How to Find the Most Profitable Affiliate Product - Part 3

In Part 1 I talked about the general concepts surrounding Clickbank affiliate products and in Part 2 showed you how to use the free online tool CBEngine.com to narrow down your niche choices. In this post I'll talk about how to research the competition to select your final product.

Even though I noted two good choices for a niche informational product, the final choice is really going to rely on what keyword phrase or phrases you'll use to promote the product and the competition for those phrases in the search engines. A lesson for any internet marketer trying to make money online is that it all comes down to traffic and copy. I don't care what your site looks like as long as you get loads of traffic and can convert it.

If you've watched a master like Frank Kern he notes time and again that you must find hungry markets and convert then with control through your copy. In fact, I would suggest watching this video - 'I Can't Believe How Well This Worked' (wow, he is good) to see first hand what I mean. His style is so simple yet so powerful - using straight forward marketing videos and short emails from his lists. Think carefully about how you might connect to a niche using his mindset.

Why Niche Sites Need Good Keywords

The single most important step in promoting a niche site are the keyword phrases you're going to use to rank your niche site in the search engines. (I had mentioned some basic thoughts about this in an older post - Tuning Your Affiliate Keywords). The problem with products is that initially you can rank well in Google for new products because the competition is very low. But, what typically happens is that a product will start to grow in popularity and keeping your search result rankings high gets harder and harder as some of the more powerful marketers start jumping in.

Most affiliate marketers will try to use the product name as the main keyword phrase. As in Part 2's example of 'The Lottery Blueprint' - marketers will use 'The Lottery Blueprint Review', or, 'The Lottery Blueprint Winner', etc.  However, you could look at other keyword phrases such as 'How to Win the Lottery' or 'How to Pick Winning Lottery Tickets'. We'll look at this in the next sections.

Picking Your Niche Keyword Phrase

So, the next step in narrowing down the field of choices is to take a peak at the competition on the search engines. Since we looked at two products yesterday (August 23rd), let's see how the results look in Google. I'll start with The Lottery Blueprint - let's do a quick search:

This doesn't tell me a lot - but, it does show that the direct search results for the key product phrase, "The Lottery Blueprint" totals 224,000 - which means there's not a lot of sites competing for this keyword (this method is very rough to get only a 'feel' for search results - very popular Clickbank products will return over 5 million results).  Let's compare that to Shapeshifter Body Redesign:

What you might notice between these two results is that almost all of the first 75 results in Google have the title keyword 'Shapeshifter Body Redesign' in them whereas for 'The Lottery Blueprint' has that keyword in the first 50.  That means marketers are building affiliate sites already for both with Shapeshifter having a bit more competition.

Now, what's also interesting is that the unquoted search results for 'The Lottery Blueprint' has 2.8M results whereas 'Shapeshifter Body Redesign' has only 394,000 results.  This stems from the keywords in the product name - 'shapeshifter body' is obviously not going to be a common search keyword combination, say as 'lottery blueprint'.  What this tells me initially is that the phrase 'Shapeshifter Body Redesign' is much more targeted to the product than to a general search - whereas 'Lottery Blueprint' is going to return results for other sites outside the product.

What's the point? We need to dig a bit deeper into the keywords - my favorite tool is to use Aaron Wall's SEOBook website:

He has some free fantastic tools that help with keyword research.  I use his Keyword Suggestion Tool.

All you need to do is join his site for free to use it.

Let's try some simple keyword phrase searches to see what the daily search volume is for the products. By entering 'Lottery Blueprint' into the tool - guess what? - no one is searching Google or Yahoo for this keyword phrase yet, which means - no one knows about the product except for niche marketers.  So, out of the gate this doesn't look like a great keyword phrase (yet).

Now, let's try 'Shapeshifter Body Redesign' in the tool:

And, look at the results:

Not great at only 5 searches a day overall, but, most certainly growing.  If you built your niche site around that product keyword phrase and aggressively marketed it, I bet you could see some good monetary returns as people become more aware of it and start searching directly for it.

Going back to The Lottery Blueprint, let's try looking for keyword phrases around 'how to win the lottery'.  I'm going to enter in the keyword tool just the words 'how' and 'lottery' to see what results I get:

Well - looks like people really want to win the lottery these days!  The keyword phrase of 'how to win the lottery' gets 1178 searches a day in Google and Yahoo combined.  If you had the #1 position in each you be doing very well indeed!  However, that phrase is largely competitive and it would take a lot of time and money to get in the top 10 of either search engine.  Not impossible, but, if this is your first niche site you might want to build your site pages on 'how to pick winning lottery numbers' or 'how to pick lottery numbers' as the keyword title and internal content.

Final Thoughts on Profitable Affiliate Products

I thought I would show you some successful affiliate sites that are ranking high for a very popular Clickbank products. One is called Point.Click Commissions - look at how they modeled the site after the product keyword phrase (this is not my affiliate page). Here's another example of a niche site for a very successful product (again, not my site). This should give you some insight on how marketers build niche sites.

This is really just a primer for you to get going - just remember this - build your profitable niche site around your chosen keyword phrase, that is, the website title, sub pages and all links back to your site.  Keep adding content, building traffic and letting your promotional site rise in the rankings. You should be earning money online within a month!