When I started my first business, one of the things I learned very quickly was that to make ends meet and pay the bills, you need a good product. And this is true for any type of business: If you want to be successful in life (and not just in business) you need to offer a product or service that people find valuable.
And this is exactly what affiliate marketing is all about: You have a product or service that people find valuable and you promote it. In return, if someone buys your product or signs up to the service you promote, you get a commission paid by the company offering the product.
Sounds easy? It is! But there's a catch…
The harder you work, the less money you make
It's really that simple. If you want to get rich quickly with affiliate marketing, my advice is to quit your job, put up a website and promote every affiliate program under the sun. You'll soon find out which companies pay well and if they don't, maybe it's time for you to start your own affiliate program and pay affiliates a MUCH higher percentage (we're talking 40% or more here).
But if that doesn't sound like your kind of business, I suggest you read on. Because what I'm going to share with you in this article can help you make REAL money as an affiliate marketer. And as such, I think it's much more likely that you'll be successful.
The next few paragraphs are filled with real-life examples to illustrate what I'm talking about, including specific dollar amounts, so I'd suggest you grab a sandwich or something because this is going to take a while. But the good news is that by the end of this article you should have a much better idea how affiliate marketing works and more importantly if it's the right business model for you.
Now let's get started…
Promoting stuff I don't believe in = not profitable
One of the first companies I joined when I got started with affiliate marketing was ClickBank. When I joined up they had around 9000 products to promote. So I thought “Hey, 9000 products to promote… this will be easy! All I need is a website and I'll make thousands!”. How naïve was I?
I quickly found out that promoting all those different products on one small website was not only extremely difficult, but also extremely unprofitable. Let me explain why by using an actual example:
At the time, I was promoting a dating ebook. Sounds like fun right? Well, not if you're trying to sell it to men AND women! Doing so basically made me compete with myself and therefore my commission on each sale went down by 50%. So all of a sudden I had to sell twice as much just to make the same amount of money!
This is why, after starting with ClickBank, I decided that from then on I'd only promote products that were very targeted and therefore had a much higher chance of making me money. And it worked: As my commissions started to go up by 20-30% instead of 50%, I could now sell half as much and make the same amount of money!
This is why I believe affiliate marketing is more profitable when you promote targeted products. But what does “targeted” mean exactly? Well, that's up to you to decide…
The importance of targeting your niche
What do I mean by niche? It's just a fancy word for a group of people that share the same interests, problems or needs. It could be anything really: gambling, cooking, weight loss, web design… the possibilities are endless.
The more targeted your niche is, the easier it will be to promote your product to them and the easier it will be for you to make sales. So if you're struggling to make money with affiliate marketing, I suggest you take some time to think about possible niches that you're interested in.
These are just a few examples to get your creative juices flowing:
– Ebooks
– Physical products (cameras, fitness equipment or supplements…)
– Membership sites (you can charge monthly fees for access)
– Personal coaching
If you can come up with a targeted niche, which you're interested in and is profitable, the next step is to find a product that your audience might be interested in buying. And while some niches are more obvious than others (weight loss products, for example), I suggest avoiding them until you have a little bit of experience under your belt. Why? Because it's much easier to start with an unknown niche and profit from that, before making the leap into more competitive markets.
So let me ask you…
What are some of the problems or needs people in your chosen niche might have? How can you solve those problems or meet those needs?
To give you a few ideas, I've included a list of niches below, along with some potential products or services you could promote. Just pick one and use the rest as ideas for future research:
– Golfing equipment/accessories
– Weight loss supplements
– Magic tricks
– Dating advice
Let's get into the fun part now, shall we?
How to find affiliate products to promote
Now that you have a niche in mind, it's time to think about the type of product or service people in your niche might buy. You can use any one of the following methods:
– Find a product yourself using one of the many tools available online. I've done this countless times, and it's one of the quickest ways to find a product.
– Find someone else who already promotes the type of products you're interested in and ask them for their advice or if they can recommend any specific products.
– Use Google Trends to see what people are searching for overtime, which will give you ideas about trending products.
Here are just a few tools that I'd recommend using to help you pick profitable products:
Jungle Search–This is one of my favorite tools, simply because it's so fast and easy to use. On top of that, their support team is second to none. Seriously, guys, they answer all my questions within hours!
So let me show you how it works:
I simply enter a keyword in the search box and I immediately get a list of all the products that are currently selling on Clickbank. If you're not familiar with this term, Clickbank is an online marketplace where people can buy and sell digital products such as ebooks or membership sites.
One thing to keep in mind here is that not all products are worth promoting…
For example, you might see a product with fantastic sales numbers, but the actual product sucks. So it's up to you to determine if the product can still be profitable for you, even though its sales numbers may tell you otherwise.
But let's say I wanted to promote an ebook about dating advice. I would simply enter a keyword like dating into the search box and get a list of all the ebooks currently selling on ClickBank.
Now it's time to get even more specific!
For example, I might want to find an ebook that talks about how to meet women in bars. So I simply add bar + dating into the search box and I end up with a list of 12 ebooks.
You can then use those numbers to determine which ebook you want to promote, based on the following criteria:
– Sales–How many sales has the product made? You should avoid promoting ebooks that haven't made at least 25 sales in the last 30 days.
– Conversion–How many sales does the ebook get you for every 100 visits? I'd recommend not promoting ebooks with less than a 1% conversion rate because it's too difficult to make any sales.
– Price–How much does each sale of this ebook generate for affiliate marketers? It should be at least $10 per sale, which means you'll need to promote an ebook that's at least $20 in price.
– Commission Rate–How much are you being paid to sell each copy of this ebook? You should avoid promoting ebooks with less than 50% commission rates because you're not going to make any money.
– Affiliate Ranking–What's the rank of the affiliate who's promoting this ebook? You should avoid promoting ebooks with affiliate ranks of under 50 because it means they're struggling to make sales.
– Back-end Sales–How many people make repeat purchases after buying the product you promote? This is a great indicator of whether or not your potential customers like the author's work, and most ClickBank marketers recommend only promoting products that include a 30% or higher back-end sales rate.
Of course, you can always decide to use a different metric if you want, but those are some of the things I look for as a ClickBank affiliate marketer.
By using Jungle Search as your first port of call when creating a niche site, you'll greatly increase your chances of finding a profitable product to promote.
As you can see, Jungle Search is super-fast and easy to use, but if you have any questions just leave them in the comments below…
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