If you’ve been following the posts I put out right before the holidays, you’ve seen the Affiliate Marketing Blueprint.  The first 5 modules that I’ve posted all deal with assessing a niche.  My philosophy is that you want to waste as little time as possible figuring out which markets you can make a profit from. 

The problem is that it takes time to set up a website, an autoresponder, craft a sales letter or landing page, and put together affiliate links/banners/images, or even worse, create your own product.  If you’re not careful, you can easily waste a month on just these activities before you make any money from any given market.  It’s also possible to do all this work only to find out that you’re not ever going to make any real money from the effort you put in.

So the assessment phase of the blueprint is really important.  I put it together and use it to make sure that all the work I do will pay off.  It saves time and money.  If you don’t use this blueprint, or come up with some other way to assess markets before you spend time and money on them, you’ll likely end up burning yourself out and may give up.

If you’ve read the modules, you’ll see that I like to start with PPC campaigns, specifically Adwords.  I think it’s the fastest and easiest way to figure out which keywords directly match up with the product you’re trying to sell.  I like SEO and that’s my main method for getting large volumes of traffic, but it still takes some time, especially compared with the speed of using PPC.  You can set-up a campaign in about an hour or so with PPCS and start getting traffic immediately.  Even if you’re good at SEO and have a plan in place, you’ll be lucky to get a high volume page one ranking in several weeks.  So what I do is use PPC to find out the keywords related to my target market that will PAY me before I try to rank for anything.  Then after I figure out what keywords I’m making money from, I target those through SEO.  I know a lot of people don’t like to pay for traffic, but this is a great way to avoid wasting your time.  And time is something we’re all limited by.

I hope you’ll give the information I’ve put together in the assessment part of the blueprint a try.  And I’ve set up this post to address any questions you may have on any of the information I’ve covered so far.  I’ll do my best to answer your questions in the comments section below.

Now you have your generic domain name, your landing page as I outlined in the previous “Landing Page Intelligence” module, your keywords and the affiliate program you’re going to promote.

All that’s left is to put it altogether by firing up your Adwords campaign. Google has a wizard that makes creating campaigns, ad groups, adding keywords, creating copy, and setting up bid prices pretty easy. So I’ve just listed out the main points here…

Create a new campaign just for this test niche. You might just call it “Dog Training”.

Create the ad groups by theme, Dog Training, Puppy Training, Train Dog, etc… Remember that you must focus in tightly. For this example, we’ve decided to go with ‘dog training’ instead of ‘housebreaking’ or ‘dog obedience’. We’ll save the themes we don’t use now for later.

Within each ad group go ahead and copy and paste the keywords from your theme lists.

Next, start on the ad copy for each theme as you set it up. I really don’t get very fancy with the copy for my test run. The main thing is to put the ad group theme words in the copy at least twice (once in the headline and at least once in the body copy). Part of the reason I had you organize the keywords this way is that ALL the keywords in a single ad group have the same copy. Anytime a surfer searches for the words in your ad group, the words show up as bold.

So by having a central theme for each ad group and using those words in your ads, the searcher will always see at least some of the words he or she used for the search bolded in your ad. This will increase your click-thru’s significantly.

Depending on the niche, sometimes I’ll make it clear that surfers are going to a review site. Other times I’ll talk about the problem and solution. Just be sure to include the theme words in the copy. If you want, write 2 ads and split test them against each other. Make it clear one is a review and the other is a problem and solution. Most of the time, the problem and solution ad will out-pull the review ad, but not always.

Problem and Solution Ad

Review Ad

Set your bid prices pretty low, especially if you are new at this and don’t want to go broke. I know I don’t want to give Google any more money than I have to, so I still set my bid prices pretty low to start (15 to 35 cents a click unless I know it’s a hyper-competitive market like ‘web hosting’ and I’ve decided to go for it anyway).

Set your daily budget pretty low, like $5 to $10 a day. Set an end date for the campaign just in case you forget to stop it. 5 to 10 days is usually enough for analyzing whether this set-up is worth pursuing.

Within your campaign, make sure you have only English speaking countries selected and disable the content network. I would also set the budget to accelerated (to show the ads as quickly as possible) and you’ll want the ads to rotate as evenly as possible (especially if you set-up 2 ads to run against one another). All this can be found under “Edit Campaign Settings” just in case you missed it during set-up.

You are now live!

Watch your campaign for a few days. You should expect to spend about $50 to get any worthwhile results. You will need about 200 clicks to begin making any judgments at all.

Now I realize some of you reading this are going to throw a fit that you have to spend some money to get into a business. All I have to say is ‘are you kidding me?’ Compared to the cost to enter most businesses, this is peanuts. Don’t go crazy with your ad spend, but $50 to test out a niche is not a whole lot of cash. For many niches, you can get a pretty good idea with even less.

That’s really about all I need to figure out if I want to pursue a niche or not. Top affiliates I’ve spoken with agree that number is plenty in most cases (just don’t pick something like ‘web hosting’ which has a minimum bid of about $10 to get to the top of the rankings).

Analyze your results. Did any of the keywords result in sales? Hopefully you had some.

If not, pause the campaign and see if your landing page is the problem. If you think it might be, you may want to re-work it and try again. We’re shooting for credible here. If the fonts are all over the place and the copy is hard to read, you’re not looking very credible. You also want compelling. This can often be accomplished by talking about the problems your prospects are having, how you had them once too, but you found the solution in the product you’re recommending.

If you really put in some effort on the landing page, have done your keyword research homework and still have not made any sales, you may want to examine your keyword themes and try a different subset (for example, since we started with dog training, you might want to try housebreaking this time). Give it another go.

If you really are not getting any sales at this point, you should scrap the whole experiment and move onto your next niche. Seriously. If you can’t make any sales with about 200 or so clicks set up the way I showed you for a tight theme (and you’ve even tried it twice now), you might not have a good market to match. It happens.

Note that I’m not talking about making a profit; I’m talking about making any sales at all … period.

If you made a few sales with the quick set up I’ve outlined above, you’ve probably found a niche worth going after. If you broke even (spent $50 and made $50) you definitely found something with potential and should pursue it further. If you actually made money, you are onto something scorching and should be super excited to put in more work.

If you didn’t find a winner this time then go back to the beginning and try again. Don’t be too upset because next time all you need to do is select a niche, an affiliate program, some keywords, and put together a landing page on your generic site. So you’re at least starting with more than you did the first time. You should also have more experience writing copy for the landing page and setting up Adwords campaigns. So you are learning. Do not take this experience as a failure at all.

While I know you can definitely earn money with these techniques, they do take a little practice.

Expect that you won’t find a winner every time and just get back to the drawing board.

When you find a winner here’s where the momentum should kick in. Stop testing niches for right now and get going.  You’ve now completed the ‘Assessment’ phase of the program.  Now you need to learn how to increase your profits.  I call this next phase, ‘Level I’… and the first module within it will show you how to “Slap Google Back”.  But we’ll get to that later.

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.

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 …