In the last module, I covered how to build an Investigative Site so that you can test out your niches as quickly as possible. 

Now that you have a good affiliate program selected in a particular niche, you need to follow this philosophy:

Do not initially waste your time building a website and getting links. What you really want to do is figure out (and figure out quickly) which searchers are going to want that product. To explain it differently, you want to uncover the exact keywords that are typed in by the buyers.

Here’s an example (it’s obvious, but I need to drive this point home with you):

If your niche is ‘dog training’ and you’ve selected a dog training ebook from Clickbank, you can bet money that people typing in ‘georgia attorney’ are not going to be interested.

Right?

Right. That’s just plain ridiculous.  And at this point, you won’t be able to get this by the quality score in your pay-per-click campaign.

People who type in ‘georgia attorney’ are looking for attorneys in Georgia, so the last thing you want to do is advertise a book on dog training to these folks. You’ll waste your money and worse yet, your time.

What about people who type in ‘pets’? Do you think some of them might buy your dog training ebook? Maybe, but that’s still too vague. Pets might also include folks with cats, fish, iguanas, monkeys, turtles … you name it. If you took out a paid ad (like a pay-per-click ad) on this keyword to advertise the dog training eBook, you will most certainly spend much more than you would ever make.

The word ‘dog’ is closer, but you would still never want to pay money to advertise for it with pay-per-click (PPC) ads. The problem is there are way too many reasons someone may want to search for the word dog. They may be thinking of buying a dog, they may be looking for a particular dog related product, or they may just not know what they want and are using the word as a starter search. You would still lose out if you paid for a PPC ad like this.

I never see anyone talk about this, but it’s pretty crucial. Keyword searches do not occur in a vacuum. You may see a high volume of searches for a particular keyword, but it might just be a word that is often used to find a better search term. The folks searching with it might not be buyers. It might just be a research word. I would bet that ‘dog’ is just a research word, therefore, you’d never want to bid with it.

If we qualify further, we could come up with ‘dog training’. People searching with the keywords ‘dog training’ are a good bet (it’s our exact niche after all). You know they want to train a dog so that’s a pretty good match to the product you are promoting. But I would bet this word is close to a ‘break-even’ word, meaning if you bid on it with a pay-per-click campaign, you would likely just break-even. You would need a highly converting sales page or sales process to make a profit (which is still possible to achieve).

And this is where most folks online are missing the boat. They want to promote a book on dog training and they buy pay-per-click ads for the word ‘dog training’. Maybe they also think up ‘dog obedience’ and slap up a couple of other obvious keywords as well.

But if you dig deeper, I can guarantee you there are many more phrases you will see much higher conversions with.

For example, surfers typing in ‘dog training online’ or ‘dog training course’ would be even more qualified than those just searching for ‘dog training’. They are typing in essentially exactly what you are offering.

The closer you can get to what you’re selling the better.

People trying to train their dog for a particular problem are also potential buyers. Folks typing in, ‘stop dog bark’ or ‘teach dog to walk’ are definitely potential buyers of a dog training ebook.

In some markets, searchers actually type in the word ‘buy’ before whatever they’re looking for. You can bet these people are surfing with a credit card in hand. You want to make a list of as many of these trigger words as you can come up with.

You’ve probably also heard that the name of the product is a highly converting keyword. It definitely is, so don’t forget to add that one to the mix.

So forget the website and link building activities for now. What you really want to spend your time on is coming up with a list of words like these. You need to dig deep. This part is very important.

You are going to uncover all the words you can, do a little spying, and then you’ll test out the keywords. There is no other way to know whether particular words and phrases will convert or not without testing them. Adwords is perfect for this. Here’s how I get my keywords…

To generate a massive list of keywords pretty quickly, I use Wordtracker. You can purchase a week pass for fairly cheap. There are free services out there and software tools that you only pay for once, but I really like Wordtracker.

If you don’t want to pay for anything, then use the Good Keywords tool. You may find it here… http://goodkeywords.com/. It’s a downloadable tool that is pretty powerful, especially for free. There are many other programs and memberships that you may already own. If so, I would use one of them instead.

If you’re going to use Wordtracker you should start with the Keyword Universe Tool. I’ve put together a short tutorial for using Wordtracker the right way here:

Building a Keyword List with Wordtracker

And once you compile your list of related words, you’ll want to put them into Excel, which you can do by following the tutorial here:

Convert Wordtracker List to Excel Spreadsheet

Once I have a list of keywords and phrases into Excel, I start analyzing them.

I like to organize the words by theme and I suggest you do so as well. You can use the find and search function in Excel for this (in my version, it’s under “Edit”). Here’s a screenshot:

So if we stick with the dog training example, words that would be on my theme list might include ‘house training’, ‘housebreaking’ and ‘dog obedience’. These are examples of themes. Themes are always just a word or two (three at the most) and are highly searched. You would see other words added onto them like ‘housebreaking my dog’ or ‘dog obedience training’.

Obviously, ‘housebreaking’ is the main theme and ‘housebreaking my dog’ is a keyword that would go under the theme (we’ll cover that in a minute). For now, I would set the themes aside and think about whether I want to create an ad group for each of them. I usually like to find about 6 to 12 themes initially.

You’re going to have to partly rely on your intuition and common sense for figuring out which themes would be more likely to earn you money. You should also pay special attention to any ‘buy’ words and the product name itself. Make sure to pull these out of the Wordtracker lists.

I did say partly rely on your intuition, right? That’s because you can also use Google to help you determine which types of products are already being advertised for particular keywords with Adwords.

To spy, I just type in my keywords, one-by-one and take stock of what’s currently advertised on the first and second page of the results. If someone else is already advertising there (especially for a product like the one you are promoting), they are probably earning some money. If they’re earning, then you have a good chance of earning as well.

Definitely keep the themes that show ads promoting products similar to what you’re planning to promote.

I would also go to my Google Adwords account (if you don’t already have one, get it set-up), and use the “tool” feature. Click on “traffic estimator”. This tool will provide you with a way to gauge how much traffic you will receive at a certain bid price.

I really love this tool. If you find that the word doesn’t bring in much traffic at all, then it’s not a good choice for a theme. Without traffic, you’re not going to see many conversions.

Here’s an example…

By using the Adword’s Traffic Estimator, we can confirm that the words “dog training” are searched quite a bit. According to the tool, we will get between 74-110 clicks per day with just a bid price of 15 cents per click. Remember, this tool only provides you with an estimate. I don’t trust it right down to the range given, but if it says I’ll get a bunch of clicks at my low bid price for just the main theme keyword, I take that as meaning it’s worth it to set up a theme for it.

You now need to organize your list of keyword themes. Remember, you would like between 6 and 12 to start with. You can always add more later so don’t spend all week on this one task.

Again, I consider the theme keywords to be the ones with a higher hit count and fewer words. Organize your keywords by theme (remember, you do not need to use them all). Just try to focus on the one’s that you think would convert for the product you chose to promote. If you’re using Excel, you can use the find tool and type in the theme. For example, if ‘dog obedience’ happens to be one of your themes then type it into the “find tool” in Excel. You will be shown a list of all the keywords that have the words ‘dog + obedience’ in them.

So on your piece of notebook paper or on your computer, type out ‘dog obedience’ and put all the words Excel found that have a decent daily hit count (at least 10 or above) underneath it. Only put in the words that make sense for the product you are promoting.

For example, we are promoting a dog training ebook. So “dog obedience schools” is probably not a good keyword. My intuition tells me that these surfers are already planning on taking their dog to a school and may not be interested in an ebook. You should follow your own intuition when creating your list of keyword themes.

Do this for each theme. You now have a highly organized list of potentially converting keywords that are ready to plug into Adwords. But before we get to Adwords, let’s set up our landing page.  I’ll cover this next in the Landing Page Intelligence module.

In the last module, I talked about how to select your niche.  So by now you should have at least one niche selected and an affiliate program you plan to promote.

The next part of the blueprint is important. While you may be tempted to go out and buy a domain name that relates to your niche right away, I’d hold off on it.

What I do instead is purchase a generic domain name that will work for testing out all my niches. I call this my investigative site. I purchase a domain name like one of the following:

Top3Products.com
BestProducts.com
TheReviewer.com

These were just off the top of my head and should spark some ideas. Get creative and you’ll find one in no time. Remember, you just want a domain name that can be used to test out ALL your niches so it needs to be pretty general.

It’s my opinion that you don’t need to waste your time initially coming up with a domain name, registering it and getting it ready to use for each test site. If you do, you’ll waste valuable time and most certainly uncover fewer good niches in the long run. So I suggest using a generic domain name for testing all your niches.

Using my system, once you find a winner (a good affiliate program that you can convert), you will transfer it over to a much better domain name later on.

But first, you will use this generic domain to find out if you have the right market to message match. That’s what’s important. Can you find the right market (the right keywords) to the right message (the landing page and the right affiliate product to promote)?

A lot of times I don’t get the right market to message match. There’ve been times when I hit something really good right away and other times when I spent a few months coming back to the same niche thinking … “If only I approached it differently I’d finally make some money”.

Guess what?

Sometimes it never happens.

If you follow this blueprint you can side-track that painful process. Instead of banging your head against a wall, just go with what is working for you. There are enough markets out there to not have to worry about hitting any particular one just right.

You can ask the top affiliate marketers you may know and they’ll say the same thing. You’re not going to win with every niche. So find the ones you hit just right and milk them. Brush the rest right under the carpet so to speak.

Best of all, if you use this technique, you aren’t wasting much of your time. After you register the generic domain name and set it up, there are only 2 things to do. One is to put up a single landing page promoting an affiliate product in the niche. The other is to set up your Adwords campaign. You can do both in a day quite easily.

So what needs to be on this domain? Firstly, I’d recommend putting up a home page with some generic information like …

… the point of your site (how you research and review products for consumers)
… who you are

You don’t need to spend too much time on this page; after all, most folks are not going to see it.

You will also want a page with your site’s ‘terms’ and ‘privacy policy’ … all the typical legal jazz. If you do not already have these, you can try LawGuru.com.

They offer a ‘terms of use’ agreement and a ‘privacy policy’ agreement as do many other sites and of course, so does your neighborhood attorney.

You’ll also need a footer at the bottom of each page. I would suggest putting in a copyright notice and some contact information in the footer. This is where paying $20 or so a month for a box from Mail Boxes, the UPS Store, Postnet, etc… will come in handy. Just include your box address at the bottom.

From your footer, make sure you link back to your home page, the terms, and your privacy policy. Here’s an example…

Having these few extra pages and the footer will help your site look more legitimate to surfers. It’s also useful when you start bidding with Adwords. Google uses a quality score for the sites promoted through its pay per click campaigns. Having a more robust site rather than a simple one-pager will help keep your site from getting a lower quality score.

This means you pay less in clicks. And that makes it worth the extra effort.

This extra work (not that it will take much time at all) will help your site look more like something Google wants to show its searchers rather than a one page site you put together in an afternoon (even though that’s pretty much what you’re going to do).

*Note: At the time I’m re-releasing this information, Google’s quality score is more harsh.  That means you may need to add some content to your site in order to keep your bids low.  I would suggest finding good articles from an article directory like EzineArticles.com and placing a few of them on your site in order to build up the content.  I’ll explain this in more detail later on. 

Best of all, you use the same domain name for all your test niches so you only have to do this once.  In the next segment, I’m going to cover a little about the keywords you want to select for your niches so that you start earning ASAP …

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…

Is there really such a thing as no risk market selection? Don’t I wish!

Truly, there’s risk involved with anything we do in life, down to getting out of bed in the morning. But if you follow this blueprint, I think you’ll agree it’s about as risk free in the world of online marketing as you’re going to get.

I’ve done everything I can to simplify the system I use to uncover and test out hot niches (without wasting tons of my time or breaking the bank). I’ve broken down my exact system into step-by-step instructions even the beginner can follow.

Here’s an overview of what you’re going to be doing …

You are going to become an affiliate in your test niche. Your test niche is the niche you are trying to determine if YOU can make a profit in (notice ‘you’ is in bold; I truly believe that many folks just aren’t meant to be selling in certain niches).

You are going to become an affiliate to a popular product in your test niche so that you can …

1) Build a list.
2) Find ‘keyword to product’ matches. It’s very important that you know which keywords are searched for by buyers. Not all keywords convert the same. If there’s anything you should get out of this blueprint, it’s the simple fact that some keywords convert better than others.

That way if you decide to really roll-it-out with the niche and create your own product, you already have two major assets; a list of potential buyers and a list of highly converting keywords (plus you have an additional bonus … an income stream).

Having these assets makes launching almost any new product practically a no-brainer. Best of all, after you have these assets you can leverage them when seeking out potential JV partners. I can guarantee that if you approach JV Partners with these assets under your belt, they’ll be more excited to help you out than if you don’t have anything at all.

As you will see, there’s more to the system than just building a list of potential buyers and compiling highly converting keywords, but these are the key factors.

The whole point of this blueprint is to get to the point where you start seeing results as quickly as possible so you can pick up in speed from there!

Momentum can really build once you start to see results so we’re going to begin with what I call the Assessment phase in the first module which will be posted next …

I’ve decided to do something a little crazy.  I’ll be giving away some of my absolute best content for free on InlineSEO.  This content is a step-by-step plan for how to find profitable niches and build up the revenue as quickly as you can once you find them.

It’ll be a whole affiliate marketing series.  I’m going to refer to it as the ‘Affiliate Marketing Blueprint’ for now.  If you’ve ever struggled with how to make money as an affiliate marketer, then this series is crucial for you to read. 

I wrote this series a while ago after building an 11-page site that began earning me several thousand dollars per month.  I don’t have the figures right in front of me, but I earned quite a bit from that first site during its very first year online and was able to repeat the process …  This series details exactly how I was able to do it so that anyone can repeat my success. 

BTW: I had compiled the information into an ebook called ‘Cracking the Niche Code’ and was selling the information for about $50 quite successfully.  I’m in the process of cutting down on the number of products I sell now, so I’ve stopped selling it and will begin posting a revised version of it.  If you were a buyer of that product, you’re on a special buyers list where I’ll let you have my next product for at least half off the regular price.  And half off will be a lot more than what you spent for the ebook.  I’ll send out the details when I’m closer to being finished with that new product.

So please be on the look-out for the Affiliate Marketing Blueprint.  I’ll try to post the very first part of the series in the next day or so.