All posts in Niche Selection

WebmasterRadio.fm Affiliate Program

I’m not usually one to promote an affiliate offer without actually running it myself, but I got an interesting email from Pepperjam Network just now. The affiliate program is for Webmaster Radio FM.

Actually I thought to post it because it’d be a cool offer for all the make money online bloggers out there. The offer pays out $12.50 when the user signs up for a subscription that costs $28.73/month. Some noteable points :

  • Automatic approval into the program.
  • Trademark bidding is allowed.
  • 90 Day Cookie.

I just did a search on Google for the trademark terms, and looks like not much competition is there. So test it out a little and see if it converts; let me know when you do. If you have a make money online blog you can sign up for a membership, and then post a positive review of the site and how much you learned from it. It could inspire a lot of your readers to go ahead and sign up if the content is worth it. Just something to think about.

If you’re not signed up with Pepperjam yet you can click this link to do so.

Popularity: 4% [?]

Case Study : Diet Pills : How I Ran It

Note : This is probably as far as I’ll ever go when it comes to “revealing” things to you guys. I’m giving you a niche I researched myself, keywords I used, and how I designed my landing page.

I have an old campaign that’s been sitting around forever now, and I’m not doing any testing with it so why not tell you guys and maybe you’ll make some money from it. I did some research a while ago and it looked like diet pills would be good to get into. All of the offers gave out a free trial bottle with just a shipping and handling fee. Hoodia, Phentermine, that sort of thing. I only did maybe five days of testing in Yahoo, got some data but had so many things going on I had no time to pursue it. So what I’ll do is walk you through how I set things up, how I researched keywords, built my page, etc.

How I Planned Things Out

I knew there were a bunch of great products out there, so what I decided to do was build a comparison/review page. I picked 4 offers from various networks and “reviewed” them. First I looked at the diet/weight loss campaigns on a bunch of networks, and then asked all of my affiliate managers what their top converting offers were. I got some stats, payouts, and EPCs, and then picked some offers. If I can remember correctly, the offers I tested were :

2DaySlimDown from Neverblue$33 CPA
Phenterthin from Hydra$30 CPA
PureHoodiaX from CPA Empire$32 CPA
and another Hoodia offer from Azoogle, which they don’t have anymore.

Now you know exactly what offers I ran, time to explain how I build my landing page…

How I Built My Landing Page

Like I said I used a review page. I included those offers in a list, and picked an order I wanted. Based on the EPCs my affiliate managers told me, I put the highest offer as the #1 and called it the “Top Rated”, and then the lowest EPC I put at the bottom and rated “Good Choice”. They each were rated 1 to 5 stars. The top rated was 5 stars, and the bottom of the list was 3 stars. You don’t want to rate everything five stars or else it looks fake, and people can tell. I wrote a small description about each product, and highlighted some facts. Things like “Average weight loss 13lbs in two weeks”, “Try a bottle free”, etc. I sold myself as a legit review site that was there to help the visitor find the best diet pill for them. I’m not going to give away the domain I used, because that will just open doors to people to try and find out as much about me as they can, lol.

How I Chose My Keywords

Next is keyword research. Well, I’m promoting diet pill offers, so it makes sense to use diet pill keywords. I had quite a few ad groups with very targeted ads. The Yahoo campaigns I ran them in are deleted now, so I can’t go in and get the exact ad groups and ad copy, but I’ll do my best. For my first campaign, every keyword had “diet pill(s)” in them. I broke down the adgroups something like this :

-diet pills
-best diet pills
-compare diet pills
-review diet pills
-safest diet pills
-cheap diet pills
-free diet pills

Each group had 100 or so keywords in it, some more some less. I used Keyword Companion to break the groups down.

As stated before, I just started with a campaign in Yahoo. I just wanted to test the waters for a couple days and see what kind of volume it produced before I got a little more serious and moved to Adwords. I think I bid $1.50 on everything to start. Once campaigns got rolling, my CTR was around 6-8% I believe. This is attributed to the tight ad groups displaying exact what the searchee wants.

The first couple days I think I lost maybe $30-40 each day, my revenue was around $300/day I think. This was on a small list of keywords and just Yahoo keep in mind. After seeing those numbers, I at least concluded that there was potential in this niche. Then I got busy with a more important thing, and that was replaced by another, etc, and I haven’t touched the campaign since around October. If I tracked my results and started dropping bids to make all keywords profitable, it could have turned out to be a pretty decent niche. I would then expand my keyword lists, and start scaling the living daylights out of Google to really up my revenues.

This should give you all some insight as to how I run some things. I don’t run everything like that, but it’s a pretty solid case study. Hell, I just told you a niche that I made money off of that had potential. Set things up just like I did and test it out. Good luck and if you get it to succeed make sure to tell me a couple of your best keywords that I can run ;).

Popularity: 10% [?]

Controversial Niches and the Future

There’s been some “buzz” in the industry recently related to ringtones and payday loans.

Rumors are going around that ringtones are going to be changing soon, that a new step will be added in to again confirm the $9.99 charge made to their mobile account. A lot of people out there are stupid, and for some reason don’t realize they’re being charged, even after they read a text message that says “9.99/mo”. I guess it’s all a little shady, but the shadyness is going to start to go away, and this may have a big impact on conversions. Let’s take a look at the trends for “ringtones” :

google trends graph for ringtones

As we all know, ringtones have been on a steady decline and have started to level off. I don’t think that’s going to change, ringtones will still be in demand. But it may have an effect on the publisher side of it, as you may have to play the game and started shifting your campaigns to be more overt about the fact that they’re getting charged.

Another niche that’s getting some attention recently have been payday loans. Payday loans are short term cash loans with HUGE interest rates…and I mean huge – and it’s screwing a lot of people. Just search “payday loan scam” and you’ll see what I mean. Being one of the niches that I run, I was a bit bummed when I got a call from Azoogle on Friday telling me that all their payday loan offers are gone. I moved over to Hydra, which wasn’t a big deal, and then a day later the offer I’m running drops in payout drops 20%. Payday loans are another “controversial” niche, and changes may be coming to payday loan companies. In the future, many states may ban payday loans…something to keep your eye out for. Checking out the trends though :

google trends payday loan graph

Payday loans look to have a healthy increase in trends, so for now hopefully we’re still in the clear.

The point I’m trying to make with this post is, I always try and have some “safe” niches that I’m running. Sales where the future looks stable, and nothing is too shady. That way, you don’t lose a niche making a lot of money due to volatile changes in the industry. I’m not saying that these niches aren’t worth any time, because shady offers convert the best :). I’d just try and work on offers that look like they’ll be clean and healthy for the long run.

Popularity: 4% [?]