Research! The Shortcut to Profitable Campaigns

You will be hard pressed to find a better business to be in than affiliate / internet marketing. In what other occupation can you make truckloads of money while you sleep and go on vacation whenever you want throughout the year? Not to mention to be free from dead-end cubicle jobs, nagging superiors and the 9 to 5 sheeple-shuffle…

Aahh yeah, this business is awesome.

But to be doing well, you of course need to do your “homework” and make sure you have a revenue stream to keep those sweet weekly payout wires from all the networks coming in. This simply means staying on top of things and diversifying.

I’m always on the lookout for new markets and verticals to try out. And the one phase you can’t avoid, is research. Research is crucial from the moment you think of trying out a new offer or niche. If you do a half-assed job during this stage, you can (and will) be losing out on a LOT of potential income. Even worse - you may end up failing the niche altogether and decide to drop it completely, based on the negative ROI you ended up with and go “meh…that niche just didn’t work out for me and I don’t understand how people are making money with it“.

I always do thorough research when I enter a new vertical I’m unfamiliar with. Not so much when I just wanna test out a low-paying lead based offer of course - but more so for higher-paying CPA/rebill or sale offers where I’m gonna build out a landing site.

This may sound like a lot of work at first, but with the right tools - it really isn’t!
I always research;

The Keywords
- What is the core set of obvious, short-tail keywords for the niche? (usually a root set of 10-50 words to start with)
- What common long-tail keywords are found off of each of these? (100 - 1000++ keywords)
- What other keywords are used by my competitors that I may have missed?
- What are the different “buckets” or groups/themes that these words could be categorized into?

The Offer / Product & Market
- Is there a potential for good traffic volume and revenue from this offer?
- Who is the average customer or core demographic? (ages, gender, level of education, etc.)

The Competition
- Who are the top 3-5 big players in the niche?
- How are they promoting it? (ad styles, landing page styles, copy style, targeting)
- Which offers are they promoting?
- Where are they promoting it the most? (ppc search or content, media buys, ppv, social media)
- When are they promoting it? (finding a common dayparting pattern among the competitors, seasonality)

In the next few posts, I’m gonna take a look at a few research tools that I personally use. Some are free and some are not. But they all make this job a WHOLE lot easier. Not to mention more profitable.

First up: My Keyword Rockstar Review. Stay tuned!