There’s a Secret to Every Affiliate Niche…
May 28th, 2008 by 
Amit
Shew! Finally, moved into my new place in Coral Gables. Exhausted today, tomorrow I’ll give you a video walk through of my new place - it’s AMAZING. Miami is Amazing, my wife and I absolutely love it here.
I’m going to make this short and sweet, since I’ve been completely slammed the last week with moving in, and I’m still tying up some lose ends.
Here’s the Super Affiliate Tip for today : In PPC Affiliate Marketing there’s a Secret to every niche you go into. Once you discover this Secret, you’ve unlocked the key to making massive profits in that niche.
Really.
For a while now I’ve attempted to automate the process of going into completely different niches and cranking out campaign after campaign. Every time I’ve attempted this I’ve failed.
Every time I’ve taken time to carefully study a niche, dropped a bunch of money just testing it from different angles, I’ve succeeded.
So how do you crack the secret to big profits in an affiliate niche?
Whether it’s ringtones, dating, herbal remedies, or whatever, here’s what you need to do :
Test content vs search. Some markets do really well of content and poorly on search, some do great on search but suck on content. Some do great on both. You need to TEST THIS.
Test your Google Adcopy. This is a REALLY important and it’s amazing that most affiliates don’t take the time to really do this rigorously. You need to understand the emotional hot buttons in your niche and put them into your ads.
Getting your ads right can spell the difference between being highly profitable and losing money like a sieve - this includes what domain name you choose.
Keyword Research : Have you thought of all the different types of keywords you can bid on for your niche? Do you know what types of keywords generate the best conversions? Does having state/city names in your keywords help? Do keywords with words like “buy”,”discount”,”sale” in them convert well?
Understanding what types of keywords convert best in your market and making sure your bidding high on these keywords is CRUCIAL.
Here’s what you need to do:
- Make sure you put together a REALLY thorough keyword list that’s nice and broad.
- Carefully tracking which keywords are converting and look for PATTERNS. Use what you learn to expand your keyword list and come up with new keywords ideas.
Bidding on the right keywords and getting good ad placement for the keywords that convert is a BIG part of the Secret to any niche.
In most cases newbie affiliate are missing 80%-90% of the converting keywords. They’re either not bidding on these 90% of keywords, or their bidding too low on them so they get barely on impressions for them without even realizing it. BIG TIP : Keywords that convert really well have a higher CPC.
Landing Page :
Do you know what type of landing page works best in your market? Review site, optin page, or straight sales page?? Look at what your competition is doing, and if necessary test several different types of landing pages to see what works best.
Do you know what type of copy or page layout will pull your visitors in to click through to the merchant and make a purchase? Keep testing until you find something that works.
I’m not going to lie to you, testing and studying are niches is not always fun. And sometimes it can be quite expensive.
But let’s put things in perspective, let’s say you bust your butt and spend a good 2 months testing and trying different angles on a market you knew is profitable. You finally found a landing page that converted really well, high CTR/high converting Google ad copy, and what type of keywords are pulling in all the sales.
Now you’re making $500/day in profit -> that’s $15k/month! 
Do you think it was worth it?
PS Once you’ve cracked the Secret to a market you need to totally focus your effort on building up your campaign and scaling it like crazy. Don’t go into another market until you’ve squeeze every last cent of profit out of that market and have created a solid income stream that will last years.
affiliate marketing market research
Posted in Market Research, Super Affiliate Mindset | 
Nice post!!!
Glad to hear your move is going well.
Yes … so many people ignore content because they read in some ebook “just turn it off, it doesn’t work”
content can be a goldmine if it converts, you’re right test it. There are boatloads more traffic on content than on search
I definitely agree
Also, what you mentioned about scaling a campaign before entering a new niche is very good advice. I’m doing that right now and here are some of the ways I’ve expanded:
1) Broadening the keyword list. Using every keyword tool possible to get a huge variety of relevant and targeted keywords.
2) Expanding to Yahoo/MSN, second tier PPC networks. After some searching, I’ve come across some fantastic PPC networks that have very low competition (hint: which huge websites that have their own PPC system?
3) Optimizing my ad copy through split testing using winneralert.com
4) Bidding up keywords with high conversion rates.
5) Building out my affiliate website.
6) Increasing my daily budget.
you defined pretty much all that is to say on expeding Joshua. Great job. Filteing as much as possible after expending is important also to reduce money spent on non converting or bad converting keywords and increase revenue.
5) Building out my affiliate website.
Joshua,
Your fifth advice is the best.
When you are satisfied with your return on paid search. Move to content. Hire a writer, build a site and start getting back links. Even 10-15 leads off 200-300 organic visits a day is enough to put a smile on your face.
Gagan
Hey Amit,
What tool do you use for tracking? I haven’t seen that covered in any of your posts and that’s such a big part of successful PPC.
Welcome to Florida by the way. I’m sure that you’ll like it here.
John P
Hey Amit. Great post. Thanks for sharing your wealth of knowledge as always.
One question though. You say that the best converting keywords usually have the highest CPC. Do you find that using the estimated average CPC feature in the Google keyword tool is helpful in finding these higher cost/converting keywords when doing your initial keyword research in anyway?
I know that the feature is in no way 100% accurate, but do you think that it’s helpful in relative terms at all?
Thanks again.
It’s definitely an ROI game, and doing due diligence before embarking on a new niche can give you a ballpark idea on sales and profit that can be generated.
I’d use these as a baseline for figuring out the testing budget for a niche.
If you’ve a gameplan on the budget needed to test a market, and have cashflow to run the campaign for 2-3 months (before the aff comms stream in), it’s a systematic formula for success.
“You need to understand the emotional hot buttons in your niche and put them into your ads.”
Well put!
That’s funny you and Paul (from ubberaffiliate.com) both got a new house and will be showing videos of it at the same time you guys must be chasing the same trends I think I’m missing something.
Amit,
What’s your secret? I mean what is the main thing that seems to always work for you if you don’t mind me asking is it the Ads?
IS there ever campaigns you spend a krap load on before you break even just because its a new keyword list even though your ad carries a higher CTR, but your stilling paying super high on keywords just becuase you don’t have any keyword history?
When I was referring to your ad carries higher CTR what I mean to say do you ever think your Ad is performing better then 90 percent of the other advertisers. You just have a Gut feeling because you know how it works and you know what people chase after, but yet your paying super high?
The Reason I ask that for is becuase I have an ad that I’m 95 percent sure its performing better then most of the other ads on the page. I just know this type of stuff just from testing titles through search engines all together and I just got a good sense for it (LOL I think so).
I just can’t figure out why my cost is so high on these ads for its been ~3 1/2 months and I have put $3,500 into this campaign for this one market, but losing like 50 percent net still.
It don’t make no sense I know its a profitable niche becuase there is one other affiliate site in this market its start to make me wonder if there getting some type of special pay.
I’m just confident that my Ad(s) are performing well because I just know I just can’t understand why my CPC is so high still maybe I’m missing something small thats making it high the thing is all my QS scores are great across the board…
another boring motivational post, how about you show us examples.
I don’t care what you say or what other people say but the last sentence in your last paragraph says it all. It’s best advice anyone can get.
I love the title of this post.. And, of course the story is well lined up as well
Well, one thing more, I always enjoy researching and niche hunting, cause I well know they will reward me for it. (for years and years to follow) Long live the internet !