Hey Guys,

For those of you who haven’t gone out there and given this affiliate stuff a go, I know it can seem really daunting and confusing. The truth is that you can make it as complicated and involved as you like, but there are also opportunities out there that are pretty much straightforward. Here’s an example of a market I’ve just noticed, and what I’m going to do to get my piece of it.

You could actually call this a "typical morning" for me. I was playing around with Affiliate Elite, doing a bit of background snooping on another affiliate to see which programs he was promoting. (This is a pretty easy thing to do with Affiliate Elite… you just plug the affiliate’s username into the software and it dishes all the dirt.)

I saw that this guy was promoting a pretty interesting looking affiliate program, so I thought I’d check it out. Some of you might have heard of it: It’s called "Registry Fix". When I started nosing around I could see that its Alexa rank is pretty impressive at 47,000 (that makes it the 47,000th most visited site on the internet, according to Alexa), and it had been hanging around that level for months. "Hmm!" I thought, but of course you need to examine more than just a site’s traffic when you’re looking to promote it. So I went over to Clickbank and checked out its stats there: 75% commissions with a gravity of 133.52.

For those of you unfamiliar with the concept of "gravity", here is is straight from the horse’s (Clickbank’s) mouth:

"Number of distinct affiliates who earned a commission by referring a paying customer to the publisher’s products. This is a weighted sum and not an actual total. For each affiliate paid in the last 8 weeks we add an amount between 0.1 and 1.0 to the total. The more recent the last referral, the higher the value added."

So what that’s telling us is that this product, Registry Fix, has had lots of sales from lots of different affiliates over the past eight weeks. That’s a pretty good sign that the product is a good one to promote.

But what was also interesting for me was to see another registry cleaner software called "RegCure" listed one place ahead of Registry Fix in the Clickbank Marketplace. This one has an even better gravity with 271.97. A little further down the page I could see even more registry cleaning software products, also with high gravity, also with payouts that looked pretty good (around $24-27 per sale at 75% commission).

So what we have here is a market that has a lot of different software products available to promote, a lot of them with very good gravity scores (meaning that a lot of affiliates are having success with them) and a lot with very reasonable commissions. Sounds like a pretty promising market so far!

The next thing I look at is WordTracker statistics. I can see that there are a lot of people searching for registry cleaners and related terms. So lets recap:

* Plenty of products to promote
* Many other affiliates already having success with the products
* Good commissions
* High number of searches for related keywords

This sounds like something I should be getting into, so I’m going to go ahead and set up a website around this topic. The decision is as easy as that!

So now its time to formulate a plan. The first thing I want to start with is getting some content for the site I want to set up, so I’m going to post a project to Elance asking for somebody to write five articles about registry cleaning, five articles about spyware and adware removal, and five articles about how to optimize your PC. From the responses I get to that project I’ll pick two "winning" Elancers. They’ll write fifteen articles each, which will give me 30 articles in total to get my site up and running.

When those are done I’ll put them together into a website, and also set up a landing page to promote these affiliate offers.

I’ve decided to promote this market using pay per click because I can see that other affiliates are doing well with it, because it’ll give me results faster, because I know what I’m doing and because I can afford to do it That said, there’s no reason why you couldn’t use the method I’ve described above to find profitable products to promote through natural SEO. I might end up doing some SEO on it myself at a later stage, but for the moment I’m going to go with PPC.

Now I’m going to have to wait a few weeks until I receive applications from prospective Elancers, choose the winning applications and then give the writers time to do their thing and write those articles. Once that’s done and I’ve put it all together into a site, I’ll post it here so you can all see the results.

So that’s it! All that, from the initial "this looks interesting" to formulating a plan of attack only took me one morning. This is a pretty reasonable method for finding profitable markets. All you really need is to know what to look for. For those of you who have spent weeks or months agonizing over your topic, performing your market research, planning your strategy… this should show you that it does get a lot easier once you know what you’re doing.

And for those of you who have been procrastinating… give this method a whirl and see what you come up with

Stay tuned for the results in a few weeks!

Mark

P.S: If you’re wondering what this "Affiliate Elite" software is, check out my last couple of blog posts.