I know I’m going to get a lot of flak for this article but so be it. See, all the hotshot affiliate marketers think that the only way to make any money as an affiliate marketer is to go after all the hot niches. You know the ones I’m talking about. Things like debt relief, weight loss, golf and so on. Sure, these niches are big and you can make a lot of money in them. You can also go broke with all the competition if you don’t know what you’re doing. Instead, why not dig deep for products that everybody and their grandmother isn’t selling?

Okay, so how do you do that? Well, you first have to start off by doing a little simple keyword and competition research. Naturally, you still want to find keywords that have a sufficient demand. After all, if a keyword is only getting 100 searches a month (about 3 a day) there’s probably not much money in it, no matter how little competition there is. So you need a sufficient demand for the keyword to make this profitable.

The key is the competition. By using a simple KEI (keyword efficiency index) formula, you can tell if the keyword you’ve chosen, provided there are enough monthly searches, is worth going after. My goal is for about 100 searches a day or 3,000 a month for each keyword. If the KEI is anything over 100, then the niche is worth tackling. KEI is calculated by taking the monthly searches and dividing them by the number of competing sites and then multiplying that figure by the monthly searches again.

Once you have a KEI over 100, the next step is finding a product at the Clickbank marketplace. The reason I choose Clickbank is because it is easy to see what products are selling but not saturated. We do this by looking at the gravity figure. This figure is the average number of affiliates making money selling that product. For me, a gravity of about 20 to 30 is perfect. It’s not too high but shows the product is selling. You want to stay away from products with gravities of 300 plus. That is just way too much competition.

Naturally, the above is simplified but it will give you a good starting point for finding products where you’re not banging heads with every affiliate marketer in existence.

To YOUR Success,

Steven Wagenheim

Tired of being an affiliate failure? Want to turn yourself into an affiliate assassin like I am? Want to land in the top 20 of every affiliate promotion you tackle just like I do? Check out my site at http://www.stevewagenheim.com/affiliateassassin/index.html and start earning a solid income as an affiliate marketer.