Choosing your niche

Have you already done what I said in the last post First steps ? If not, go ahead and read it!

First things first! A niche is your target market, the people interested in the product you are going to sell. Wikipedia says A niche market is the subset of the market on which a specific product is focusing. So, you can think of a niche being what you are going to sell. For example people interested on how to feed their dogs is a niche, so you go and make a book about how to healthily feed a dog and try to sell this book to them.

So, how do I, as a business man, choose a good niche? Here's how to do it!

Grab a piece of paper and write on that what you are best to, for example hobbies. Why write on a paper? Because, unlike mind, paper never forgets! So off you go, write topics at which you are best at.

Now, after you made a list, think at what topic you are the best, something that you can talk for a long time without getting bored. Because that's basically what you are going to do.

After you chose a couple of topics (niches), go on Google and do a quick search on those. Don't do a search like "computers", because no-one is going to search that, be more exact. For example, you are good at repairing computers, so you search "computer service"->enter. Woaah 1.580.000.000 sites found, that's a lot of competition.
So go to Google AdWords Keyword Tool for more inspiration. Type there "computer service". There you will see how many times that month "computer service" has been searched. Right now, Google tells me 301,000 searches for "computer service" this month. That's a lot of searches! Now don't go on the top most searched keyword because there will definitely be harsh competition. "toshiba computer service" has much less searches, and when you type it in Google, it finds 21 000 000 sites, that's nearly 7 times less websites. That's good news!

Don't get blown away by those huge numbers! That's for computer services, it's a very very popular niche with huge competition. And even if you want to make a computer service, you should definitely start locally. You won't go international from the start.

Anyways, back to affiliate marketing. You should choose a niche at which you are good at, is popular , and where competition isn't too harsh. And even if there is a lot of competition, check their websites. You will surely find something in your mind that they didn't even think about.

Here is a more in-depth research about niches: Great Niche Content

Then, you need to start a website, like this one, in which you should write about your niche and recommend the best products you have used to the people via ClickBank.

ClickBank - first steps

Here we are, in the very beginning of our internet business, the best way of making money if you don't like having a boss.

The first step is, of course, making an Affiliate account on ClickBank Affiliate Program . I am not going to tell you how to do this, because I assume you already know. If you're banging into some problem, be sure to check their help topic: Signing Up for a ClickBank Account

After you do this and sign in, you should see something like this:



Excited yet? I sure was!

Now what you want to do, is click Marketplace, on top of the page, near the Search bar. Before you start to promote a product, think deep of what you would like to promote, you should choose something which is familiar to you. You will see a little status bar underneath every product, where are some info like money/sale, comission/sale and others. What counts the most is Grav. It's short for Gravity, and it gives you a number that is directly dependent on how many products of that type have been sold over past 8 weeks. The more grav it has, the hotter this product is. Keep in mind that Grav IS NOT products sold, it's rather a rating of how hot the product is.
After you choose a product, make sure you check that product page, see how it looks like and document yourself about it. If you think this product is the right choice, ask the producer for more info about it, or even buy it and try it, to know exactly what you sell. Afterall, trying it yourself is the best way to know it, and no merchant is a good merchant if he doesn't know what he sells.

After you decide what product to sell, you should think of ways to advertise it. Now, there are more ways of doing that. You can put an advertisement in your local newspaper including your affiliate link, you can start posting articles and reviews about it on different sites (Ezine @rticles is a good website to do that), you can even create your own website about that product. And even combining those, like making a website and advertising it on your local newspaper. There are literally infinite ways of promoting your product. Even ClickBank tells you something about promoting your product here: Common Ways to Promote Products

The Newbie Workbook for Success is an e-book I mentioned earlier. It describes a very good way of advertising your product. It is about making a webpage for your product and advertising it through search engines without spending money, via making backlinks to your main page. This way you work for a couple of weeks, and after you gain "trust" from Google, you don't need to work that hard any more, just update it from time to time, and the money just flows in.

I will focus on the web page promotion, telling you what to do in order to create, manage and rank your webpage high. If you rank it high enough, and people keep coming to your webpage, you will surely have a percentage of them buying your product. The more pageviews you have, the more chances are people will buy your product.