How you can Generate More Search Motor Targeted traffic

Finding The Best Affiliate Products To Promote part 2

How do you identify products to promote 

After you have gone through some or all of the above-mentioned ways to identify products to market, your work is still not over. 

You are still left with choosing which product you want to go with. 

Using Amazon or Google's affiliate network may be very easy, but all that it will help you with is with giving you options to choose from. 

You still have to choose, and if you make the wrong choice you will not only be not earning any money, you will be wasting your time and effort on something that is well spent elsewhere. 

Choosing these products is an art, you need to have a gut instinct for it. There are a number of tools that will help you with making the choice, and we will discuss them in detail later, but making the final choice is still something that is as arbitrary as you picking one because you like it. If picking products 11 were totally scientific there would be no place for you to enter in at all because everyone else would use the same tools that you want to make use of and choose products to market. 

It is because it is not so easy, and it requires a lot of hard work that there is potential for the person who is willing to work hard at it. There are a few basics to selling both online and offline that are applicable and the primary among this is that selling is very easy if you are catering to a need. For example, selling clothes is never difficult. What is difficult is to sell them at a 300% profit, because buyers know when they are being ripped off. Most of the advice you get will be different variations of the same thing. Find something that people need and start to sell it. A slight tweak on the same thing would be to find things that people need, that other people do not sell, and then sell it. This is just to make your job of selling it much easier than it would be if there were a horde of others selling the same thing. The problem is that most of the needs of people are already met. Not only that, there are a large number of sellers already in the market and finding a spot where you will be alone is going to be a difficult thing to do. Taking advantage of changing trends will give you huge returns in a short time, but there is nothing permanent about it. You will have to keep finding new things to market and will always have to be on your toes. It is simply because of all these difficulties that choosing the product to sell becomes an art. You make use of the tools available to you to gather as much information as you can about the product and then take a call on whether it is a good idea to promote it or not. Below we will take a look at both what you can do as well as the tools available to you to help you choose the product to promote on your site. 12 Become an Expert This takes a lot of time, and even more hard work. The Internet is amazing in that it basically creates a level playing field for everyone. It takes very little money to start a website of your own, and if you are not particular, you can even host your site for free at certain places. This means that you have just as much of a chance as anyone else out there to make good. The bad thing is that this increases the competition tremendously. While in real life, it takes a lifetime of hard work to not only become an expert in a certain field, but to be accepted as such, it takes considerably less time online. Yet, this same factor means that there is no dearth of experts in any field on the net. You will therefore have to put in a lot of hard work to show people that you truly are an expert and that what you say is reliable. This is because most of these so-called experts are really not, and all they do is scrape information off other sites and put it on their own. It does not take long before people find out that such people rarely have an opinion of their own, and discard them. The true expert though will not only catch the fancy of the net going public, but will stay there for a length of time, and even build up a fan following. Let us take a simple example to explain the point. If you are going to set yourself up as an expert on cameras, you will find that there are a number of affiliate sites that push products by saying the exact same thing, that they are experts on cameras. However, you invest in some time to build your site up as a place where people can come to for reliable reviews of cameras, you will find that pretty quickly there will be a number of people who do. As long as you make sure that your reviews are honest and accurate you are sure to become popular sooner than later. If you start to sell cameras from your site, you are poised to take advantage of a lot of traffic that comes to your site looking for reviews. Even if most of them are only looking for the reviews but are not interested in making a purchase online, you will still profit from the few who do. The reason why the reviews need to be accurate and honest is because if not, the same people who came to you thinking you were an expert will go out of their way to tell everyone else that you are a 13 fraud. You will find bad reviews about your site cropping up all over the net, and all of a sudden you have lost everything you had. This also means that you do not need to go searching for products to promote. Any new camera in the market that you do not have on your site is a potential candidate for promotion. There is little in the way of research or analysis that needs to be done, and all you have to do is to put in a review of the model and sit back. The advantage of this model is that you have a regular income stream. Even if you have to do a little maintenance work like always making sure that your content is current, or ensuring that you have a new model up on your site within a few days of launch, everything else runs along pretty smoothly. The flip side though is that you will not be able to take advantage of anything new on the market other than cameras. If Apple brings out its new phone, you won't be able to do anything about it. Having a site that is too general is not good because you will not be able to focus on any one product or niche, bringing down the value of your whole site. You will also not be able to target your market properly because you really do not have any target market. Online stores Most affiliate sites go with the large online stores because not only is it easy to become an affiliate, it is also easier to sell the products. For example, if you have a site that promotes cameras, it is much easier to sell these cameras through Amazon or eBay than through some other site. With the number of scams only increasing, people are wary of making any sort of payment unless they know that the site is bona fide. The second good thing is that most of these online stores really do not even give a good description of the product, far less a comparison with similar ones from other brands. This means that they are just a place where people can buy, but it also means that people who want to buy will look elsewhere for expert opinions. If you are the person with the expert opinion, they will visit you, and if you have been convincing enough, will purchase the product online thus crediting you with the sale. 14 For example, you have pitched on washing machines as your niche; you will find that Amazon stocks pretty much everything that you can find in your local store, in terms of brands and models, and then some more. You have two choices here, you can go with washing machines as a niche for your site, or you can target specific manufacturers or even brands to sell. The advantage of doing this is just that you can focus more narrowly on a particular brand or model allowing you to go even higher in the search rankings. Just looking through the most popular list on Amazon will tell you which model people are buying. Generally speaking, this alone is enough because if people are buying something, it means that there is a demand for the product. There are a few things that you have to do to confirm whether that particular model is what you want to go with. Google it This is the simplest way to check if the product you selected is already being marketed by other affiliates, and what king of competition there is. If you see a number of paid advertisements as well as a number of affiliate sites coming up high in the display page, you know that this niche has already been covered and continue your search for your product. The reason for this is obvious. You will be investing a lot of time, effort and money in building a site dedicated to a particular model and if you are going to have to fight it out, it will take you that much longer to start seeing any returns. Going in for something where the competition is lesser is a better idea. Probe your competition This is the stage where most of us find ourselves. Most new niches are already taken and finding one where there is little to no competition is not as easy as it seems to when you read about it. This means that you have to probe your competition to find out exactly how good your competition is. 15 For example, let us take it that you are interested in selling washing machines. You are pretty confident about selling them because you know that there is a need for them. Everyone needs a washing machine. It only remains to be seen what the competition is like. Searching on Google shows you that that particular niche is taken. There are a number of affiliate sites that deal with washing machines and some of them are actually quite popular and not only give you a good review of different washing machines, but also have a rating system that lets you compare different models. If you search on Amazon for the bestselling washing machine, you will find that it is the Haier HLP23E. Yet, when you search with this “Haier HLP23E” as the search string, the results are completely different. You get six results in the display page and we will restrict ourselves to the first page alone. In this first page, you will find that apart from Haier's official company site, there are six affiliate sites. Yet, out of these six there is only one that offers anything approaching a reasonable review of the product. Most of the other sites either give you a general description of the functioning of a washing machine, that you really don't want, or give you the features of the machine that you can get from the company site directly. All the sites offer customer reviews, but barring one all the others have between two and five reviews, which is really not good. Even the one site that has what looks like a promising review by a customer looks like it has been written by a professional article writer rather than an actual user. This fact immediately shows you how you can improve on your competition. When you come down to this level, you will be able to identify products that have lesser competition than others. Yes it is not a totally empty niche, but there are possibilities that are worth exploring further. Use tools You will also find tools that will supposedly help you find weaknesses in your competitor’s websites. These tools are generally paid and will do everything from checking the keyword density to checking if your competitor has the ideal address in his URL. 16 The effectiveness of these tools is debatable, but then it is something additional that you can try if you want to. If you can do all the research yourself, it is probably the best, but where you cannot, you'll have to rely on tools, even if they are not as good. The one thing that you need to remember is that all the pages that have made it to the first page on Google are those that have Haier HLP23E in the URL itself, which shows you how important it is to target specific products. Identifying products is all about legwork and although we have taken Amazon as the basis of our search, this can be done in many other ways. Affiliate networks ClickBank and Google's affiliate network gives you a list of all the products you can promote on your own site. All you have to do is to sign up with them, and this information is made available to you. The sign up procedure is free, and if you go through the procedure of finding products and marketing it, you find that it is one of the simplest there is. You can search by product categories or you can go with specific keywords. If you want to go with the categories, you will get a list of all the products including the “vendor's pitch” which gives you relevant information about the product. This information may often not be enough, but it will at least help you shortlist likely products. You will have to do further research before you choose individual products. The stats button shows you how much your commission is for each sale and the promote button generates a HopLink that will link your site to the vendor's. This is the link that you will have to use in your site, as if you copy the URL of the vendor, you will not be credited with any traffic you drive to the vendor. Such a simple process has seen them grow tremendously and they are one of the more preferred affiliate vendors in the market. 17 When compared to online stores, they also offer much higher commission rates, meaning you earn more. The difficulty though is in you making the sale. Everybody knows Amazon and is comfortable with purchasing from them. When they have to give out their credit card details in other places though, many people will refrain from doing so meaning that you will find selling that much more difficult. Going with the products that have a number of affiliates is a good place to start off. The more the number of affiliates, the more the chances are that that particular product is a large selling one. This is a different take on aping your competition, and your whole strategy is based on the simple fact that if everyone else is selling something, and making a profit out of it, then you can as well. Yet, this logic is not without its pitfalls. 

Just because a particular product has a number of affiliates, it is no guarantee that you will be able to sell the same product. It also means that the competition is already stiff, and breaking into the market is not going to be easy. Moreover, all the juicy sounding URL addresses would have already been taken which will make it more difficult for you to get the product name into your address. This is especially true of you are going in for a totally unrelated product from what you are selling now, or are starting out new. The other way is to look at the products with the maximum commission and then figure out a way of driving sales. Unfortunately this is easier said than done, and in many cases the commissions are high and the competition low because making a sale is so difficult. The second thing that you will have to think about is that you can drive any amount of traffic to a particular site, but unless the home site is written well, no one is going to buy the product. For example, if you become an affiliate to sell eBooks for someone else, however much you do your part, unless the home site itself has something that will make the people you send, buy the product, you are not going to get any sales, and all your effort will be to waste. Generally speaking going for the sure shot ones, like the ones that have a lot of competition is better, because if you work hard enough and get the ranking on your site up, you are at least guaranteed 18 success. If you go for the hard to sell products, you cannot be sure that even after all this effort you will make any sale.