[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]Selling affiliate products that are either physical or digital is one very good way to quickly start making a lot of profit with no need to create something of your own.
However, if you’re looking for the single most profitable monetization option available, then creating your own product is by far the best option. This way, you won’t just keep a percentage of the profit but will instead get 100% of that profit. What’s more, with your own product, you will be able to keep your visitors completely engaged with your brand and you will be able to find other affiliates to help bring more traffic to you instead of doing that for someone else.
Creating a product doesn’t have to be as hard as you think either: there’s nothing to stop you from simply outsourcing the whole process so if you want an eBook written this might just mean paying a writer. Want to sell an app? Hire a programmer from a site like UpWork. Of course if you can write or program yourself, then you can always create your own product. You might even want to get really ambitious and create a tangible product of your own, maybe using 3D printing!
Whatever you decide, creating your own product or line or products is a great ‘end point’ to have in mind when you’re creating your blog and coming up with your business model. Right from the start then, it’s a good idea to ensure that there’s room in your niche for a new product before you begin.
Considering Whether There’s Space for Your Product
So how do you decide whether the niche you’re considering is one you could create products in?
This basically comes down to doing market research just like you would do as any product manufacturer. In turn, that means asking whether there is an audience for what you’re thinking of selling and whether there’s potentially too much competition.
Of course an example of a niche where there is a huge audience would again be one with a broad appeal and an obvious value proposition. Fitness again, or business provide plenty of opportunities to sell information in the form of courses, eBooks or ‘reports’. At the same time though, this is also an area with a lot of stiff competition – you only have to look on Facebook to see countless adverts for eBooks on fitness or making money online.
The question you have to ask here, is whether you can compete and whether you can offer something new. If not, you may be better off selling a product as an affiliate. That said, it’s important to be optimistic here and realize that with the right product or the right slant, it is more than possible to compete even in a crowded market – you just need to do something new! You can also use the same approach we used earlier to finding smaller niches within bigger ones. Instead of making a fitness eBook, you could make a fitness eBook for a certain age group or social group.
To research what’s currently available in your niche and to get ideas, you can again browse affiliate networks to see the products being sold, or you can just look at the other sites in your niche. How are they monetizing? What is working and not working? What tricks have they missed?
Products for Smaller Niches
On the other hand, you have smaller niches – for instance those we mentioned earlier that correspond to specific careers or skills. For instance, if you wanted to create a product for stage lighting professionals, then this might be a unique niche to fill.
In this scenario, creating a unique product is perfect – you’ve found your particular niche and hopefully a way to market to them, so all you need is to create something you can sell to them. This again lets you focus on your strengths and your personal expertise and that’s how you can really provide value.
Whenever you create your own product though, you will be taking a big risk. You’ll be investing a lot of time, money or both into creating something new that you have no guarantee will sell. The worst case scenario is that you spend all your time creating something new only to find that the audience isn’t there, or your product isn’t going to sell. This is even more of a risk if you’re selecting the niche for your blog entirely on the basis that this new product is going to sell!
Before you select your niche on this basis then, consider trying something called ‘verifying’ the product…
Validating Your Product
To avoid a situation where you’re putting all your eggs in one basket before you have any guarantee that you’ve bet on a winning horse, you can use a process called ‘validation’ to ensure the market is out there for what you’re selling.
Essentially, all you’re going to do is to run a practice run as though you were selling your product and then see how many imaginary sales you can rack up. If the number is high, you can go ahead and invest the time, money and energy into creating the product. If not? Then you know not to waste your time and you can start thinking about alternate niches and alternate products.
Simply create a landing page then, promoting your product and describing it as though it were real. At the bottom, explain the price (this is important to get a true idea of how in-demand your product is) and then add your ‘buy now’ button.
Only instead of taking your customers’ money, the buy now button will take them to a ‘coming soon’ page, where you’ll tell them that your product isn’t quite ready yet. Just a warning: this method may make some customers upset, but you’re simply saving yourself lots of time and money so you’ll know for sure that it’s something your audience wants.
You’ll add a little script to count how many unique visitors make it this far and in doing so, you’ll be able to get a picture for how many people would have made a purchase if you really had something for sale there.
This is the perfect strategy because it lets you see how many products you can potentially sell before you have created anything! If 10% of your visitors make it to the ‘coming soon’ page, then you know you have a winner on your hands and it’s worth going ahead with the product and the niche site. On the other hand though, if no one goes there, you can head back to the drawing board.
This strategy works even better too if you collect e-mails as leads from the coming soon page, or if you let people ‘preorder’. This way you can even start making money before you create your blog, completely removing any possibility of it not working out!
Keyword Research Tools To Find Hot Niche Markets
There are shortcuts to finding niche markets that are profitable. One of the most common ways is to use keyword research tools.
Here are a few tools that are recommended:
LongTail Pro
http://www.longtailpro.com/
LongTail Pro has been once of the most useful paid tools out there for finding keywords you can target. They offer a free trial, so give it a go and see if it’s right for you.
SpyFu
A top resource and tool for finding profitable keywords.
Google’s Keyword Planner
https://adwords.google.com/KeywordPlanner
Why not use the top search engine’s own keyword research tool?
SEOBook’s Keyword Tools
http://tools.seobook.com/keyword-tools/
Check out SEOBook’s range of keyword tools and recommendations[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_single_image image=”19574″ img_size=”740″ alignment=”center” onclick=”custom_link” link=”http://google.com”][/vc_column][/vc_row]
