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HOW TO FIND PROFITABLE NICHES
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Welcome!
If you don’t know me, my name is Mark Ling and I just wanted to firstly thank you for taking the
time to download this free report and set aside some time learn how to find profitable niches.
Before I get into the details I just want quickly cover who I am just so you know who you’re
learning from. Following that, we are going to briefly cover what affiliate marketing is (for those of
you who are newbies). And then we’re going to get into the nitty gritty of how to find profitable
affiliate niches, and in particular we’re going to be focusing on digital products, although I will
allude to other types of affiliate niches out there as well.
Allow me to introduce myself
Below is a photo of me with my wife Michelle, my son Benjamin who’s just turned 2 years old, and
my son Caleb who is 5 months old. In the photo is his nice train birthday cake which was made
by his Mum who I’m very proud of.
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And below is a photo of me when I was speaking at an internet marketing conference in Las
Vegas.
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Why learn from me?
You might be wondering what makes me so special and why you should learn internet marketing
from me. Well, put simply, you should learn from me because I make a lot of money online.
I do it through different means – half of it comes from doing affiliate promotions promoting other
people’s products, I also make a lot of money from marketing and selling my own products, and
I’m even making good money making and selling my own iPhone App, so I really have taken to
this whole information marketing business like a duck to water – I really love it.
Evidence of my successes
I’ve taken some screenshots of some recent data from a few of my ClickBank accounts and
pasted them below.
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Below is a screenshot of an affiliate commission where I made over $21,000 just from a couple of
emails to one of my lists.
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Below is an email I got sent recently when I promoted a guy’s product from the dating niche.
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For this particular promotion, the product was on “why men lie to women” and I ended up selling
around 700 copies of this particular product, and won first prize in that particular launch
competition. I got an iPad 3, a 1-hour consultation with a guy who is a brilliant copy writer, and
this sort of thing happens all the time.
Other people that I have helped to succeed with affiliate marketing
I’ve got lots of successful students and below is a screenshot I grabbed from my website – lots of
successful students that have made a lot of money as well.
Below is a photo of my father with my son Benjamin this was taken the day after Ben’s birthday.
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I even got my dad into internet marketing! He was really skeptical at first but now he’s into it and
making all of his money from internet marketing. Before he got into affiliate marketing, he was
working for a Government agency. After 30 years working in Government, he was getting quite
stressed. Then I got him into making money from affiliate programs, and he even went on to make
some of his own products as well in different niches, and he’s done extremely well. These are
niches like “dog training”, and “how to sing”. He has done extremely well out of it.
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What is affiliate marketing?
Affiliate marketing is simply when you earn commissions promoting other people’s products. An
example of what this looks like on the internet is in the screenshot below. I typed in the words
“aggressive German Shepherd” into Google.
This is what someone that’s got a problem relating to almost anything does; They go to Google or
another search engine, and they type their problem into Google.
Or maybe they’ll type in a physical product they’re looking for or something else. But let’s say
they type in a problem they have. In this case “aggressive German Shepherd”, then they’ll see
my website comes up right at the top of the search. Because most people click the first thing they
see in Google, they will click through to my website.
You can see what my website looks like in the screenshot below. The person will straight away,
see my article there on my website, and then they’ll go ahead and read my article and for some of
them that’s all they will do.
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But a small percentage of the people who visit my website, and it only takes a small percentage to
make a good deal of money, go ahead and buy one of the products that I recommend on this
page. Further down the page I’ve got some affiliate links for different products. So that’s basically
what affiliate marketing is; It’s just about being the middle man and there’s a world of traffic
outside of Google.
Google’s not the only way to send traffic to an affiliate offer. The idea about affiliate marketing is
that you don’t have to own the product that you’re promoting, but you can earn commissions and
there are tens of thousands, probably hundreds of thousands of different products that you can
promote as an affiliate.
Common ways of making money as an affiliate
Here are a couple of examples of how you can earn money as an affiliate marketer.
• You can earn commissions promoting digital products. The good thing about digital
products is you can earn much higher percentages because it’s just bits and bytes
people are downloading, so if you promote a dog training product that is an instant
download, then let’s say that product sells for $37 and you could earn 70% commission,
then that turns out to be a lot of money, especially if you make several sales per day.
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• You can earn commissions promoting physical products. Some places are better to
promote physical products than others. Some physical product places only pay you
maybe 4% commissions, but then other places pay you much higher commissions.
• You can earn commissions promoting ‘cost per acquisition’ offers. That’s where you get
paid just for sending somebody that will enter their name and email address. So you
might get $3 for every name and email address that gets entered. Or you might get say
$30 for everybody that fills in a full on form that might be an application for insurance or
something like that, even if they don’t take up the insurance, or even if it’s just to get a
quote estimate you might get paid quite a lot of money per lead.
• You can earn recurring commissions from offers, like maybe signing someone up for a
membership where that person is paying a monthly fee, and then you end up getting a
recurring commission for as long as they stay on as a member.
• You can also earn high ticket commissions. Some products sell for $1000 and you can
make 50% commissions. In fact one product that I promoted that was $2000 a little while
ago I ended up making $187,000 in commissions that week, and that wasn’t even
counting my prize which brought it to over $200,000. A few times I’ve made over
$100,000 in commissions promoting a product, and very frequently I make over $10,000
promoting different people’s products, whether it’s high ticket or low ticket. Anyway, I’m not
telling you this to brag, I’m just telling you what a great opportunity it is.
So with all this in mind, in this report I’m going to show you how to find profitable digital product
niches. And in particular I’m going to focus on the ClickBank affiliate network.
Yes, there are a lot of other ways of profiting in affiliate marketing, and I’ll cover all of the ones I
just mentioned in my AffiloBlueprint course which is coming out on 29th May 2012. But for now
I’m focusing on ClickBank, and the reason I’m doing that is because the vast majority – over 60%
of my income – comes from ClickBank. Other people make the majority of their income from other
affiliate networks.
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There are other ones out there and there other ways of making money which I’ll cover in my
AffiloBlueprint course. But seeing as the vast majority of my money is made in ClickBank, I think
it’s only appropriate for me to show you how to find profitable ClickBank niches.
Finding Niches On ClickBank
The first thing you need to do is visit www.ClickBank.com, and at the top of the page you’ll see
there’s a link to the ‘Marketplace’. From here you can pick a category – any category that
interests you.
I’m going to pick ‘Parenting and Families’. You have to scroll down a bit to see it.
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On ClickBank you’ll find that the vast majority of products are digital information products on
topics like “how to train your dog”, “how to pick up women”, “how to play guitar”, or software like
“search engine optimization software” like “Traffic Travis” or business software like “daycare
management”. So we’re trying to find niches and products that are profitable but don’t have too
much competition, at least for the moment.
Thankfully ClickBank now makes this quite easy using their tools. Later on in this report I’ll show
you how to find profitable affiliate products that do have competition, but right now we’ll stick to
the low competition offers. So you’ll want to use the filters on the left hand side of the page to do
this. What I recommend that you do is you set the minimum ‘gravity’ score to 6 and the maximum
gravity score to 25.
This means that at least some sales are being made but not too many different affiliates are on
board promoting this particular offer. And you’ll also want to set the average $ per sale to a
minimum of $15. Look at what I’ve done in the screenshot below. I’ve set average $ per sale at
$15, minimum gravity 6, and maximum gravity 25.
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This narrows down the number of products in the Parenting and Families category that I’ve gone
to. You can do this in another category of course, but it’s narrowed it down to about 15 products.
Now it’s just a matter of checking out the sales process for the products that you’re interested in
promoting.
You basically want to find out for yourself whether or not people will be likely to buy any of the
products you’ve found. Obviously some people are buying these products or there wouldn’t be
any gravity at all, and I’ll get onto gravity shortly, so don’t worry if it sounds complicated, I will
reveal everything soon! Let’s just take a look at the first product in our narrowed down search by
clicking to open the website.
Checking the sales page
So the first product opens up a sales page with an opt-in box, and this can be a good thing as it
means the vendor is trying to collect visitors’ email addresses, and this means that they can follow
up and make more conversions for you so you can earn more commissions.
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So the users will enter their details into that opt-in box then they will be taken to the sales page.
The sales page is actually a video, it’s got very little text.
Some video sales pages convert very well, especially if they’ve got proof and elements of product
scarcity and so forth. Usually when I see that it’s a video sales copy and I see that there’s gravity
of over 5, I’ll just assume that it probably converts okay and will be a good money maker.
You can’t really tell for sure until you’re promoting it but with video I’ll watch the first few minutes
and try and get a feel for it, but give it the benefit of the doubt and try it if I’m not sure.
Let’s look at another product. This product on “Baby Gender” offers a recurring commission and
quite a high average dollars per sale (over $30 per sale).
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Promoting products that offer a recurring commission can be a really good idea because you can
keep making money from the same sale over and over again.
Let’s take a look at the sales page.
This sales page above looks very promising, and could potentially convert highly. Notice the
attention grabbing headline, it’s got a slick presentation, and there’s ‘social proof’ – 11,993
couples have used this method already.
I like the look of this product, and think it’s probably pretty effective, so let’s take a closer look at
gravity then move onto some basic keyword research to check if there’s potential to profit in this
particular niche.
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What is gravity?
The gravity on this particular product is 16.53. That is a measure of the number of separate
affiliates that make sales of that particular product. An easy way of thinking of it is there’s roughly
16 different affiliates making sales of that product every week.
So one affiliate might make 100 sales a day, another affiliate might make 1 sale a day, another
affiliate might make 12 sales a day. Each affiliate can only add ‘1’ point as a maximum to the
gravity.
If an affiliate made a sale say three weeks ago, but they haven’t made another sale since, then
they might only add say 0.3 to the gravity. It works on a sliding scale. The longer ago they made
a sale, the lower the amount they add to the gravity.
A rough rule of thumb is just to think of it as the number of separate affiliates that are making sales
of that product. And if there’s anything under 25 the competition is not really that high. But if it’s
over 5 then at least you know some affiliates are making regular sales of that particular product
which is a good sign.
Basic niche keyword research
Anyway, let’s move on to some basic keyword research. The first thing to do here is to go to
Google.com and type in ‘Google Keyword Tool’.
You will see that the very first listing listed is the Google Adwords Keyword Tool and you just go
there.
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And then type the niche topic into the search field. In this case I’m using “baby gender” as the
basis of my search. Then just fill in the CAPTCHA security code.
And then press ‘Search’.
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What this tells me right now is that there are 450,000 global searches per month related to “baby
gender”.
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Now this is a ‘broad match’ result as you can see right here I’ve got ‘broad match’ selected. You
can select this option from over on the left.
The reason I’ve got broad match selected is because I want to get a rough idea of how big this
particular niche is. I’m not researching any individual keywords just yet, I’m looking at the overall
size of the niche. We can look at what broad phrase and exact phrase are shortly. So anything
over 100,000 though indicates that there’s enough interest in the niche for me to consider
pursuing it.
So scrolling down the page we can see that there are quite a few different keywords and phrases
that people are looking at relating to “baby gender”. For example, "predict baby gender" and
"choosing baby gender”.
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So scroll back up the page now and under the ‘Match Types’ box untick ‘Broad’ and tick the box
that says ‘Exact’.
This will help return more accurate keywords and search volume counts. When you’ve got it on
broad match, you’re seeing how many phrases people are searching that include the words
“baby” and “gender”. Whereas when you use exact match you’re seeing how many people are
searching for the exact phrase “baby gender”.
So now you see there are only 4,400 people (as opposed to 450,000) that type in the exact phrase
“baby gender”, but you’re getting to see the exact break down of the other kinds of phrases using
the words “baby gender” that are getting typed in.
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For example you can see further down the page “baby gender predictor” – 18,100 people are
searching for that. You’ll find that all of these exact matches put together will total around
450,000, and that’s because all of those exact matches together have the words “baby” and
gender” in them.
As you can see, there are plenty of keywords to target and build a site around. However it’s
important to look at the conversion rate of the sales page also, because if a product has a gravity
of under 25, you don’t really know for sure if it is converting very well or not. You know it must
convert, otherwise there wouldn’t be any gravity, but you don’t know how good it actually is, and
that’s why it’s good to look at the sales page itself first.
Also another thing to consider is if the product you’re looking to promote has a landing page that
looks more like a portal to a lot of different pages or products. If it has, make sure that you look at
the affiliates resources section of that website to see if you can promote the individual products.
An example is one of my niche products sites called meetyoursweet.com. I’ve actually got a lot of
products in there, so if you sent a direct link using the ClickBank code directly, you’d just go
straight to the ‘meetyoursweet.com’ homepage and you probably wouldn’t make as many sales as
if you sent people directly to one of the products.
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Whereas anyone that signs up as an affiliate can send direct traffic to the different offers. For
example, I had one guy a couple of weeks ago who promoted my product from
Meetyoursweet.com on how to get your ex back called “Second Chance”, and he made over 600
sales of that individual product.
But he used the special link that’s given to you inside the Meetyoursweet.com member’s area
when promoting that product which directed people straight to that particular sales page for that
product.
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As you can see in the screenshot above is an example of the break down - people can earn 70%
commissions on the front end and 50% commissions on recurring sales for anyone that promoted
any of these individual products. But if you hadn’t gone to the affiliate resources area you may not
even realize this, if all you did was grabbed the link straight out of ClickBank.
So make sure that you check to see if these individual websites that are in ClickBank actually have
their own affiliates area, because sometimes that can be the difference between making great
profits and not.
More Competitive Products
So far we’ve just looked at niches that have lower competition and they can be great. But also,
equally, some of the most lucrative niches often have high competition. So we’re talking about
maybe over 100 affiliates that are succeeding in promoting a particular product and that’s
because it converts extremely well.
And when you’re confident about what you’re doing in affiliate marketing you may wish to decide
to promote a product that is proven to convert because so many different affiliates are having
success with it.
Yes there’s more competition, but you might be thinking well that’s a good trade-off, and that also
shows that there’s a lot of money in that niche.
So anyway, in order to find products that are good to promote that have high competition, what I
do is go back to the gravity filter and this time I look for something with a minimum gravity of 25
and I leave the maximum gravity at about 100+.
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So these products with high gravity scores are pretty much guaranteed to convert, and you
probably don’t even need to check the sales page of the product because how will it get such a
high gravity unless lots of affiliates are succeeding in making sales, so you know that the
conversions are going to be there.
Let’s look at the example in the screenshot below.
The top product there has a gravity of 160, it is called “Pregnancy Miracle”, the average $ per sale
is $25, they pay 75% commission, they “claim” that their top affiliates makes $9700 a day – that
may or may not be true – I don’t know – I can’t verify that, but it sounds pretty exciting. They are
obviously doing very well because the gravity is there.
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