether you should or not, is another matter, and we’ll discuss that later).
Here’s the thing about this—none of it is untrue. It is easier to put yourself behind a product you already know. It is easier to hit the ground running when you are already well-versed in matters. It is easier to connect with visitors and readers who are more like you. So why, then, is it a myth to believe that you should focus first and foremost on your personal-interest niche as an affiliate marketers? Why can’t that mean virtually automatic sales and commissions?
What’s wrong with passion?
The reasoning against personal niche concentration is more simplistic than you might think. And in point of fact, there are some exceptions to the rule, which we can touch upon after you understand why the myth in general is a myth.
Then cut to the chase already, right? What’s wrong with doing something you are passionate about?
There is nothing truly wrong with it. But there is something unprofitable about it in an overwhelmingly large percentage of cases. What is unprofitable about this mindset is that it is just too limiting. By choosing your business and products based on one personal preference, you lose the freedom of choice. And that freedom is important, because it is what allows you to give buyers what they want, and saddles you with a limited number of affiliate product options, most of the time in a niche that isn’t seeing very high demand.
Very simply, unless your niche interest happens to be in products or subject areas that coincide with what people are ready to buy, it does not come with the most essential element of affiliate marketing success—built-in customers.
Instead of focusing on the niche products, you need to focus on the products that can and do sell. At least if you want to be one of the Big Dogs in internet marketing you do. If you want to make the big commission checks and the easy, sell-themselves-while-I’m-in-the-tropics kind of sales the Big Dogs do, you have to think less about what you want to talk about and more about what customers want to hear.
The other factor you must consider is sustainability. When you do choose a niche, choose one with staying power. Choose one that can be recycled over and over—that will continue to elicit demand again and again. That will lend itself to up-selling with other products and/or upgrades. And while you do that, focus on how you sell, not only what you sell, so that you can re-use what you learn. That way, you can continue to be a Big Dog affiliate success well into the future (say, to retirement?) even as products and affiliate programs come and go.
If by now you are concerned and thinking, “Great. Now I just don’t know what to sell, and I thought I had it all figured out…” don’t worry. This book is here to re-train you and teach you to sell and make easy money the way the Big Dogs do. Not the way the people making trickles and dabs of affiliate money do, the way the people living off affiliate commissions do. And to that end, we will certainly clarify for you how to identify the products that will sell. In fact, we’ll do that shortly. But first, let’s take away another fear.
But I’m no expert
Okay, so now that we’ve dismissed the thought of selling niche products that you like, and taken away your automatic level of comfort with your product, we need to talk about how to correct that problem for you, yes?
It is a lot easier to sell something you know and love, surely. It is easier—at least in the beginning—to build marketing and pre-sales around a product you have an interest in; meaning, if you are already an expert in “widgetta obscura” you could probably sit down and in one afternoon draft a complete website full of content on the matter. And if you choose another product, say an in-demand high seller that you know next to nothing about, you’ll have to do some research before you can belt out that content. You’ll have to become an expert all over again.
There. You’ve just been given the answer. Did you see it? Become an expert. Just as you were not born an expert in widgets, just as you became an expert through study and use, you can do the same thing for any product that with excellent consumer demand.
All that it takes to become an expert is some time spent reading, and eventually using your products. You can become an authority. You can become whatever type of expert you want to be. And trust us when we say that you want to be the expert who knows the products with ready-to-buy consumers.
That being said, there is something more to consider—you don’t really need to be an expert to be an effective affiliate! By default it is quite likely you’ll become one over time, but in the meantime all you need to do is let your parent affiliate program do the work for you! All the information and ordering and purchasing tools are already there for you. Your job is just to get your people to them so that they can buy. And believe us when we say that if you target the right markets, they’re likely to come with plenty of information anyway!
The exceptions to the rule
We did say there would be exceptions to the rule of choosing a niche that interests you. That exception is very simple, and we won’t spend a lot of time on it here.
The exception to the rule is that if you happen to love a product that people are clambering to buy, go for it! Jump in now while the getting is good. Consider yourself lucky.
The other exception is your personal interest. If you feel a burning desire to promote a product within your niche to suit your own personal fancy, go for that, too! There are no rules to what you can and cannot sell. You can be an internet marketer of a multitude of vastly different products in all sorts of niches. In fact, that’s probably a good idea. There is no one perfect niche, there are many. Open up your options, do your fanciful thing on the side, but plan to make your money the way the Big Dogs do—by selling the right products that require the least amount of effort on their part.
How to Spot a Moneymaker When You See One
Fine. You can accept that you can’t make it big selling your widgets to the five other people who love widgets. You accept that you have to look for the product that is in demand, with buyers ready to click that “buy” button. So how do you know which products to choose?
This is where your affiliate tools come in. This is where targeted product research comes in. This is also where SEO and keyword research starts to come into the picture, but the details of each of those will come in their due time, in their own, dedicated chapters.
Spotting the sellers
What you need to do to spot a moneymaker is find out what is selling and what is not. Go to affiliate sites like Click Bank and Commission Junction. Utilize the marketplace tools there and find out what products are performing—which products other affiliates are making money with. Start there, but go further. Consider the whole picture before you decide on the right affiliate products for you.
Go to these sites, and look at the market reports. Don’t just start with a top keyword search; find out what is selling—not just what is getting traffic hits. Compare products in your chosen category against each other. See which products are outperforming the others, and then go from there. Build your website and your affiliate program around that product. Then use your keyword analysis in the most productive way (as we’ll show you).
Here’s the trick, though. You don’t want to just grab the first products you see with the highest traffic generations. Traffic in and of itself means very little. You want the products that are actually converting—that are turning into sales. So even if a products gets thousands of hits a day, but only a couple of those hits convert to purchases, it is probably not the product that will generate the kind of easy, hands-off sales you want. A product with only a hundred (or fewer) hits per day that converts at a much higher rate would actually do much better. It’s the conversion and sales that you need to know, not just the traffic generated by searches.
What sells and what doesn’t
Sometimes these statistics are things that you can find through the marketplace tools on affiliate lead sites. Not always, though, and some sites are better at it than others, so you need to look at the proven factors that are more likely to result in sales. The trick to this is really in knowing a bit about the psychology of buyers, and then using that to guide your efforts at SEO and marketing (but more on that later…).
First off understand that there are basically only two types of buyers of interest to you; they are
- Buyers who are researching products, and
- Buyers who need a product (or feel they need a product) because they need a solution to a problem (or think buying solves a problem—sometimes the problem is simple want)
Are there other types of traffic-generators out there? Sure. But most of them are not buyers who are ready or nearly ready to buy. So that kind of traffic is essentially fluff. It looks good on your site meter, but it doesn’t make you money. So it’s not worth your time and effort.
This is where keyword research really comes into play. Effective keyword research will target those buyers ready to buy, rather than those just looking around. We’ll break that down in later chapters.
It may seem as though we’ve gotten a bit away from the issue of niche selection. Really, though, it’s all intertwined. To choose your niche—since you’re not choosing on interest alone—you will need to know how to choose the niches that can perform. You need to know how to spot the moneymakers, using your market tools.
Now that you know your niche, we can start setting up your business. We can go on to formulating a game plan and carving out your piece of the market action.
Leon Edward
Visit http://www. opportunity.com/leonedward where you can get expert niche finding done for you plus access thousands of affiate products and the top networks.
From Affiliate Multi Millionair Mark Ling, - Step-by-step tutorial videos, blueprints, checklists, and other training materials show you exactly what to do and when to do
$1 Trial [ Click Here]
Big Dog Super Affiliate Marketing Tools - Compilation of links the Big Dogs Resource - affiliate directories, keyword tools, social networking sites, backlink tools..[Click Here]
Affiliate Marketing Online Business is Leon Edward 's affiliate marketing coaching website where you can learn affiliate marketing.
Affiliate Program Directory, Training and Research | guide to affiliate marketing | Internet Based Business
Wholesale Products To Sell | Products To Sell Online | Products To Sell On eBay | Mind Movies | Brain Games For Seniors | your first year in network marketing
 |
|
| Buy through my affiliate link , [Click Here] And Receive almost $300 of these Super Affiliate Bonuses | |
Bonus 1: Affiliate Extreme System (Sells for $197)
$119,427.95 in just 2 weeks in
affiliate
commissions. And this is just one of several of his
clickbank accounts!
Find out how he did it so that you can earn EXTREME affiliate
commissions for yourself!
You will receive this $197 Bonus FREE also. See details....[Click Here] |
Bonus 2: Super Affiliate Strategies (Valued at $97)
This bonus is a 1:30 hour video Mark Ling completed with a super affiliate that wishes to remain anonymous (Mr "G"). Mark grilled him on affiliate marketing and how he uses it to make over $1.2million each year. Some of the areas they covered included:
This video is worth $97.00 and like bonus 1 is included with AffiloBlueprint for any customer that purchases through my affiliate link.[Click Here] |
August 28, 2009
Posted in: Affiliate Marketing - How To ..., Best Affiliate Programs, Big Dog Affiliate Tips, Tricks and Tools
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.