Affiliate marketing is an ideal way to make money in today’s technological age. The advantages of affiliate marketing are convenience and the possibility of a high income.

Affiliate marketing does have its disadvantages, too. The advantages come from convenience because it lets you work in the comfort of your own home with very little resources. A computer with an internet connection along with some capital should get you started.

The disadvantages come from getting the customers. In affiliate marketing, selling is done easily because when someone looks for a product they usually want to buy that product. The problem is knowing what to sell.

In internet marketing, one of the biggest steps is finding a niche market. But before finding a niche market, you should first know what to sell.

This is one of the big mistakes that most beginning affiliates do. They try to sell everything, or they try to sell the most expensive thing they find. Even if you are the best affiliate marketer out there, you won’t make a sale on just anything, especially if what you’re trying to sell is not what someone would buy.

Most marketers choose to sell digital products such as eBooks and memberships. Most digital products give high commission rates because the products don’t have a big price tag. Selling digital products is good, but there is a market that might make you more money - the physical products market.

The physical products market is where you try to sell physical products, such as gadgets, to people through the internet.

Why choose physical over digital?

Selling digital products has its advantages such as the probability for high sales volumes, but the current trend today says otherwise. Why? Because digital products, such as eBooks, are usually guides or manuals for doing certain things, and today, guides and manuals are easy to find all over the internet for free.

Another reason for choosing physical products is that physical products cost more, and therefore give off bigger commissions. Let’s look at an example. The commission for an eBook is 50%, with $5 as the price (these are the usual rates); while a designer bag costs around $300 with a commission of only 5%. Using simple math, you can only earn $2.50 for an eBook sale while you can earn as much as $15 for a designer bag.

Find a Product First

A simple mistake that some online marketers do is they first find a market, and then they find a product to sell in that market. This may work sometimes but the problem is there are cases wherein, after finding a niche market, finding a product to sell is impossible because there is no one selling that product.

In choosing what to sell, you can go to the big online physical goods stores such as eBay and Amazon. You can use eBay Pulse and Amazon’s searches to find popular products. Always choose current products rather than the high commission products or the high-priced ones.

You can increase your earnings by selling products above $200 because commissions are pretty good at that range. Take note of the products that sell a lot as well as the product category with the most searches because those will be the source of your niche markets.

Finding a niche market that works

Finding a niche market means finding the right keyword combinations to use. Using an old favourite, such as Google’s Keyword Tool, will help here. Start by entering the product names and captcha code, and then click search.

Look at the results and choose the keyword combinations with the highest global and local searches while having medium competition. High local searches mean more than 3,000 while high global searches mean more than 5,000. These keywords give you a shot at making it in that niche. After using the product names, you can then use the categories and see which one has the most profitable niche.

Finding a niche market that sells requires you to complete certain steps before, to ensure your niche market will sell. This may take some time, but in the end, it is all worth it.