Work at home on the Internet: internet marketing and affiliate program help.
Back issues here Issue 272 | Apr 13th 2003

Letter from Phil

when you're trying to develop an income from affiliate programs, don't fall into the trap of only promoting information products or
tools aimed at Internet marketers.

Many people, even those who have been in the game a long time, get stuck in this niche and never leave it. They forget that there's a whole wide world of buyers out there just waiting to be sold to.

I guess it's natural for many people to start off selling marketing ebooks, member only sites, and related products. After all, it's what they're interested in so they tend to think everyone else is. But really they're playing in a very small arena.

Another reason is that these products are pushed into their faces all the time...in newsletters like mine :-)

People also tend to promote products in the very narrow Internet marketing niche because they generally pay a much higher affiliate percentage, often 50%.

All well and good, but we're all selling to each other and competition is fierce.

I hate using that clichéd expression "think outside the box" so I won't.

But what you need to do is take a good look around the net. Study what people are buying.

Remember how in last weeks newsletter, and in the week before's I talked about building 2 mini sites a week... saying that if they all only made $50 a week after a year you'd end up with a weekly income of over $5000?

http://www.ozemedia.com/newsletters/issue271.htm

http://www.ozemedia.com/newsletters/issue270.htm

Well the health related mini site I built just over 2 weeks ago has really taken off, and last week it grossed $5695 paying me $348 in commissions. See screenshot.

It's doing well because:

# Competition for sales is fairly low in this niche. (you'll find that nearly EVERY niche has lower competition that the overcrowded marketing niche.)

# It's a tangible product that people spend big sums on.

# Health is a huge industry...most of us want to live to old age. I'm nearly there :-) We're an aging society so demand in this field will keep growing.

Now $348 is nothing startling, and I expect this to grow as the site does better in the search engines. But my total costs have been under nine dollars for the domain name, and around $25 on Google
Adwords.

I can't really take hosting costs into consideration because I pay just $29 a month to host up to 200 sites

The money spent on Google Adwords will not be ongoing. The way I currently work is to list a site with one or two of the pay-per-clicks until they take off in the no fee search engines. See Allan Gardyne's Pay Per Click Search Engines site for advice on using them

The downside, if it can be called a downside, is that commissions are usually much lower in this and other niches.

But that's got to be balanced against the fact that there are a lot more potential buyers in this (and numerous other) fields, and that people often spend bigger sums.

So even if you only make 3 to 8 percent on sales of big item products it can soon add up.

The aforementioned Allan Gardyne, who does VERY well marketing to marketers, is someone who really understands the importance of targeting other areas.

Take a look, for instance, at this site his assistant Rupert built using Site Build It.

It's making around $1000 a month in affiliate income but the affiliate program the site is linked to, Tiger Direct, only pays 3 percent.

So as usual I've taken a long time to get around to the point of all this, which is you've GOT TO look at expanding into other niches.

Tip 1:

Look at using Nichefinder to help you locate profitable niches to build sites around.

Tip 2:

Wordtracker is another very useful tool. I've got an annual account I use several times a week

Tip 3:

Read my book Mini Site Profits to see how I'm doing it.

Tip 5:

If you want to build a text based site like Allan's, which ranks very high in the search engines, and you're not comfortable doing it all on your own use Site Build It.

2. Value Exchange.

And while we're talking of Ken Evoy's Site Build It, he's just released a new free service which helps you find exchange links for your sites.

# By entering your site details it registers your site (which doesn't have to be a Site Build It one) as a site that is willing to exchange links with other sites that have a similar theme/topic content (the engines weight a link less heavily if the linking site is not of a similar nature to yours)

# It also searches for similar sites, ones with topical content that relates to yours.

Like I said, it's a free service, so make use of it.

3.
Invitation to my forum....

please come along to my forum (it's very lively)

and join in the discussions. It's got a whole new look, and lots of help and advice is on hand.

Come on, join us. Oh...and read Rebekah's Forum Profits first if you're not a regular forum participant.

Right, that's it for this week. Thanks for reading all of it.

Much appreciated.