Written by: Chris Jones, Guest Blogger

Over the 4 years that I have been involved with ClickBank, I have seen countless products, niches, and services all trying to compete for market share.

If I could give you one piece of advice to maximize your affiliate marketing efforts, it would be this:

Stand out from the crowd, be unique, and the profits will follow.

This has never been more vital than it is today. Over the past 3 years the Internet has changed substantially—“Web 2.0” sites have become very popular, YouTube has become a major player both for entertainment and for Internet marketing, and there are more people online than ever before. To get people’s attention these days, your affiliate marketing efforts have to be truly special.

Here are 3 things that can help you stand out from the crowd with your product or service:

Design:

As mentioned above, the days where you can just have a blank page of text, a few pictures and a Buy Now button are over. Focus on making your site design fit the niche you are in, and work on making the design look really professional so potential customers trust you.

A good way to ensure your design will resonate with your audience is to learn from the best in your niche. If it is a gaming site, for instance, then check out some of the biggest game companies on the web and follow suit. Make sure your images, colors, and even fonts are in line with what visitors to gaming sites would expect.

Video:

As I’m sure you’ve noticed, many of the most successful ClickBank vendors and affiliates have started using video on their site, and there’s a good reason for it.

Video can improve conversions ten-fold if executed properly, so make sure you have a professional video made that focuses on the benefits of your products.

Some of the most profitable sites on ClickBank now use a simple video on their main sales page. If you’re not taking advantage of video yet, you’re missing out.

Product/Service:

Even though there is a lot of competition in any given ClickBank category, and especially the largest ones, the top products find a unique angle or selling point that helps them stand out. Make sure that you put some thought into what makes your product or service different from all the others in your niche.

Is it a totally new technique? Do you provide better support resources? Really cool tools or bonuses? Make sure you’ve got something unique that will resonate with buyers. If your product has a unique selling point, it can do very well!

Conclusion:

The final point that I wanted to recommend in this blog post is to be yourself! There is no one like you in the whole world and your product/website should reflect that.

Of course, don’t ignore learning the basics of skills like copywriting, web design, and video creation, but when you are using them, make sure to add a little bit of your personality so you stand out, and you’ll see your conversions improve.

About the Author

Chris Jones has been a Clickbank Vendor for 4 years and co-owns DUBTurbo with NC Media. For in-depth tutorials on how to get started with ClickBank, visit the NicheChoppers Forum.

Take a look at these related posts:

1. Use Physical Products to Increase Profits & Reduce Refund Rates
2. Maximize on Market Trends to Increase Your Profits
3. 7 Keys to Big Video Profits

Written by: Charles Kirkland, Guest Blogger

This is Part 1 of a three-part series.

With numerous opportunities to make money online available worldwide, one of the most popular methods these days is affiliate marketing. There are several approaches to affiliate marketing, but most marketers agree that the fastest way to start making money immediately is through Pay Per Click (PPC) marketing. Unfortunately, this is also one of the fastest ways to lose a lot of money if you do not plan properly.

In this guide, we will take a look at three critical factors that every affiliate marketer must be aware of in order to successfully turn a profit using PPC marketing without the risk of losing a large amount of money.

Factor 1 – Discovering a Profitable Offer

Generating an exceptional profit using ClickBank is still highly possible at the moment. Having said that, there is such a large variety of products and niches that it might be tough to choose the most effective income generating products on ClickBank to advertise. So what’s the easiest way to determine which products are ideal to promote so that you can make the most money without having to waste your time.

Let’s take a look at a handful of tips that when followed should put you on the right track to uncovering some of the most successful ClickBank products.

1. Pay attention to exactly how well other affiliate marketers are doing in promoting the product

It’s possible to understand a great deal about whether or not a product is profitable by looking at the sales statistics of others. A product is without doubt selling very well if there are a high number of affiliates advertising it. ClickBank has a sales statistic known as gravity, which is a number that represents the percentage of online marketers successfully promoting a specific product.

You shouldn’t make a judgment based solely on gravity, but it is useful data that ClickBank provides and can be an excellent tool in selecting a income generating product to advertise. Choosing virtually any product with gravity between 10 and 100 is usually a great start.  If the gravity is less than 10, odds are it isn’t selling very well. Likewise, if the gravity is more than 100 it may be an indication that the marketplace is saturated, although that is not always the case.

2. Monitor products that are rising in popularity

To discover successful products, it is helpful to pick one with statistics that are climbing. Restrict your choice of products to roughly 10 and track them for at least a week or two. Should you note that other affiliates are choosing one product a lot quicker than the others, then that could be a successful affiliate product.

3. Estimate the return rate

One crucial factor you should consider when choosing the top ClickBank products is the return percentage rate. When return rates are high, then a product sales rate is not indicative of your potential success with a product since you will likely end up returning your earnings in the future. Virtually any product with return rates higher than 15% probably should not be considered, irrespective of sales rates.

The only way to truly gauge return rates is to promote a product for a while and keep a close eye on the return rate. However, if you want to get a rough estimate of the potential return rate before you start promoting a product, you can do Google searches for these kinds of phrases:

“What is your opinion about PRODUCT TITLE?”

“Did you like PRODUCT TITLE?”

“Did anybody buy PRODUCT TITLE?”

The results for these searches will often give you a good overview of the quality of the product and what the general customer opinion of it may be.

4. Examine the size of the market

After you have narrowed down the products a bit more by crossing out products with high return rates, you should then check out the market size. For example, suppose you have found four different niches. Use the Google keyword tool and research the variety of keywords for each niche and determine the search volume. Google Trends is also a useful tool for analyzing the developments of a niche immediately and over time. The best scenario is to find a product with few competitors and high demand from customers.

Be sure to check back tomorrow for Part 2, where we’ll discuss how to build a great landing page where you can send your PPC advertising traffic.

About the Author

You can read about Charles Kirkland and his adventures and misadventures in affiliate marketing at his blog. He also provides free affiliate training and videos for marketers at any level there as well.

Take a look at these related posts:

1. The Low-Cost Guide to Getting Started in PPC Marketing: Part 3
2. The Low-Cost Guide to Getting Started in PPC Marketing: Part 2
3. Sort Your Way to Success

Niche Blueprint 2.0 Is Going To Change The Landscape For E-Commerce Forever.

I am a proud customer of the original Niche Blueprint and I can personally attest to the quality of this product. Niche Blueprint is a powerful product if you currently own or are interested in starting an e-commerce site. This isn’t like your normal Internet Marketing product, it’s specifically for selling physical products. The business these guys hand pack for you can be summarized like this. Pick a profitable niche with their rock solid market research formula and the tools they include will uncover those markets in a matter of minutes. When you’ve decided on a niche you then find a drop shipper (don’t worry, they provide that also). Create an SEO Optimized e-commerce site with their specially designed back-end platform that is dead simple to use and then promote it with advanced SEO and Backlinking strategies that will get your site ranked #1 for the most profitable keyword for your e-commerce sites. I recommend you watch this video, it gives you a complete run down on this course and you will even see some results from some very profitable sites they have created with this system. These niches are, well, Odd to say the least (train horns, bird cages, and sewing machines).

Watch This Amazing Niche Blueprint Video

Some of the great benefits of Niche Blueprint…

• A “Paint By Numbers” eCommerce system
• A Solid Blueprint to $x,xxx in profit each month that you can expect from your e-commerce business
• The Best Support Team To Help You Achieve All Your Goals
• A Whole Package Of Great Tools That Uncover The Profit Spewing Niches
• and a ton more…

I am excited to be promoting this product as a first hand user. I believe highly in the quality of this product and recommend it to anyone who is serious about making a stable income, part time, online.

I am giving away an amazing bonus which you can find out about below

To Go Directly To Order Your Copy of Niche Blueprint 2.0 Follow The Link Below

This is the final post in my “Competitive Niches” series. Be sure to check out Part 1,  Part 2,  Part 3 and Part 4 if you haven’t already!

#5 – Look for the niche within a niche

Some affiliates fail because they think of a niche as a single entity. So if you ask them what niche they’re in, they’ll say “weight loss” and then they wonder why they don’t seem to be getting any traction. The sites that thrive in these competitive niches are the ones who have discovered niches within the niche.

For example, some successful affiliates have targeted a specific subset of weight loss customers, such as people looking for high protein diets. When you start researching this sub-niche you start to discover a lot of different products you can promote, and it can be enough to support your Internet marketing business.

So remember, you don’t need to take on the whole niche. Just find a healthy niche within the niche and you’ll have your sales without the excessive competition that comes with being too generic.

For example, some weight loss sub-niches you could try include:

• High protein diets
• Bride diets
• Belly fat diets
• Low carb diets

We’re barely scratching the surface here, but something you’ll find with competitive niches is that they fragment really well, allowing you to easily find a sub-niche you can quite happily take on.

Have you been scared off taking on a competitive niche? What would make it easier? Do you think taking on competitive niches is a waste of time? Please leave a comment with your thoughts!

About the author

Simon Slade is the CEO of Affilorama, an affiliate marketing training portal that offers free video training, education, and affiliate tools to both beginning and advanced affiliate marketers. You can follow them on Twitter.

Take a look at these related posts:

1. Competitive Niches: 5 Ways to Beat the Big Guns- Part 3
2. Competitive Niches: 5 Ways to Beat the Big Guns- Part 1
3. Competitive Niches: 5 Ways to Beat the Big Guns- Part 4

This is Part 4 in my “Competitive Niches” series. Be sure to check out Part 1,  Part 2 and Part 3 if you haven’t already!

#4 – An organized link building campaign

It’s been said that 80% of search engine “love” comes from backlinks to your site. That’s not to say that all the on-page SEO you do is not worth doing – it is – but you should remember that without backlinks you won’t stand a chance in a competitive niche.

Link building can be challenging and you might actually feel it’s more ‘link begging’ than link building. While there’s nothing wrong with asking for a link, remember there are lots of other ways you can get a backlink to your site. Here are a few suggestions:

• Article directories such as ezinearticles.com or squidoo.com
• Industry directories that are directly related to your niche
• Forum posts or blog comments (search for CommentLuv blogs that offer dofollow comment links)

The advantage of creating your own backlinks is that you can use the anchor text of your choice, and using the keyword phrase in backlinks to your site is a huge plus for boosting your site’s relevancy for a specific keyword phrase.

Remember to monitor your backlinks with SEO tools like Yahoo! Site Explorer, Google Webmaster tools or Traffic Travis. While not all backlinks are reported, these tools will help you gauge how successful your link building campaigns are.

Stay tuned for Part 5, where I talk about focusing your niche to be even more competitive.

About the author

Simon Slade is the CEO of Affilorama, an affiliate marketing training portal that offers free video training, education, and affiliate tools to both beginning and advanced affiliate marketers. You can follow them on Twitter.

Take a look at these related posts:

1. Competitive Niches: 5 Ways to Beat the Big Guns- Part 2
2. Competitive Niches: 5 Ways to Beat the Big Guns- Part 5
3. Competitive Niches: 5 Ways to Beat the Big Guns- Part 1

This is Part 3 in my “Competitive Niches” series. Be sure to check out Part 1 and Part 2 if you haven’t already!

#3 – Thinking outside the box

It’s difficult to tackle competition head-on. Like any great battle commander will tell you, it’s more effective to attack your enemy from the rear or even the side. Similarly, affiliates can be more successful by thinking outside the box and coming up with new ways of doing things. Dell was able to shake up the computer industry by selling direct to the public online, rather than through retail outlets. So instead of thinking about what your competition are doing, think about what they’re not doing.

If you’re in the weight loss niche, is there something other affiliates are not giving customers? For many customers in this niche, a sense of community support is vitally important and has been the basis of success for offline weight loss services such as Jenny Craig. As an affiliate, could you fill this gap? For example, you might try some of the following ideas:

• Add a weight loss widget to your blog that allows readers to enter this week’s losses
• Build up an online discussion forum around reviewing weight loss products
• Allow visitors to your site to create their own profile page where fellow members can post messages of support
• Add a Twitter list to your site that collects inspiring and encouraging tips for people trying to lose weight

Stay tuned for Part 4 next Monday, where I’ll talk about organized link building campaigns.

About the author

Simon Slade is the CEO of Affilorama, an affiliate marketing training portal that offers free video training, education, and affiliate tools to both beginning and advanced affiliate marketers. You can follow them on Twitter.

Take a look at these related posts:

1. Competitive Niches: 5 Ways to Beat the Big Guns- Part 5
2. Competitive Niches: 5 Ways to Beat the Big Guns- Part 1
3. Competitive Niches: 5 Ways to Beat the Big Guns- Part 4

This is Part 2 of my series “Competitive Niches.” Be sure to check out Part 1 first if you haven’t already.

#2 – An effective SEO strategy

Most website owners say they do SEO, but a lot of them are half-hearted about it. They forget that the O in SEO stands for optimization. When you optimize for something it means you are thorough in covering all your bases to make sure your site is built for ranking, with every screw tightened and every page fine-tuned for search engine love. Just having the keyword in the page title is not enough!

You can review how heavily optimized the top 20 sites are for any given keyword phrase using the SEO Analysis feature in Traffic Travis. It looks at 12 different things a website can do to optimize for a phrase, so you can check if a site is dropping the O out of SEO!

Some particularly important SEO factors to keep in mind:

• Keywords in H1 headings, page titles or page description
• Directory listings in DMOZ or Yahoo!
• Backlinks to your site (including trusted backlinks from .edu and .gov sites)

If any of your competitors are missing one or more of these things, then you’ve just found a significant weakness that can be exploited for your own benefit.

While SEO is sometimes talked about like a way to ‘game’ the search engines, it’s better to think of it as preparing a good CV (or resumé for you Americans). And as we all know, when it comes to getting a job, sometimes half an hour’s extra tweaking can make all the difference.

Stay tuned for Part 3 tomorrow, where I’ll talk about “thinking outside the box” when it comes to your niche.

About the author

Simon Slade is the CEO of Affilorama, an affiliate marketing training portal that offers free video training, education, and affiliate tools to both beginning and advanced affiliate marketers. You can follow them on Twitter.

Take a look at these related posts:

1. Competitive Niches: 5 Ways to Beat the Big Guns- Part 4
2. Competitive Niches: 5 Ways to Beat the Big Guns- Part 1
3. Competitive Niches: 5 Ways to Beat the Big Guns- Part 3

Something that I love about the internet is the way it has removed a lot of the barriers to getting started in a particular industry or niche. There is a certain amount of democracy to the online world that has removed the stranglehold that large, well-established players had on the marketplace. Ten years ago it would have been very unlikely that a small Internet marketing company from New Zealand would be competing successfully on the global scene, but now it’s a reality.

With that said, it’s still not exactly a piece of cake. Taking on a competitive niche and clambering your way to the top is a challenging task involving tactical thinking and determination.

If it seems like shooting for the stars, I invite you to think about these 5 ideas on tackling top niches – you might decide it’s more achievable than you think.

#1 – Know your target

If you’re thinking, “this sounds familiar,” then you’re right. I talked about knowing your target in a recent post about keyword research, but it’s worth repeating.

So what does knowing your target have to do with tackling a competitive niche? Lots. To illustrate my point, I want to use Subway as a real-world example. Subway took on the world’s biggest franchise, McDonald’s, and became a big player in the fast food niche. They didn’t do it by trying to copy McDonald’s – they did it by getting to know their target better. Learning that fast-food customers wanted healthier options, Subway targeted that hole in the market and became very successful, building up almost twice as many outlets in the US as McDonald’s.

You can replicate Subway’s strategy by thinking about the niche you’re tackling and really getting to know your target market. For example, are you in the ’stop smoking’ niche?

• What products are quitters talking about right now?
• Is there a new product that’s just come out and is in demand?
• Is there something in particular that is a real concern for people trying to quit, such as dealing with a relapse? Remember to really listen to what people are saying here. Be prepared to alter your perceptions and don’t make the mistake of clinging to your own assumptions.

You’ll notice that effective affiliate sites keep up with the latest trends and stay in tune with what their target market is talking about.

Stay tuned for Part 2 tomorrow, where I’ll discuss developing an effective SEO strategy.

About the author

Simon Slade is the CEO of Affilorama, an affiliate marketing training portal that offers free video training, education, and affiliate tools to both beginning and advanced affiliate marketers. You can follow them on Twitter.

Take a look at these related posts:

1. Competitive Niches: 5 Ways to Beat the Big Guns- Part 5
2. Competitive Niches: 5 Ways to Beat the Big Guns- Part 3
3. Competitive Niches: 5 Ways to Beat the Big Guns- Part 4