Just let the portal tell you what is hot and what has sold for long periods as well.

Great post!
Mary

You are right on the money – literally.

Once you’ve found a high-converting product, then what you want to do is plan a way to capture part of the niche through some kind of leverage.

You CAN go the mini-site route, eventually having them feed into an authority site (or network), and as you also mentioned, some of the viral models often work as well for capturing traffic initially, and possibly long-term.

The search engines will send you crap-loads of traffic, especially if you’re creating info-pages or reviews for *every* product/solution in the market on your site. (Becoming the official “whitepages” for your niche can be very profitable, by the way…)

But the important thing here is to have an action-plan in place for when this happens so that you can create a DIVERSE range of taffic assets.

If there’s thousands of affiliates promoting products like mad in the market, then the thing to aim for is to enter the market YOURSELF as a merchant, creating feeder products that lead the buyer to a natural upsell.

Again, a creative twist based on the same “reason for buying” can help to set your product apart and make a splash.

This, in addition to list-building and the natural organic traffic growth that will occur by creating an actual resource worth talking about in your market’s perspective, creates a business that is destined to succeed based on its very design.

You let the product prove the market as an affiliate.

Then you capture that market in a variety of ways so that you’re NOT dependant on any one source.

Getting Google traffic is great, but getting Google AND YouTube AND affiliates AND your list AND viral marketing and so on and so forth is what you want to eventually strive for.

Allen Says once said “The #1 rule of internet marketing is to make everything you do self-perpetual”.

That’s not always possible in every market or with every project, but making it your AIM will lead you to do things that will give your business an edge.

And this can even include things like sorting out an effective ROI for a given activity (such as creating squidoo pages or something) and then outsourcing that activity for less than what you’ll make back.

But you only do this once the market proves itself to you.

Until then, it’s only “worth” the effort of a mini-site, or a PPC tester campaign if you’re comfortable with adwords.

Rock solid post, dude.

This is exactly how it’s *really* done…

-Chris

P.S. Traffic diversity – especially through feeder products – is something that most affiliates are too lazy to do.

This is how you get an edge on even the stiffest competition in almost any market.

‘coz you can have those zillion “searches” (= see that Dog Training as an example) but people are not going to buy a ‘dog training book’ readily, ‘coz they are lazy! “They” would actually Have to Do something.
And it doesn’t matter you have the “Perfect Product” either! This ‘market’ is simply shitty, no matter who is washing your brain to.
(You have to Push 100x harder in this market if you want to make some decent money, then you would have to f.e. in some recent new gizmo for Apple fanatics)

One could be running a PPC campaign based on great niche keywords for a “dud” product. Tracking reveals this, of course, but the money is still down the drain.

Great stuff!
Jim