How to Find the Most Profitable Affiliate Product - Part 3

In Part 1 I talked about the general concepts surrounding Clickbank affiliate products and in Part 2 showed you how to use the free online tool CBEngine.com to narrow down your niche choices. In this post I'll talk about how to research the competition to select your final product.

Even though I noted two good choices for a niche informational product, the final choice is really going to rely on what keyword phrase or phrases you'll use to promote the product and the competition for those phrases in the search engines. A lesson for any internet marketer trying to make money online is that it all comes down to traffic and copy. I don't care what your site looks like as long as you get loads of traffic and can convert it.

If you've watched a master like Frank Kern he notes time and again that you must find hungry markets and convert then with control through your copy. In fact, I would suggest watching this video - 'I Can't Believe How Well This Worked' (wow, he is good) to see first hand what I mean. His style is so simple yet so powerful - using straight forward marketing videos and short emails from his lists. Think carefully about how you might connect to a niche using his mindset.

Why Niche Sites Need Good Keywords

The single most important step in promoting a niche site are the keyword phrases you're going to use to rank your niche site in the search engines. (I had mentioned some basic thoughts about this in an older post - Tuning Your Affiliate Keywords). The problem with products is that initially you can rank well in Google for new products because the competition is very low. But, what typically happens is that a product will start to grow in popularity and keeping your search result rankings high gets harder and harder as some of the more powerful marketers start jumping in.

Most affiliate marketers will try to use the product name as the main keyword phrase. As in Part 2's example of 'The Lottery Blueprint' - marketers will use 'The Lottery Blueprint Review', or, 'The Lottery Blueprint Winner', etc.  However, you could look at other keyword phrases such as 'How to Win the Lottery' or 'How to Pick Winning Lottery Tickets'. We'll look at this in the next sections.

Picking Your Niche Keyword Phrase

So, the next step in narrowing down the field of choices is to take a peak at the competition on the search engines. Since we looked at two products yesterday (August 23rd), let's see how the results look in Google. I'll start with The Lottery Blueprint - let's do a quick search:

This doesn't tell me a lot - but, it does show that the direct search results for the key product phrase, "The Lottery Blueprint" totals 224,000 - which means there's not a lot of sites competing for this keyword (this method is very rough to get only a 'feel' for search results - very popular Clickbank products will return over 5 million results).  Let's compare that to Shapeshifter Body Redesign:

How to Find the Most Profitable Affiliate Product - Part 2

From Part 1 you learned about the popular niche categories that are available in Clickbank that should provide your niche site with the highest profitability. I mentioned that you could dig deeper into Clickbank directly or use a great online tool called CBEngine.com that is free for basic research.

The best part of CBEngine is that you can easily search and sort through the Clickbank parameters such as Popularity, Gravity, Date Added, Category, Subcategory, and Affiliate Payment level.  With only these search criteria you can finalize your niche pick usually within one to three hours depending on the niche popularity.

The main CBEngine search window is located on the far right side of the main page screen. Each of the search parameters means the following:

Top Category - these are the same categories in Clickbank I showed you in Part 1.

Sub Category - within each category are smaller subsets - for example, in Sports there would be a Golf sub category.

Ranked In - these are the top products ranked in a category or sub category if picked.

Keywords - any words within the products you are searching for.

Look In - what part of the product description you want to find a keyword.

Newer Than - how new the product is since its release on Clickbank.

Pays More Than -  the payout to affiliate for each product sold.

Order By - in the free version you can only order by Rank, Earn% and Gravity.

Choosing a Product

My own personal secret to finding a product is to start with ONLY the last three search criteria - Newer Than, Pays More Than and Order By.  I'm not too worried yet about the categories until I can see the first list.  Here's the trick - be sure to start by choosing products newer than 6 months. This is critical! The reason why you want to do this is because the competition for other affiliate niche sites will be much less than if you pick a product with high popularity that has been out for over a year.

How to Find the Most Profitable Affiliate Product - Part 1

For most of my internet marketing career I've been an affiliate or niche marketer. I've found that this is the easiest way to get something out the door to get some online income with a busy schedule (as I was when I started out).  Being new to this game can be daunting if you are caught up in many internet marketing or affiliate marketing products and trying to learn how to make money online.  And, as I mentioned in my last post, if you don't have a strategy then you'll find making those first dollars online few and far between.

So, here's your strategic goal - build one highly profitable affiliate niche site as fast and as easily as you can. If you are a new internet marketer or feel like you're struggling to find a niche this is where you need to start.  I've built niche sites in as little as five hours and made thousands on them.

The good news is that building a niche site quickly isn't really that difficult and to start to see some returns. I use some pretty simple methods that get me results fast without the pain and suffering of building something that doesn't convert.  My method is going to be focused strictly on Clickbank informational products in this article but could be extended to other markets.  If you follow these easy steps you should be able to find a product to market in one night.

Affiliate Product Principles

So, let's get started!  The basic principles for any niche affiliate product site are:

1. Choosing a popular subject area - if you scan through the Clickbank marketplace you'll see quite a few categories such as Sports, Travel and Health.  It's just a fact that some markets are going to have a much larger audience than others.  I'll talk about that in the next section.

2. Finding a product with low competition - this principle is the tough nut to crack, because, if you choose a popular subject area to market chances are the competition is very high.  This is where most of your time will be spent.

3. Picking products with higher payouts - I have found that many forget this basic rule of thumb which seems to work against common sense. You'll find yourself drawn to lower cost products initially.  I'll talk to this point later.

Basic Product Categories

As I noted before there are many Clickbank categories to choose from many of which are very narrow in interest. If you go to the Clickbank site and click on 'Marketplace' at the very top of the screen:

IM101 Step 7: Using Blogger to Build Your Affiliate Site

I've talked about Blogger many times before on The Agile Marketer. It is, in my mind, the easiest way to get a site online that can generate revenue for you quickly. With built-in RSS feeds, Adsense and the ability to customize using Javascript or HTML additions you can actually build a fully functional website.

However, your goal is not to get too wrapped up in site design - remember, the key to your success is getting content out there quickly and to notify blog search engines that content is being updated.

I'm not going to go into the details of how to sign into Blogger and set up your account - you can find many tutorials out there on how to do this - here's a great one if you need it: Vance's Blogger Tutorial

Make sure you choose a more vanilla, or sparse template. The reason for this is that you can make things stand out much better - the colors of a header or inline page photos really stand out when the template is mostly white. In case you haven't noticed, The Agile Marketer is a Blogger blog (highly customized, though).

I realize it has been a while since my last tutorial - but, part of the reason was to show you how this Blogger affiliate site I was building, namely, The Diet Solution Program, is doing in Google!!

Take a look at: The Diet Solution Program

I completed the first part of the blog in October and submitted only some free press releases and one, single article. Over time I added some more blog posts, submitted my site to a few social sites such as Spicypage and Blogcatalog, submitted the single article to some more directories and pinged some blog search services. Actually, not much work overall - I didn't do some of the standard traffic building techniques such as YouTube or a load of article submissions.

So, in two and half months - how are we doing with our keywords?
1. 'The Diet Solution Program' - now ranked 42nd in Google (534,000 results)
2. 'Isabel De Los Rios' - now ranked 22nd in Google (361,000 results)
3. 'healthy diet plan' and 'natural weight loss' - (524,000 and 2,640,000 Google results) no ranking yet for those specific phrases (but indexed by Google if the search is refined)

I haven't spent any time on optimizing the keyword phrases in #3 yet - just letting organic growth work with these. However, my future approach will be to add keyword density in my Blogger posts as well as articles that focus on these.

Not bad for the small amount of work I've put into the site - I would guess I've put in about 8-16 hours of work. With only a single article, six submissions to article sites, three press releases, about seven social site networks I'm generating some traffic, getting Adsense revenue and a few Clickbank sales.

The key with Blogger was getting my content posts out there so that they will be searched by Google right away. Keywords make the difference - you can see how just a little work can get a site moving up the organic search result ladder. Just image if you have 5 to 10 of these Blogger affiliate sites working over time....

IM101 Step 4: Finding Your First Product to Market

I've spent some time in my earlier tutorials discussing how to make money online by pre-marketing your website. Now that you understand the basics let's get started building something easily and quickly.

There's probably no easier way to start than to market an existing electronic product. I prefer starting with Clickbank only because the products are affiliate ready - that is, they are structured in a way that every product Clickbank promotes must allow the same affilite linking, terms of service, disclaimers, refund policy, etc. Plus, they are all electronic downloads which makes your profits that much less stressful. This means you only have to pick a product that matches something you are interested in (remember, focusing on your passions will make this much easier - see Passions to Profits for more information).

The other part of Clickbank that I like is the easy way to see what products are the most popular and their gravity (a term meaning the products are accelerating in sales). I prefer picking a fairly new product that shows some gravity but is not yet in the top sellers. Here's an example from their Marketplace tab:

As you can see - I searched by highest gravity in the Fitness section of Health and Fitness. The stats underneath give you an idea about the amount you make per sale and how popular the ebook is.

Researching the Clickbank History

If you want more data on the specific product from Clickbank then I like to use another site called CBEngine.com. They have more data you can use to see how a product has been doing over time. CBEngine has both a free service and a paid service if you want more than just data (you can get specific recommendations).

Another aspect you should pay attention to before picking your product is to see how much that author is willing to pay you, the affiliate marketer, for selling their product. The payout to you for a product can range from $5 to $80 per sale which is a pretty wide spread.

When I first started I focused on the highest paying products only to find that there seems to be a price threashold for many buyers won't cross. A $99 Clickbank product is a much harder sell than a $30 one. Keep in mind that you would have to sell three to six times as many products to match a high priced one. My rule of thumb is to focus on products for less than $50 with at least a 50% affiliate payout (meaning you get at least $25 of a $50 sale).

Signing up with Clickbank is a simple task - just be sure that you have your online business ready to go (see Business Before Web) and that your TaxID is setup so you can start.

Clickbank is a very easy way to start your internet marketing business. All you need is an affiliate site, some traffic tricks (more to come!), and the perseverence I'm mentioned so many times before. Remember, the product is only a small part of the bigger picture. Getting your site ranked with traffic will be the winning formula. Imagine now that your site is #1 in Google for the keywords tied to your product - that's the real goal. I've done it and made thousands on Clickbank products - so can you.

Next up - getting your product keywords ready (before you doing anything else!) to dominate a Google search result.