how to find profitable niches

BLUEPRINTaffilo

www.affilorama.com

Welcome!

If you don’t know me, my name is Mark Ling and I just wanted to firstly thank you for taking the time to download this free report and set aside some time learn how to find profitable niches.

Before I get into the details I just want quickly cover who I am just so you know who you’re learning from. Following that, we are going to briefly cover what affiliate marketing is (for those of you who are newbies). And then we’re going to get into the nitty gritty of how to find profitable affiliate niches, and in particular we’re going to be focusing on digital products, although I will allude to other types of affiliate niches out there as well.

Allow me to introduce myself

Below is a photo of me with my wife Michelle, my son Benjamin who’s just turned 2 years old, and my son Caleb who is 5 months old. In the photo is his nice train birthday cake which was made by his Mum who I’m very proud of.

Copyright © 2012 Affilorama Group Ltd. All rights reserved. No part of this ebook may be used or reproduced without permission from Affilorama

HOW TO FIND PROFITABLE NICHES BLUEPRINTaffilo

http://www.affilorama.com/

And below is a photo of me when I was speaking at an internet marketing conference in Las Vegas.




Why learn from me?

You might be wondering what makes me so special and why you should learn internet marketing from me. Well, put simply, you should learn from me because I make a lot of money online.

I do it through different means – half of it comes from doing affiliate promotions promoting other people’s products, I also make a lot of money from marketing and selling my own products, and I’m even making good money making and selling my own iPhone App, so I really have taken to this whole information marketing business like a duck to water – I really love it.

Evidence of my successes

I’ve taken some screenshots of some recent data from a few of my ClickBank accounts and pasted them below.




Below is a screenshot of an affiliate commission where I made over $21,000 just from a couple of emails to one of my lists.




Below is an email I got sent recently when I promoted a guy’s product from the dating niche.




For this particular promotion, the product was on “why men lie to women” and I ended up selling around 700 copies of this particular product, and won first prize in that particular launch competition. I got an iPad 3, a 1-hour consultation with a guy who is a brilliant copy writer, and this sort of thing happens all the time.

Other people that I have helped to succeed with affiliate marketing

I’ve got lots of successful students and below is a screenshot I grabbed from my website – lots of successful students that have made a lot of money as well.

Below is a photo of my father with my son Benjamin this was taken the day after Ben’s birthday.




I even got my dad into internet marketing! He was really skeptical at first but now he’s into it and making all of his money from internet marketing. Before he got into affiliate marketing, he was working for a Government agency. After 30 years working in Government, he was getting quite stressed. Then I got him into making money from affiliate programs, and he even went on to make some of his own products as well in different niches, and he’s done extremely well. These are niches like “dog training”, and “how to sing”. He has done extremely well out of it.




What is affiliate marketing?Affiliate marketing is simply when you earn commissions promoting other people’s products. An example of what this looks like on the internet is in the screenshot below. I typed in the words “aggressive German Shepherd” into Google.

This is what someone that’s got a problem relating to almost anything does; They go to Google or another search engine, and they type their problem into Google.

Or maybe they’ll type in a physical product they’re looking for or something else. But let’s say they type in a problem they have. In this case “aggressive German Shepherd”, then they’ll see my website comes up right at the top of the search. Because most people click the first thing they see in Google, they will click through to my website.

You can see what my website looks like in the screenshot below. The person will straight away, see my article there on my website, and then they’ll go ahead and read my article and for some of them that’s all they will do.




But a small percentage of the people who visit my website, and it only takes a small percentage to make a good deal of money, go ahead and buy one of the products that I recommend on this page. Further down the page I’ve got some affiliate links for different products. So that’s basically what affiliate marketing is; It’s just about being the middle man and there’s a world of traffic outside of Google.

Google’s not the only way to send traffic to an affiliate offer. The idea about affiliate marketing is that you don’t have to own the product that you’re promoting, but you can earn commissions and there are tens of thousands, probably hundreds of thousands of different products that you can promote as an affiliate.

Common ways of making money as an affiliate

Here are a couple of examples of how you can earn money as an affiliate marketer.

• You can earn commissions promoting digital products. The good thing about digital products is you can earn much higher percentages because it’s just bits and bytes people are downloading, so if you promote a dog training product that is an instant download, then let’s say that product sells for $37 and you could earn 70% commission, then that turns out to be a lot of money, especially if you make several sales per day.




• You can earn commissions promoting physical products. Some places are better to promote physical products than others. Some physical product places only pay you maybe 4% commissions, but then other places pay you much higher commissions.

• You can earn commissions promoting ‘cost per acquisition’ offers. That’s where you get paid just for sending somebody that will enter their name and email address. So you might get $3 for every name and email address that gets entered. Or you might get say $30 for everybody that fills in a full on form that might be an application for insurance or something like that, even if they don’t take up the insurance, or even if it’s just to get a quote estimate you might get paid quite a lot of money per lead.

• You can earn recurring commissions from offers, like maybe signing someone up for a membership where that person is paying a monthly fee, and then you end up getting a recurring commission for as long as they stay on as a member.

• You can also earn high ticket commissions. Some products sell for $1000 and you can make 50% commissions. In fact one product that I promoted that was $2000 a little while ago I ended up making $187,000 in commissions that week, and that wasn’t even counting my prize which brought it to over $200,000. A few times I’ve made over $100,000 in commissions promoting a product, and very frequently I make over $10,000 promoting different people’s products, whether it’s high ticket or low ticket. Anyway, I’m not telling you this to brag, I’m just telling you what a great opportunity it is.

So with all this in mind, in this report I’m going to show you how to find profitable digital product niches. And in particular I’m going to focus on the ClickBank affiliate network.

Yes, there are a lot of other ways of profiting in affiliate marketing, and I’ll cover all of the ones I just mentioned in my AffiloBlueprint course which is coming out on 29th May 2012. But for now I’m focusing on ClickBank, and the reason I’m doing that is because the vast majority – over 60% of my income – comes from ClickBank. Other people make the majority of their income from other affiliate networks.




There are other ones out there and there other ways of making money which I’ll cover in my AffiloBlueprint course. But seeing as the vast majority of my money is made in ClickBank, I think it’s only appropriate for me to show you how to find profitable ClickBank niches.

Finding Niches On ClickBank

The first thing you need to do is visit www.ClickBank.com, and at the top of the page you’ll see there’s a link to the ‘Marketplace’. From here you can pick a category – any category that interests you.



I’m going to pick ‘Parenting and Families’. You have to scroll down a bit to see it.


On ClickBank you’ll find that the vast majority of products are digital information products on topics like “how to train your dog”, “how to pick up women”, “how to play guitar”, or software like “search engine optimization software” like “Traffic Travis” or business software like “daycare management”. So we’re trying to find niches and products that are profitable but don’t have too much competition, at least for the moment.

Thankfully ClickBank now makes this quite easy using their tools. Later on in this report I’ll show you how to find profitable affiliate products that do have competition, but right now we’ll stick to the low competition offers. So you’ll want to use the filters on the left hand side of the page to do this. What I recommend that you do is you set the minimum ‘gravity’ score to 6 and the maximum gravity score to 25.

This means that at least some sales are being made but not too many different affiliates are on board promoting this particular offer. And you’ll also want to set the average $ per sale to a minimum of $15. Look at what I’ve done in the screenshot below. I’ve set average $ per sale at $15, minimum gravity 6, and maximum gravity 25.




This narrows down the number of products in the Parenting and Families category that I’ve gone to. You can do this in another category of course, but it’s narrowed it down to about 15 products. Now it’s just a matter of checking out the sales process for the products that you’re interested in promoting.

You basically want to find out for yourself whether or not people will be likely to buy any of the products you’ve found. Obviously some people are buying these products or there wouldn’t be any gravity at all, and I’ll get onto gravity shortly, so don’t worry if it sounds complicated, I will reveal everything soon! Let’s just take a look at the first product in our narrowed down search by clicking to open the website. Checking the sales page

So the first product opens up a sales page with an opt-in box, and this can be a good thing as it means the vendor is trying to collect visitors’ email addresses, and this means that they can follow up and make more conversions for you so you can earn more commissions.




So the users will enter their details into that opt-in box then they will be taken to the sales page. The sales page is actually a video, it’s got very little text.

Some video sales pages convert very well, especially if they’ve got proof and elements of product scarcity and so forth. Usually when I see that it’s a video sales copy and I see that there’s gravity of over 5, I’ll just assume that it probably converts okay and will be a good money maker.

You can’t really tell for sure until you’re promoting it but with video I’ll watch the first few minutes and try and get a feel for it, but give it the benefit of the doubt and try it if I’m not sure.

Let’s look at another product. This product on “Baby Gender” offers a recurring commission and quite a high average dollars per sale (over $30 per sale).




Promoting products that offer a recurring commission can be a really good idea because you can keep making money from the same sale over and over again.

Let’s take a look at the sales page.

This sales page above looks very promising, and could potentially convert highly. Notice the attention grabbing headline, it’s got a slick presentation, and there’s ‘social proof’ – 11,993 couples have used this method already.

I like the look of this product, and think it’s probably pretty effective, so let’s take a closer look at gravity then move onto some basic keyword research to check if there’s potential to profit in this particular niche.




What is gravity?

The gravity on this particular product is 16.53. That is a measure of the number of separate affiliates that make sales of that particular product. An easy way of thinking of it is there’s roughly 16 different affiliates making sales of that product every week.

So one affiliate might make 100 sales a day, another affiliate might make 1 sale a day, another affiliate might make 12 sales a day. Each affiliate can only add ‘1’ point as a maximum to the gravity.

If an affiliate made a sale say three weeks ago, but they haven’t made another sale since, then they might only add say 0.3 to the gravity. It works on a sliding scale. The longer ago they made a sale, the lower the amount they add to the gravity.

A rough rule of thumb is just to think of it as the number of separate affiliates that are making sales of that product. And if there’s anything under 25 the competition is not really that high. But if it’s over 5 then at least you know some affiliates are making regular sales of that particular product which is a good sign.

Basic niche keyword research

Anyway, let’s move on to some basic keyword research. The first thing to do here is to go to Google.com and type in ‘Google Keyword Tool’.

You will see that the very first listing listed is the Google Adwords Keyword Tool and you just go there.




And then type the niche topic into the search field. In this case I’m using “baby gender” as the basis of my search. Then just fill in the CAPTCHA security code.

And then press ‘Search’.




What this tells me right now is that there are 450,000 global searches per month related to “baby gender”.




The reason I’ve got broad match selected is because I want to get a rough idea of how big this particular niche is. I’m not researching any individual keywords just yet, I’m looking at the overall size of the niche. We can look at what broad phrase and exact phrase are shortly. So anything over 100,000 though indicates that there’s enough interest in the niche for me to consider pursuing it.

So scrolling down the page we can see that there are quite a few different keywords and phrases that people are looking at relating to “baby gender”. For example, "predict baby gender" and "choosing baby gender”.

Now this is a ‘broad match’ result as you can see right here I’ve got ‘broad match’ selected. You can select this option from over on the left.






So scroll back up the page now and under the ‘Match Types’ box untick ‘Broad’ and tick the box that says ‘Exact’.

This will help return more accurate keywords and search volume counts. When you’ve got it on broad match, you’re seeing how many phrases people are searching that include the words “baby” and “gender”. Whereas when you use exact match you’re seeing how many people are searching for the exact phrase “baby gender”.

So now you see there are only 4,400 people (as opposed to 450,000) that type in the exact phrase “baby gender”, but you’re getting to see the exact break down of the other kinds of phrases using the words “baby gender” that are getting typed in.




For example you can see further down the page “baby gender predictor” – 18,100 people are searching for that. You’ll find that all of these exact matches put together will total around 450,000, and that’s because all of those exact matches together have the words “baby” and gender” in them.

As you can see, there are plenty of keywords to target and build a site around. However it’s important to look at the conversion rate of the sales page also, because if a product has a gravity of under 25, you don’t really know for sure if it is converting very well or not. You know it must convert, otherwise there wouldn’t be any gravity, but you don’t know how good it actually is, and that’s why it’s good to look at the sales page itself first.

Also another thing to consider is if the product you’re looking to promote has a landing page that looks more like a portal to a lot of different pages or products. If it has, make sure that you look at the affiliates resources section of that website to see if you can promote the individual products.

An example is one of my niche products sites called meetyoursweet.com. I’ve actually got a lot of products in there, so if you sent a direct link using the ClickBank code directly, you’d just go straight to the ‘meetyoursweet.com’ homepage and you probably wouldn’t make as many sales as if you sent people directly to one of the products.

http://meetyoursweet.com




Whereas anyone that signs up as an affiliate can send direct traffic to the different offers. For example, I had one guy a couple of weeks ago who promoted my product from Meetyoursweet.com on how to get your ex back called “Second Chance”, and he made over 600 sales of that individual product.

But he used the special link that’s given to you inside the Meetyoursweet.com member’s area when promoting that product which directed people straight to that particular sales page for that product.




As you can see in the screenshot above is an example of the break down - people can earn 70% commissions on the front end and 50% commissions on recurring sales for anyone that promoted any of these individual products. But if you hadn’t gone to the affiliate resources area you may not even realize this, if all you did was grabbed the link straight out of ClickBank.

So make sure that you check to see if these individual websites that are in ClickBank actually have their own affiliates area, because sometimes that can be the difference between making great profits and not.

More Competitive Products

So far we’ve just looked at niches that have lower competition and they can be great. But also, equally, some of the most lucrative niches often have high competition. So we’re talking about maybe over 100 affiliates that are succeeding in promoting a particular product and that’s because it converts extremely well.

And when you’re confident about what you’re doing in affiliate marketing you may wish to decide to promote a product that is proven to convert because so many different affiliates are having success with it.

Yes there’s more competition, but you might be thinking well that’s a good trade-off, and that also shows that there’s a lot of money in that niche.

So anyway, in order to find products that are good to promote that have high competition, what I do is go back to the gravity filter and this time I look for something with a minimum gravity of 25 and I leave the maximum gravity at about 100+.




So these products with high gravity scores are pretty much guaranteed to convert, and you probably don’t even need to check the sales page of the product because how will it get such a high gravity unless lots of affiliates are succeeding in making sales, so you know that the conversions are going to be there.

Let’s look at the example in the screenshot below.

The top product there has a gravity of 160, it is called “Pregnancy Miracle”, the average $ per sale is $25, they pay 75% commission, they “claim” that their top affiliates makes $9700 a day – that may or may not be true – I don’t know – I can’t verify that, but it sounds pretty exciting. They are obviously doing very well because the gravity is there.




You could check out the sales page if you want and it’s probably going to be pretty good, but either way if the gravity is 160, it wouldn’t get that high unless it was a good converting product that affiliates were making a good amount of sales from.

After that though the next thing you’ll want to consider is whether or not you think that you can be one of those 160 people. That’s why sometimes you start out with the lower competition products first and “cut your teeth” on those before you really get into these higher competition products.

As you can see in the screenshot, the gravity is 160. And as I said before, basically gravity is a measure of how many different affiliates have made at least one sale of a product during the course of a week. So if 160+ affiliates can make at least one sale of “Pregnancy Miracle” in a week, then there’s absolutely no reason why you can’t as well.

You just need to follow a solid plan like my AffiloBlueprint plan which I’m really hoping that you’ll consider joining when it launches on 29th May. Basically it’s a step by step over-the-shoulder training program where you get to see me build a profitable site from scratch in front of you and you’ll copy and follow along with me as you build your own profitable affiliate sites in whatever niches that you choose following my training methods.

Using Amazon to find niches

Another thing you can do for even more comprehensive research is to head over to Amazon.com. In the search bar you can type in your general search terms, in this case it’s “get pregnant”.

http://www.amazon.com


Now very few people actually bother to go back to Amazon and review products that they purchase, so this means that many people have purchased this book, showing that it’s a hot niche with lots of active customers.

There are also many different products available on Amazon in the “get pregnant” niche, which again indicates that there is money to be made in this particular niche. Now in a niche like this, the central keywords like “get pregnant” are going to be hugely competitive and hard to rank for.

However, long tail keywords are likely to still be reasonably easy to rank for if you follow the training that I’ll be teaching you inside the AffiloBlueprint course.

Common questions

Now let’s look at some common questions you might have about finding profitable digital product niches. Q. Isn’t competition a bad thing?

A. Well not usually. Competition actually means that there’s plenty of interest in the niche and lots of money is being made. And you’re better to cut off a small slice of a competitive niche where lots of sales are being made than you are to try and totally dominate a niche where there are very few sales.

Imagine if you just got say .01% of $1 billion industry, it can still turn out to be a lot of money than if you’re trying to totally dominate a niche where there are very few sales being made.

Q. Which niches are always popular?

A. Well that does depend a little bit on the types of products you’re promoting. If you’re talking about digital information products then some of the core niches that will always convert well will be anything that plays on the main motivational factors of just being a human being - things like weight loss, getting a girlfriend, getting a boyfriend, making money etc.



And you can see that this book here has 56 customer reviews.


In fact it’s a good idea if you want to know which niches are always popular, to go to Google and look up the “Seven Deadly Sins”. You’ll find that this will give you a pretty good idea of the kinds of things that lead to people wanting to buy certain types of products.

If you’re talking about outside of digital product niches, (which are essentially either software based or information products which teach people how to do things to make their lives better), you can find niches that are popular say in CPA networks, such as insurance, debt consolidation, and BizOp. And obviously things to do with weight loss pills and so forth always goes well even in CPA as well.

In general though, the key really is to do what I said just before, and use the Google Keyword Tool. Have a look at ClickBank, and the methods that I’ve shown you there in finding profitable niches.

Most niches that are popular now have usually been popular for a while. The niches that you’ve got to worry about are things like say “ringtones” or something that could be a fad, but usually most niches that I get involved in have been around a while.

If you think about it, a niche that was around 20 years ago, maybe in bookstores rather than being sold online, like “dog training” for example, then it’s probably going to be around a long time into the future.

Q. Do I have to promote digital products?

A. No, of course you don’t have to promote digital products. I’ve been showing you how to find profitable digital product niches in this particular lesson, but in my AffiloBlueprint course I’ll teach you how to find profitable physical product niches.

I teach you how to find profitable cost per acquisition niches if you prefer to get paid per acquisition like per zip code or email address or something like that instead of per sale.

I teach you how to promote two types of physical products like your e-commerce type products, and supplements which are the other kind of physical product.




And then there’s DVD’s and home study courses that can be sold in the form of physical products. There’s all sorts of ways of earning commissions.

And furthermore, inside one of the bonuses that’s going to come with AffiloBlueprint, I’ll teach you how to apply what you learn in AffiloBlueprint towards earning Google Adsense commissions, so you could just make all your commissions from Adsense instead. I’ve got a lot of great stuff to teach you there as well, and that’s in one of the bonuses that come with AffiloBlueprint.

Q. Are here other places to find more profitable niches outside of ClickBank?

A. Well I’ve talked in the previous questions about finding profitable niches outside of ClickBank. Specifically, there’s places like markethealth.com if you want to promote supplements, and there’s Plimus.com if you want to find another place that promotes digital products.

There are a lot of different places, and I teach you how to find dozens and dozens – in fact hundreds of other places to find profitable niches. ClickBank though is one of the better ones, and in the course I’ll teach you all sorts of places to find profitable affiliate programs.

Q: How do I build and market my website?

A: Well that’s outside the scope of this particular lesson but that’s at the core of what AffiloBlueprint is all about.

We’ll give you our brand new Wordpress website theme. And as far as I’m concerned it’s the best theme there is for any aspiring affiliate. It will help you to build authority sites, there’s all sorts of “whizzy” features, and it allows you to build really stylish looking websites. It’s a major upgrade over the Wordpress theme that we had available for the previous AffiloBlueprint when that last launched a couple of years ago.

So we provide you with the theme, we teach you how to use it, (which is really easy), and we even host it for you if you want. You could host it on your own server if you wish to. And I teach you step by step while you watch over my shoulder as I build a website using it. With the previous versions of AffiloBlueprint, people that had never built a website before were building them and that was fantastic.



http://www.Markethealth.com

http://www.Plimus.com


This version is no different in that regard, but there will be a lot of advanced affiliates who are going to like using this particular theme also.

It does everything from giving you a lot of different options on your newsletter opt-in boxes, through to making sure that it’s search engine optimized, and making sure that it’s really stylish. You can even design your own header graphic inside the theme.

Q: When is the new AffiloBlueprint launching?

A. The new version of AffiloBlueprint is being launched on 29th May.

AffiloBlueprint in the past has sold for $197 and that’s what the price will continue to be. I think it’s a steal at that price. I’ve seen far worse courses sell for $2000 and I believe that people would have thought that this was excellent value even if I’d sold this at $997.

But what we’re going to do is for the early movers at the start of launch we’re going to sell it for $77 just to reward them... at that price it really is a steal.

I don’t believe you’ll find any product ever, at least not during the year of 2012, which is as good as this and will make as big a difference to your online money making future for the year.

So we’re going to launch it at $77 for the early movers, I haven’t decided how long we’ll leave that open for. It may be for something like 24 hours, or maybe we’ll leave it for 72 hours at that price, but it won’t stay for very long at $77.

So anyway as I’ve just said 29th May – the new version of AffiloBlueprint is launching, and I hope to see you guys in the member’s area. Really looking forward to bringing it to you guys and I’ll post a few more things on this launch blog before then. So keep an eye out on your inbox for more details coming soon.

All the best to your success,

Mark LingCopyright © 2012 Affilorama Group Ltd. All rights reserved. No part of this ebook may be used or reproduced without permission from Affilorama



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