Entries Tagged 'Affiliate Marketing' ↓

Do you use pay-per-click? Are you into search engine optimization? Either of these marketing disciplines hinge on proper keyword selection. You want to be in front of your customer when they’re in a buying mood, not a browsing mood, right?

I’ve always found that keyword research is one of the hardest things to when creating an ad campaign. How do you find out which keywords make money, and which ones burn money? Anyone can add all the suggestions from a keyword tool into their campaign - but I guarantee they will lose money unless they take that a step further. So how do we find profitable keywords? Here are three steps to help this process.

Step 1

The first thing to do is have a little brainstorm session. For whatever product you’re promoting, try to get inside your customer’s minds:

• What is causing them to be looking for your product?
• What pain (problem) are they feeling or dealing with?
• What questions do they have?
• What solution are they trying to find?

Once you’ve answered these things jot down the different phrases you think they would use to find you.

Step 2

The second step is to use a keyword tool such as the free keyword suggestion tool at wordtracker.com. See if the terms you thought of are showing up on their lists, and find out how many searches are done daily for each keyword. The higher the better, obviously, though the highest keywords might not be the most profitable.

Step 3

Up until now, the information here is probably old hat for most of you. Here’s the golden third step. Head over to MSN’s AdLabs Online Commericial Intention Detector. Click on query, and punch in one of the keywords you think has potential. The web form will then spew out a number between zero and one. Here’s the readout for “affiliate marketing”

Result: NonCommercial (Query)

Probability for Commercial Query:

0.33748

As you can see, MSN thinks this phrase is by and large, non-commercial in intent. Having less than a 0.50 indicates non-commercial; anything over .5 (50%) is commercial in intent. The stronger or higher the co-efficient, the more profitable this keyword is likely to be!

Go to the tool, and compare the output for “personal loan” and “personal loans” - you’d perhaps be surprised to see that the singular is scored at 0.67969, while the plural is scored at 0.89554. So although both look to be quite profitable, “personal loans” is the keyword with the highest commercial intent, of those two.

So now you run your list of keywords from steps one and two through this tool, to make sure that they are all above 50%. If you’ve got keywords that you think would be good, but they’re under 50%, ask yourself why, and see if there isn’t a small variation that can be made to boost the score. If you can improve on it, use the new keyword instead.

Now, I should clarify that although I’ve talked about this as being a way to find profitable keywords, I guess really it is just a method to find the keywords that people are using to buy stuff. This is great, if you are doing SEO. If however you are paying per click, profit takes on a new meaning, as you need to consider what your costs are for each keyword. Chances are strong that the highest rated keywords are also those with strong competition.

However, in all markets, the presence of sharks indicates there is prey in the waters; competition isn’t a bad thing, you just need to find a way to best them, and you’ll be laughing!

A few weeks ago I wrote a post on using Google’s Website Optimizer (found inside your Adwords account). At that time I mentioned I was running a split test on a couple different background colors for a landing page I wanted to test. After only a day or two I was getting some pretty interesting results:

“As a side note, I’m currently split testing a different version of the page which at least in preliminary results, the splits are outperforming the original by 26% and 55%. The implications of a successful outcome from a split test can really make a big difference on the bottom line!”

I wanted to follow up on this to see if we can learn anything from this exercise. The first few days seemed spectacular; I thought for sure I had stumbled upon the ultimate background color. Then as more results steadily streamed in, things gradually started to equalize. In fact, the two tested colors suddenly reversed their leads! Anyways, I continued to run the test, from May 7th to June 16th. You can see the results here.

I should mention that the Original in this instance was color code #333366. Google doesn’t give you an option to edit that title. So you can see that color #0099CC came out on top, which is strange, because to my eye it seems the ugliest of the three. However, I guess that is neither here nor there. FYI, the original is kind of a dark navy blue, combo 1 is a light sky blue, and combo 2 is a light gray.

I don’t know if you can draw anything too substantial from these results, because I am sure different background colors work better with different page content as well. However, on the page that I’m using, apparently combination 1 turned out better. It is important to note that Google still didn’t come up with a conclusive answer, only that there was an observed improvement over the original of 5.86%, and that there was a margin of error of plus or minus 2%. Having run this for five weeks now, the numbers have not really been changing a whole lot, so I’ve decided this is as far as it goes. If I wanted to confirm these numbers I might try re-testing with only the original and one alternative.

You can see that there were a total of 2443 conversions during this period (I only used traffic from Yahoo PPC for this test). That gives me an overall conversion rate of about 50.3% - from there I still need to get them to apply for the offer after clicking through.

You can get some insight into how this tool works by looking at the conversions/visitors column. I think that the way they’ve built this, Google takes the assumed favorite combination and tests the heck out of it, while giving an equal share to the original. You can see that combination 2 got less visitors than the first two, but that the first two got exactly the same number of visitors. I think this is Google’s way of testing a hypothesis. First give everything equal traffic, then as soon as things start to gel a bit, pick the original and the favorite and push them farther.

Anyways, for the time being, I’m happy having found something that offers me a 5.86% improvement over what I had, for no cost. As I laid out in the previous post, anything I can do to increase this conversion ratio will net me more profit at the end of the day. I’ve already spent the money to get the visitors to come; from here on the more that click through the better.

For example, if I spend $100 on PPC to get 100 visitors, and previously got 49 to go through to my offer, and if I know that each time someone views my offer it is worth about $3.00 to me, then before I was netting ($100 - (49 x $3.00)) = $47 profit.

Now, with the new numbers, it would work out to ($100 - (52 x $3.00)) = $56 profit. That’s a $9 improvement, per day. That’s nearly $300 a month. Not bad. Of course, assuming I was actually paying a buck a click, and actually getting $3 per viewed offer - these are just made up numbers for the sake of illustration. However, it is close to reality, and the principle still stands.

I don’t recommend you all go out converting your landing page backgrounds to 0099CC because of this - but I do recommend you think of something that might improve your offer and test the heck out of it!

I’ve been so busy lately trying to work out some kinks in getting my first webstore online (selling digital picture frames - and yes - I’m trying to get some link love here =) that I’ve somewhat neglected my affiliate marketing endeavors. However, as the site is slowly coming together I find myself starting to think about how I’m going to market it. As I previously posted, I have had no end of SEO related sales calls, some of them totally discounting the value of PPC advertising. I think that is rather misguided. SEO alone is like having one leg on a stool. You need more legs if you want to stand securely!

Pay Per Click advertising gets you results fast, and it also helps you really drill down to find the money words, if you’re doing proper analysis. This can really help inform you when it comes to SEO, and choosing what keywords to optimize around. So I set out on a quest to find some tools to really help me do that proper analysis, and along the way I’ve discovered a couple great ones. If you’re into affilate or pay per click marketing, I highly recommend you seriously consider these.

Disclaimer: This is not a sales pitch, and even though my affiliate links are in here (you can only be an affiliate once you’ve purchased) I honestly do recommend these products. Evaluate them on their own merit.

Affiliate Radar

I’ve been looking for a way to quickly build campaigns that are trackable at the keyword level for a long time. I’m fairly handy with Excel so I’ve limped along with some homebrew solutions for quite a while, but when I found Affiliate Radar I knew I needed it. Their slogan is “Don’t Fly Blind” and it’s true. If you’re an affiliate marketer and you’re not tracking the performance of every keyword you’re advertising on, I can almost guarantee you’re both losing money (even if you’re making money) and at the same time leaving money on the table.

The great thing about AR is that I’m now able to easily implement keyword-level and ad-level tracking on pretty much any search engine I choose. I can send all the traffic to one page if I wish, and the software will handle it all for me. Later on, I simply go into my affiliate network, grab the relevant report, import it into AR along with my cost data and boom - it spits out a gigantic report that gives me cost / revenue data per keyword / ad across all my campaigns all at once! It takes seconds! From here I can quickly identify which keywords are winners and which are losers. This allows me to save a ton of time testing new affiliate offers, and means I’m much more likely to hit upon a profitable combination (even if I’m only running two keywords!).

Another interesting thing about the method of tracking AR uses is that it assigns a unique ID to every keyword - such as 7A000123 for example. The only place this has relevance is in their database, so the manager of your affiliate program will have no idea which keywords or tactics you’re using to drive sales. This effectively keeps your secrets safe.

Affiliate Radar is setup for simple report importing for most of the affiliate networks you can think of (and they’ll add more on request). CJ, Clickbank, Linkshare, CPA Networks, Azoogle, the list goes on and on. One of the coolest features is the ability to quickly export any given campaign to Google, Yahoo, or MSN. What I do is build a campaign in Adwords Editor (another FREE must have for anyone using Adwords), export the whole campaign into Affiliate Radar, add all the special keyword links, then export back to Adwords, adding Yahoo and MSN at the same time. This can really triple your efficiency when building new ad campaigns.

Speed PPC

I just got Speed PPC the other day, and I’ve yet to really take full advantage of its power. However, using these two systems in conjunction can provide some stunning results. Speed PPC allows you to manipulate keyword lists into massively long lists, broken down by category in order to provide maximum relevancy. For example you might have two lists, one of type of shoe (running shoe, tennis shoe, hiking shoe etc) and another of brand names (Nike, Reebok, Adidas, etc). Speed PPC can merge these together into every combination you can think of (Nike running shoe, Nike tennis shoe, Nike hiking shoe) and group them together. You can then do similar things building the ads themselves. The final screen lets you export all that data into Adwords Editor where you can have a campaign with hundreds of keywords broken down into dozens of adgroups live in about a minute.

Now take this data from Adwords Editor, send it over to Affiliate Radar, add keyword tracking, then export it back to the three main search engines and you’re well on your way. A competent user of both programs could have a fully fledged, optimized keyword and ad tracked campaign (with hundreds of keywords) setup from start to finish in just over 10 minutes. Where I come from that is pretty impressive.

Adwords Editor

I thought I should mention Adwords Editor in here as well. I know a while ago I was conned into buying a similar product that allowed me to edit my Google Adwords campaigns from a Windows client; however the software didn’t work that well and I ended up discarding it. Little did I know, probably at the same time, Google was releasing their free tool called Adwords Editor. By far the most impressive feature of this software is the ability to easily import / export bulk data. I can add hundreds of keywords to multiple campaigns from one screen, or change the max bid on all my keywords simultaneously. Did I mention it is free?

In affiliate marketing we’re often trying to find the most effective and targeted way possible to drive traffic to a particular offer. I don’t know about you but I know that I don’t just stumble upon the best way to do that the first time I try. I know many affiliate marketers simply link directly to the offer; however this isn’t always possible. With Yahoo for instance, they won’t let you do that, meaning if you want to take advantage of that traffic you need to create your own landing page. So how do we get the best landing page possible?

Let me introduce a cool tool by Google: Website Optimizer. This is a great split testing tool (sometimes called A/B testing) for internet marketers. Google handles all the complicated code and statistical analysis; all you need to do is come up with a few versions of the page you’d like to try, and drop a few lines of code onto each page.

You can access the Website Optimizer via your Google Adwords account. You’ll see it under the Campaign Management tab, on the far right. You don’t need to use it in conjunction with an Adwords campaign: it can be completely separate.

The concept behind split testing is that you take traffic coming to your site and randomly redirect each visitor to a different version of your landing page. This works best if you keep your different versions to a minimum, hence the term A/B testing - two versions. The whole point is to be as scientific about this as possible. If you remember your scientific method, the idea is that you isolate single variables and measure those alone, while measuring your control.

Ideally, we’re talking about using traffic all from the same source. For instance, I’m only split testing one of my landing pages on Yahoo traffic. This means that your visitors are all coming from the same place, so you’re measuring results from a somewhat standard crowd. However, this isn’t by any means a make or break scenario - you can definitely split test pages getting traffic from multiple sources. The software will take care of sharing the traffic equally.

More importantly, when you make changes to your page, make them incrementally. If you come up with two completely different landing pages, one will definitely outperform the other, but you’ll have no idea why. This can be a good approach initially, as you’re trying to get into the right ballpark, but once you’ve got something that’s working fairly well you’ll want to split test on single variables.

For instance, I recently ran a split test on a landing page for a particular product (gotta keep some secrets you know ;). Anyways, let’s just say I get more money for homeowner applicants versus renters. So my theory was why not put a fairly prominent link on the page saying “Homeowners Apply Here” or something to that effect. Try to encourage my primary targets onward to the offer.

So I started with my original page, which has just a standard “Apply Online Today!” text link, and added a “Home Owners Apply Here” text link, then created a graphic from some clipart that also said “Home Owners Apply Here.” So I was testing two things: does a Homeowner link perform better, and does a graphic outperform a text link? Therefore, I ended up with three different versions of my landing page, each with a single difference from the others, all while keeping my control page constant (I’d been running the control page for months and months).

In the test results (below) Combination 1 is the text link, and Combination 2 is the graphic link. Here are the results from the split test I’ve just described. If you click the picture, it will open a larger copy in a new window.

There are quite a few important things you can learn from this little table. First off, Website Optimizer is telling me that my trustworthy landing page that I’ve used for months is converting at 34% (plus or minus 6%). So this is my baseline. The longer a split test runs, the better this confidence interval gets. I happened to quit this test early, because I could see where it was heading and I wasn’t happy forfeiting the traffic for the sake of a statistically significant result.

Next you can see that Combination 2 (graphic link) underperformed my original page, but over performed the text link. I would have to run the test longer to see which one truly worked better, as they are fairly close, however I’ll save that for another time.

So quickly, through the table, you have the estimated conversion rate range, shown in percentages, with confidence levels, as well as in the very cool graphic. This graphic shows you at a glance how well or poorly your split tests are faring. Next is the chance to beat the original. This is a way of showing you what probability each split actually has of beating your original page. The chance to beat all shows the probability of each split being #1 overall. Observed improvement is the improvement or lack of, as compared to the original. Finally, to keep things grounded in reality, the conversions over visitors tells you exactly how many results went into each split test.

Lessons
So what did I learn from this split test? Well first off, I realized afterwards that even though I get paid more per homeowner, I still get paid for renters, so why would I want to alienate them? So singling out the homeowner is perhaps a poor idea, and possibly was contributing to the lower conversion rate. Secondly, although the test didn’t run long enough to be truly statistically significant, at first glance it appears that the graphic link was outperforming the text link. This would be a good place to start with another split test - excluding the home owner part. Third, 34% conversion for a landing page isn’t bad, I guess, but it certainly isn’t stellar. Basically this means that I’m throwing away 66% of my advertising dollars before the visitor even sees the actual offer page. That’s kind of horrendous if you think about it.

As a side note, I’m currently split testing a different version of the page which at least in preliminary results, the splits are outperforming the original by 26% and 55%. The implications of a successful outcome from a split test can really make a big difference on the bottom line!

If I can get a landing page that is converting above 65% (the current forerunner) that means that for the same advertising dollars, I now get 30% more people viewing the offer! That is nearly double! Assuming final conversion remains constant, this should more than double my profits.

Here’s a super rough example:
If I currently spend $100 in advertising at $1/click, then 35 visitors make it through to the final offer. Assume I get $150 revenue from the 35 visitors. ($4.28/visitor) = $50 profit.

Now, if I spend the same, but have a better landing page, this means 65 visitors go through. With the same ratio of $4.28 to visitor, that would give me a revenue of $278, or $178 profit!!

So you can see the tremendous value of improving your landing page!

Once I have some solid results from this current test, I’ll post them and discuss what I’ve learned. I might even have a valuable tip for you on how you can improve your page the same way!

I recently read a post talking about how recession is going to be great for affiliate marketing. Although a bit shy on details, he did make a couple good points. The general idea is that merchandisers tighten up their marketing budgets going into the recession. So far so good. The traditional forms of advertising are becoming more expensive anyway, (print, TV, radio etc) so those dollars will naturally gravitate to he most efficient marketing method - the internet. This means a huge influx of marketing dollars all over the internet.

I would add though that supply and demand economics dictates a stabilization over time - there will always be tremendous marketing value in TV ads for example, and if they temporarily become over-priced, more dollars will flow to the internet, but eventually this will cause TV prices to come back to a  sustainable level. As long as there is value in any marketing channel it will never cease to exist, even though there may be large fluctuations in price or use.

I’ve been thinking about this topic a bit lately. One of my best affiliate offers is a loan product, and people sometimes ask me if business is slowing down. Fact is, I don’t really know, because I keep looking for new ways to promote it and it keeps growing. If it keeps growing, people are still getting loans in droves (personal loans).

I think a smart affiliate marketer will take advantage of whatever current market / economic trends are happening. Recession appears to be on the menu for the near future, so we might as well start evaluating to see how we can take advantage of it. People make money in market ups and downs - just a lot less people make money on the downs! If we’re smart we can be among the few!

Have you ever dressed your website up as a giant carrot? Probably not. If you have, please let me know ASAP because I’d love to hear that story!

Occasionally you hear about unique marketing methods that work really well. Someone comes up with a brilliant idea, and implements it. Often these ideas are quite cheap, but just require you to be unusual, which a lot of people aren’t comfortable with.

A good example is a story I recently read where a guy dressed up as a giant carrot, and started going to events around Saint Paul, Minnesota. His business, the Crazy Carrot Juice Bar, got a huge amount of free advertising in the newspapers, radio and even on TV. He quickly grew the company to 5 stores with 65 employees, and then sold it to Jamba Juice, presumably making a bucketful in the process.

Here’s the best part: the suit cost him $73 to make.

Examples of this kind of marketing are all over the place - the question is, how can you, in your business, make an impact? Chances are there is a way you haven’t thought of to really get your business the public attention it needs to become profitable. As affiliate marketers, we’re typically confined to the internet (not always though - that’s a different topic), but how can we use these concepts to promote our products? Viral videos can make a big splash, and blog contest giveaways can be huge as well. There are lots of ideas out there - which one will you use?

The other day I decided to try promoting a new affiliate product, as I hadn’t done anything new that way in a while. So I picked one from CPA Empire, which had a good network EPC (Earnings per click), and paid per lead. I’ve had good success with lead based affiliate programs in the past. I like the fact that there’s a very low level of commitment required of the customer  - they don’t have to make a purchase decision right then and there, and I still get paid!

Initially, I went to Google, because Google has traditionally been a great place to get a campaign up and running in a jiffy. Unfortunately, with affiliate marketing you don’t always have control over the landing page. I went to the landing page to check it out and it was one of these one page wonders. It is a very simple page, nothing wrong with it from a user’s perspective; however Google’s crawler clearly thought it was lacking. So only 3 of the 40 keywords I wanted went live, and only after I put my minimum bid up to $1.00 / click. When I looked into it further with Google’s tools they told me the landing page sucked. Uh-huh. Already knew that.

So anyways, I let the thing run, and managed to get one lead that day. Unfortunately I spent nearly twice as much on Adwords as the value of the lead. The extremely interesting thing was that I actually got clicks on keywords that were classified by Google as Inactive. Has anyone else seen this? Is it some sort of fraud, or is Google actually letting me get those clicks for some reason? I thought that was extremely interesting.

So I recognized this wasn’t going anywhere, so I thought for a second, then realized if the landing page was the problem, from Google’s perspective, then maybe I should try it out on a different engine that didn’t care nearly as much as Google does about these things. So I fired up my trusty 7Search account and plugged in basically all the same information as went into my Google campaign, and turned it loose.

The immediate difference: I was paying approximately 14 cents per click for second and third place positions on 7Search, whereas I was paying $1.00 per click on Google just to get active. I knew from the start that at least I wouldn’t lose my shirt if nothing much happened, 14 cents a click is a lot more forgiving than $1.00.

So that has now run for about 3 days on 7Search, nothing spectacular, but I have got 97 clicks so far, at a total cost of $14. Out of that traffic, I’ve managed to generate two leads, at $10 a piece. So I’m actually showing a very modest profit. That’s encouraging. Better than a loss, but still nothing to throw a party for. Now I’ve got to figure out how to grow that so it does that regularly and consistently.

Anyways, I guess the lesson of the day is that you need to look at the landing page you’ve got and then go from there; if it doesn’t have much text on it, chances are strong Google isn’t going to like it, and you might want to try it on a different engine first.

I got an email today extolling the virtues of a new service from my web host, Powweb, called TargetClicks. (I’d like to preface this post by saying that I love Powweb as a web host - I’ve been with them for years and they’re really top notch). I’ve copied in the main bullets of the email here:

WHAT THE TARGETCLICKS TEAM CAN DO FOR YOU
TargetClicks ensures that when people perform Google, Yahoo! or MSN searches on keywords related to your site, an entry for your Web site will be listed next to their search results! All you have to do is …
1. Fill out your site information. TargetClicks will determine your competition, target region and optimal keywords.
2. Pay just $1.75 per click. TargetClicks takes care of ad placement for you and eats the cost, even if the lowest bid price is more expensive!
3. Review your performance. TargetClicks provides easy-to-read e-mail and online reports that track your progress.

Is anyone else chomping at the bit to get signed up? I saw $1.75 per click and nearly laughed out loud. Then my brain kicked in, and I started thinking about it. I realize they’re really targeting the people that have no clue about pay-per-click or internet marketing, and would just rather pay someone to know for them. That is fine, there are things that I don’t really care to know much about and would rather pay someone to do, such as fix my car for instance. Are you an ad mechanic? If you don’t like getting under the hood, perhaps a program like this fits your ticket.

Thing is, I do happen to know a thing or two about pay-per-click ads and the $1.75 seems pretty high. Apparently though, one gets coverage on up to 30 PPC networks, which is definitely a big time saver. My guess is their incentive to create a good campaign is the more they get costs down, the more they get to pocket. The other thing to keep in mind though is what kind of quality are they delivering? I could setup a campaign for $1.75 a click and send thousands of visitors through all day long; but how targeted are they? Seems to me the disadvantage of this setup is that there is no relation to profitability.

At the end of the day, this is what makes a successful affiliate marketer; being able to advertise and get a targeted customer ready to purchase for less than the value per action so he can pocket a profit. If you’re just sending traffic down the pipe for a set fee, there will never be any accountability on quality.

Just my two cents.

To succeed in business on the internet, you need to pick a niche and specialize. There simply isn’t a lot of room for more eBays and Amazons out there. There will always be a few of these uber-players in the game; ingowever the vast majority of successful businesses on the internet are specializing in a niche.

I’m going to assume that I don’t need to convince you of the merits of choosing a niche; it is one of the most talked about things in internet marketing. Instead, I wanted to focus on some concrete ways that you can go about identifying a market niche that is going to work for you. This process is well suited to those who are looking to develop a product of their own, though it will work equally well if you’re planning on building a site promoting affiliate products.

Researching a Market Niche

1. Brainstorm. Take a piece of paper and start writing any market idea that comes to mind. The conventional brainstorming wisdom applies - don’t discard any idea - just write it down! Even if you don’t think it is any good, write it down!

Think of your own hobbies or those of your friends. Think of a common problem in people’s lives - is there information out there, or a product, that can solve it? If you absolutely can’t think of anything, go to the public library or a good sized bookstore and have a look at their magazine section. Magazines represent topics people are interested in; topics that people are willing to pay money for more information on. Once you’ve got 25-30 topic ideas on paper you can move on to the next step.

2. Research Keywords. You don’t have to come up with an exhaustive and comprehensive list at this point of every keyword you’ll ever use in the niche. Rather, use this step to get a feel for the highest traffic keywords in your niche. Try to pick around 5. Go to SEOBook.com and use their free keyword tool. Type in what you think is the main keyword for the niche, and see what you can find out. There are likely other common variations or sub-niches you haven’t thought about.

3. Assess the Niche Potential. Ultimately, you want to be able to deeply penetrate your chosen niche. Go through your list and consider whether each niche has the potential for additional products. Would it be possible to create a home study course around it? A membership site? Something you could upsell your customers on after the initial product? How about a monthly newsletter? Is there sufficient depth that people are likely to pay for additional products? Is there a good selection of affiliate products available for that niche? Checkout the usual culprits for this: Clickbank, PayDotCom, CJ, LinkShare, etc. You might need to search around in your niche market to find some good products, then google those products + “affiliate” to see if there are affiliate programs available.

4. Understand the Niche. Now that you’ve hopefully narrowed down your list somewhat, take it to the library and see what kinds of magazines and books exist on your subject. What topics are they writing about? Are there sub-topics that have product potential? Keep your eyes open for complementary niches as well. Once you’ve developed a list of customers, people who have purchased your main product, you’ll want to be able to continue to use that list to sell your customers other related products in the future.

Another idea is to go to Amazon.com and type in your top 5 niche keywords from step 2. See what products come up. Amazon can show you a ton of useful information about your target niche. You can see what people thought of competing products (ie what they liked and disliked), as well as additional products that they purchased. Try to get a feel for the price points as well.

5. Check for a Community of Interest. Go to Google and type in your niche keywords and the word “forum” and see what comes up. Click on a bunch of the results. Are people talking about your niche market, or is it dead? If forums exist on the topic, check them out and see how many active users there are on the relevant threads. Try to get a feel for the topics they are discussing, and the level of participation. Take note of the best forums, as you’ll want to come back to these later on to participate and promote your own product.

Another idea is to go to blogsearch.google.com and search for your niche in there. See if blogs come up on the topic, if so, check them out for content and try to get a feel for their traffic volumes. Are people actively commenting on the posts? Identify the best forums and blogs, as you’ll want to come back to these later to participate and promote your own product. You can also look for article directories.

6. Check out the Competition. Run searches on the main keywords for your niche and see what paid ads come up on Google and Yahoo. What products are being promoted? What are they doing well that you can emulate, and what are they doing poorly that you can do better? Checkout the organic listings as well. Read their squeeze pages and sales letters. Do they have newsletters available? Sign up for them; see what they’re talking about. Keep your eyes open for products you could partner with in the future.

7. Don’t Slack Off! This might seem like a lot of work, and it is. Choosing a niche market is possibly the hardest part of the whole process, and arguably the most important. Put your head down and slog through it. Once you’re established later on you’ll be happy you did.

I’m on a TON of mailing lists. In fact, a while ago I setup a separate email address specifically for this purpose. I did this for a couple reasons: a) because I have actually purchased quite a few of the best affiliate marketing products, thus I’ve naturally become part of these lists, and b) because I like to see how other marketers do their thing. Every now and then examples come through my inbox of great sales letters, and I like to keep those for future reference. It becomes a sort of “best of the best” toolkit for an email / affiliate marketer.

Anyways, this post isn’t really about my toolkit - today I wanted to rant about the amazing number of underground, previously unknown, rejected by all, newly arrived on the scene gurus. You probably know the ones I mean. “Straight from the underground” and all this jazz - doesn’t anyone else look at this as being merely the default marketing tactic to use if you’ve got no experience on the affiliate product launch scene? Can’t these guys come up with something more original?

It’s a funny thing, marketing to marketers. On the one hand, we’re all supposed to see through the hype because this is our world, right? Wrong. Apparently we’re just as susceptible as the next person - perhaps more so! The very fact that affiliate marketing products are simply everywhere is testament to that fact. Not a day goes by that I don’t receive at least 30 affiliate offers in my inbox. Most are marketing related. My spidey sense has to be on DEFCON 1 all the time, or I could easily buy more of them than I have time in the day to implement all their tricks and tips! I’d be curious, if someone could omnisciently discover the truth, how many affiliate marketers have in fact spent more on affiliate marketing products than they’ve actually earned by using them! Maybe I’m wrong, but I imagine there are masses of people out there who have purchased tons of products and never actually implemented them to their potential.

It seems like everything has to have more hype than the last - each email is more spectacular, each conference has a more amazing lineup, each product launch has more amazing giveaways and bonuses, etc. The sad thing about marketing is you simply can’t sell anything by saying “Another product from X - please buy it.” We all subconsciously crave that hype, knowing that the product we just bought is better than all of its competitors, and knowing that we now have an advantage over our own competition because of it! We made the right choice! This is the ultimate product, and I should be proud for having purchased it!

Yay me!

I realize by posting this absolutely nothing is going to change, and in fact I’m working on a sales letter of my own right now, and no doubt it will contain some of this language. Fact is, that’s what works. It’s also what people expect to see. If they don’t, they somehow become suspicious. I’ve walked away from some perfectly good products because the sales letter didn’t “wow” me. Others do too.

However, this post will not be in vain if the next time you read an uber-hype sales letter you pause, for just a microsecond, remember this post, and consider your motivations. Then feel free to dive back and in hit “Buy Now!” as quickly as possible.

Heck, you didn’t expect me to say don’t buy it did you? It might be one of my offers you’re reading!