Affiliate Marketing and Picking a Niche

When choosing a niche product for an affiliate marketing campaign, most affiliates immediately log onto Clickbank, choose the product with the highest commission and the most popularity, and start the campaign.  While Clickbank is a great way to find an affiliate product niche, there are other unique tools you can use to choose an affiliate product.

Open Directory

Open Directory websites list hundreds of thousands of websites that offer affiliate products.  One of the largest Open Directory sites on the Internet is Dmoz.org which provides a way for you to drill deep down and find a very specific niche affiliate product with low competition.

Dmoz has over 4,000,000 websites with over 700,000 categories in which you can search for an affiliate niche product.

• How to Search for an Affiliate Product Niche

Using the “Shopping” category as an example, we will choose a niche from the category such as “Home and Garden.”  From this category we can choose a sub-category such as “Outdoor Structures.”  From here you can get more specific by choosing “Greenhouses.”  Under this category you can start to see more specific niche products related to the broader term of “Home and Garden.”

From there you can get into more specifics such as cedar greenhouses and then search under that topic for specific niche affiliate products.  Once you find a specific product you can go to the Dmoz home page and use the Advanced Search feature to research websites that are offering your product.  You can find out how they are offering them and get ideas as to what you can do differently.

From there you can proceed to the Internet and Google to start your keyword research and begin to construct your affiliate marketing campaign.

Ebay Pulse

Ebay Pulse is another unique tool for locating an affiliate product niche.  You can access Ebay Pulse by logging onto:  http://pulse.ebay.com.  As soon as you arrive at the home page you will see the most popular products features. Do not waste your time considering one of these products because you will be unable to find a unique niche, due to the fact the market is so saturated with these products. Instead you will need to dig deeper into the popular searches.

• Searching Ebay Pulse

Choose a product that interests you and that you are knowledgeable about and then begin with “Category.”  We will use “cell phone” as an example.  When you type in “cell phone” you will once again receive a list of popular searches.  These are still too broad so you will need to dig deeper.

Go to Subcategories and choose an item related to cell phones such as cell phone accessories.  Go a little further into the subcategories by clicking on the menu for the popular searches.  This will take you to more specifics like cell phone cases and from there you can dig further such as brands of cell phone cases, etc.

Once you discover a unique product it is time to start researching the product on the Internet and discovering what keywords are being used to locate the product and the kind of traffic that is generated from the keywords.  Once you have accomplished this, check the Ebay search results to see if there is an adequate supply of products.

Finally, choose a domain, create your landing page, and set up a pay per click affiliate marketing campaign.

Learning online marketing with you,

~ Julie