Assessment

Before you do anything else, you are going to find a niche and assess it. Just follow the exact blueprint here and you won’t waste much time or money uncovering lucrative niches. And that’s what we’re going to do in this module …

Niche Array

When you’re sitting down thinking about ways to make money, one of the first thoughts that will pop into your head is ‘what market should I pick?’

Honestly, this is where the mistakes frequently happen. It doesn’t matter if you are planning on pursuing profits by Adsense (or other advertising methods), affiliate marketing, or your own products and services. You need to pick the right market. You need to pick one where money is being spent.

A lot of folks (both old and new) pick a market that isn’t proven to be profitable, and then when their new business idea fails, they pack it up. It takes these poor folks a long time to feel like starting over again (if ever). I’ve been in this unhappy place a number of times. Even though I have more than my fair share of optimism, it truly is hard to pick yourself back up from failure.

But you know what? Even top marketers have failures. I honestly haven’t met any successful online marketers who have never picked a bad niche. That’s just how it goes.

The truth is, most, if not all affiliates aren’t going to be able to swing it ALL niches. Why that is so is a bit of a mystery.

My explanation for this phenomenon is that certain products will resonate with you better than others. You will most certainly relate to a particular problem (especially if it’s one you’ve experienced for yourself) over others. This is true due to all the unique life experiences you’ve had that I haven’t and vice versa.

This is an obvious example, but if you’re a stay-at-home mom, parenting may be an easy niche for you to conquer, whereas horse racing (especially if you’ve never been to a horse race) may turn out to be a challenge.

You will be able to see how to put together certain marketing campaigns better than others. Sometimes you’ll surprise yourself with how much you understand about a particular niche. Maybe you’ve never suffered the problem a certain product attempts to solve, but you may know more about it than you think. You may just resonate with folks who have this problem a lot more than you’d ever imagine.

No matter what, no one can avoid selecting a bad niche from time to time.

So I truly believe that one of the best strategies is to try as many things as you can without getting too caught up in any one in particular. Throw them all out there. When one project starts earning you some money, then pursue it like crazy and spend your time earning more from it. This way, you waste as little time as possible.

This is in contrast with someone who comes up with an idea, spends weeks if not months preparing the product, creating the website, fine-tuning images, writing an autoresponder series, and all that jazz only to find out months later that no one wants to buy their product.

I want you to avoid that kind of failure at all costs.

In my opinion, the best way to test out a niche is to become an affiliate first. It’s my philosophy that you never enter a market void of any products. The market you’re thinking of entering SHOULD have competitors and hopefully at least one of them has an affiliate program you can join (if not, I urge you to pick another market for now).

If you can join an affiliate program and start earning money from it, you’ll be way ahead of the game before you spend any of your time creating a product. As I’ll show you later, this has the added benefit of allowing you to create a much better product if you decide to do so.

What I want you to avoid at all costs is creating a product that turns out to be a dud. Believe me, it can still happen, but if you follow my blueprint; you’ll turn the odds of it NOT happening in your favor.

So let’s get started with niche selection …

If you have a niche in mind, check for affiliate programs by typing in “niche keyword + affiliate” without the quotes into Google. You can often find a number of affiliate sites in your niche just by doing this.

Another way to get started is to look for good affiliate programs first, and then pick the niche based on those programs. You can search for affiliate programs from the following sites:

www.cj.com
www.linkshare.com
www.clickbank.com (only digital products)
www.shareasale.com
www.associateprograms.com (a directory of smaller affiliate programs)

The best affiliate programs to promote are those that offer at least a $15 to $20 payout on each sale. Anything less than that may not be worth your time (unless the market is not very competitive at all).

You also need to make sure the program you plan to promote is converting. If you’re going to send traffic their way, make sure they know what they’re doing and have a well put together sales page along with compelling copy. I look for a product with testimonials, a money back guarantee, and an easy order process. If you are looking over Clickbank.com and/or CJ.com then you can see how the programs are ranked (essentially, the higher the product, the better it’s selling). It’s a little more complicated than this, but that’s the essence of it.

*** If what you’re really interested in does not have any affiliate programs, then try thinking more broadly. Pick a niche that the same type of buyers may flock to. Sometimes this is a similar niche, other times it’s just a broader version of the niche.

For example, if you really want to enter the ‘how to fly fish’ niche, but there are no information products ready to promote, expand your horizons by entering the ‘fishing’ niche. If there are no information products in the ‘fishing’ niche (which I know is not the case), then you could enter the ‘outdoorsman’ or ‘hunting’ niches. Keep taking steps backwards until you find the bigger market that exists for your sub-niche. Try selecting an affiliate product in the bigger market if none exist in your sub-niche.***

You really want to enter a proven market rather than one that’s entirely new. This is especially true if you’re not making any money online yet. You want to start out with some easy successes. That way you’ll keep going.

Otherwise, you might hit a roadblock and give up completely. This stuff works; you just need some guidance and a little experience under your belt.

One of the best features of an affiliate program is one that allows you to track right down to the keyword. That means anytime you make a sale through a pay-per-click ad; you know which keyword got you the sale. If you can’t find an affiliate program that offers this feature in your niche, it’s OK; I’ll show you a few ways to get around it.

The point is if you’re hovering between two affiliate programs in the same niche; pick the one that allows you to easily track the keywords that make you the sales.

One of the best signs of a healthy market is competition, so don’t be scared of a niche with a lot of affiliate programs. If anything, consider it a good sign. It only provides you with more choices to promote.

In the next module, I’m going to explain to you how I set up what I call an Investigative Site so that you can test out the niches you find…