Product Selection – Affiliate Marketing

The most important key to your success before you set out is product selection. This is what will help you to make sure there’s an audience for your product and what will dictate what you write about, who your target demographic is, how much profit you make and more.So to start out, you need to make a list of all the niches you would enjoy writing about and that you have some experience in. This isn’t going to come into play right at the start but it will make a big difference when it comes to promoting a blog and creating your own audience somewhere down the line.What we’re interested in right now is finding a niche that isn’t over-saturated with digital products and with affiliate offers. We’re going to start out with a digital product because this will give you the most profit per sale which means you can get more revenue from a smaller number of buyers. Later down the line, you might become interested in selling physical products which have a much broader appeal – you can read the full Affiliate Marketing Secrets eBook for an in-depth treatise on that subject.When you take a look at the digital products on a network like Clickbank or JVZoo, something might jump out at you right from the start: they’re almost exclusively in the ‘make money online’ niche. In fact, if you take a look at the network ‘WSO’ (Warrior Special Offers) then you’ll notice that this one is actually 100% products in that niche.I want you to resist the urge to choose this as your first niche. Why? Because as you can see, it is already a highly competitive area to get into. If you try to sell a product in this area, then you’ll be going up against pretty much every other affiliate marketer and product creator on the net. As such, you’ll be paying considerably more for each of your ads to appear on Facebook, Google AdWords or wherever else you choose to put them. What’s more, you’ll find that you struggle to stand out to that audience. This particular audience is very web savvy, they probably know exactly how the affiliate marketing business model works and they’ve probably encountered some real duff products in this niche. Even if you’ve chosen a product that is genuinely very high quality, your offer will still be looked upon cynically and they will assume that you’re just out to make money. They’ve been burned before, they’re inundated with such offers and it takes a lot more marketing to sell to them.On the other hand though, selling something to a much smaller niche means that you can pay considerably less for your ads and find an audience that hasn’t seen offers like yours before. Potentially, you can offer them something that solves a real problem they’ve been facing and promises to make their lives easier: which is exactly how you make money.A great example of this is to choose a career. This is a very specific niche that you can target directly through Facebook and indirectly through Google AdWords (AdWords ads are ads that appear on Google searches). Pat Flynn is the owner of ‘Smart Passive Income.com’ and he demonstrates how this can work with his ‘foodtruck’ niche. He has a website that is aimed specifically at food truck drivers and he uses it to sell a digital product that can help them to make more money from what they do. This is ideal because there are millions of English-speaking food truck drivers around the world and yet they’re not highly targeted with these kinds of products all the time.Earlier we discussed the wedding planning niche. An eBook on how to save money on planning a wedding is a perfect niche for a few reasons:
  • It’s not over saturated with similar digital products
  • The book promises to save money, thus making it an investment
  • It’s easy to target – people place their relationship status on Facebook and use a lot of predictable searches when they’re planning weddings
  • The audience is young and thus likely tech-savvy enough to be interested in digital products as a whole
  • The demographic is constantly changing: in other words, people are getting engaged all the time meaning that you’ll never saturate the market and run out of people to sell to
Another great option is to sell a product to a small section of a larger audience. Right behind making money online, the fitness niche is another very over-saturated area for digital products. There are no shortage of books on how to get abs or build muscle or lose weight.But you can still make this work if you pick a specific area within fitness to target. How about training for the marathon? How about teenage bodybuilding? How about fitness for the over 50s? These are once again specific niches that are constantly replenishing and that give you a huge number of potential customers. What’s more, these areas allow you to subsequently branch out with future products which means that you can make more money from your market in future

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