Diorex

I am very frequently asked “what is the best niche for a newbie?” or “What is the best niche to expand to once I have had some success?” or even “What is the next hot niche?”

I feel like I have been writing about this almost since the start, but it seems people just seem to miss it or I am getting senile.

The best niche is one that no one else is in and there are literally thousands of them left.

If you start by looking on CJ or ShareaSale then that is better than looking on a CPA network where apparently there are only like 5 verticals - credit, diet, dating, auto, and zip submits… (or so it seems). Even better would be to go the local flea market or hobbyist convention and see what people there are talking about or selling - maybe even check out the obscure listings in Ebay - look around for the booths or listings with people at them (or bids) - is it gumballs or bowling shoes or designer picture frames who cares as long as it does not scream affiliate marketing…

If you can do a search and find 2 or 3 paid ads, none of which are affiliate links now you may have found your niche. It means there is enough online interest in the product for people to be doing business, but not so much that CPC is bid up to unprofitable levels. Find a local company that can provide the product cheaply - or maybe you are aggressive and go straight to a national distributor and arrange a drop ship arrangement or even start as an affiliate of an existing business (after you explain what that is to the 45 year old guy running the company).

Retail markups are typically fairly large and in a less competitive space you dont have to give away all that much to be a good price, plus the inefficiencies of your competitors when it comes to internet marketing mean that even though you might not have the best prices you will still outmarket them if you have half a clue, because most of them arent even aware there are clues to be had.

Once a decent product with decent search volume is located, immediately begin seeking out the best domain name possible don’t buy TheBest-Niche_website.biz when you can be Niche.com for a few thousand dollars. The domain name lends instant credibility and allows you to be more professional than the guys you compete with.

It is my opinion that you can almost certainly learn 85% as much about the niche as those who have been doing it for decades in a matter of months while at the same time out marketing these Niche specialists by a huge margin. You will understand technology and the importance of tracking analytics and testing (if not please unsubscribe from my blog), understand Google and Yahoo and MSN plus have heard of Facebook and MySpace. You will understand Ebay and possible Amazons marketplace. You will have a clue on how to best collect and use email, plus maybe have some insight into the idea of coupon codes and Free Shipping or design of web pages or any of a dozen other things that increase sales. In no time at all you should own that niche and be the major player, with no competition.

Face it, almost no one reading this blog has a shot at starting a mortgage lead company or building a competitor to proflowers or cars.com making tens of millions a year. Just because you cannot own a $100 million dollar niche does not mean you cannot own a $5 million one… or even own several of them.

Bottom line, if you are looking for your path to fame and fortune through internet marketing and are starting on a CPA network you have probably already lost the game.

Read a great blog post from someone named PunditX that I found following one of my backlinks.

It was about how he made $95k in 2 months marketing a product all of us are aware of but few probably
knew it had an affiliate program - Adsense.

His post spells out just what he did and it seems perfectly reasonable to me. I can think of a dozen or more ways to market the product beyond what he did.

The ’secret’ to his success is that he did not assume “oh that must be saturated” or “that will not work”. he went out and made it work.

He even states he tested 35 different landing pages - which is probably a huge driver in his success. Not being lazy is a critical component to affiliate marketing success.

Too many in affiliate marketing assume that they have to follow the crowd or that their AM knows whats best - the entire time I was focused on affiliate marketing I never had an AM I spoke with regularly. There are some awesome deals on CJ noone has ever heard of and most of the CPA networks are in business for themselves first.

I know a guy who markets $.05 clicks to small niches that then turn into Ebay sales. I know another guy killing it in the Wal-mart affiliate program marketing just a few select products via PPC. There are a million things that are not dating or ringtones or <flavor of the month> that are both sustainable and scalable and that do not require super technical skills.

The best advice I can give anyone wanting to get into this space is to get outside the zone of the affiliate blogging ‘experts’ and start thinking for yourself. If you never read another blog post about affiliate marketing, you will probably be better off than if you read the top 50 affiliate bloggers religiously. The honest truth is that most affiliate blogs are full of junk and one hit wonders.

It is Father’s Day weekend and as part of my gift, my kids and I went to see KungFu Panda. Pretty funny movie that I enjoyed and so did my kids.

Like many of the kids movies, this one had a pretty simple moral underlying the humor. That moral was basically that “there is no secret ingredient”.

Again and again in life, I have seen people who are on the outside of an industry trying to get inside looking for the secret to how to do something.

Affiliate/Internet marketing is no different. Read on boards or blogs and it seems that most people are looking for the secret of how to make money out of nothing with no effort.

The truth of life and internet marketing is that there are rarely secret ingredients. The people who succeed do so as a result of hard work, perseverance, intelligence and a little bit of luck - not because they have some secret keyword list or way to scam Google or that hidden niche that noone knows about.

Totally off post topic - so if you are not fascinated by this election cycle then just move on…

I am sitting here watching the CNN countdown of delegates needed by Obama to ‘clinch’ the Democratic nomination. According to the home of the voice of Darth Vader he just need 6 more right now.

I cannot help but think, and find it strange that not one talking head is saying this, but a Super Delegate is totally uncommitted and can change their vote at any time up until it is placed at the convention - several have changed their minds already, mostly moving from Clinton to Obama.

If Obama did something enormously stupid in the next few weeks or months, or some past event was to come to light before the convention, then these delegates can and almost certainly would change their votes.

This is not the case for the Republicans, because McCain has won a majority of obligated votes that must vote for him on the first ballet, thus wrapping the Republican nomination up regardless of what might happen in the interim.

Now I am not a Constitutional Scholar or anything like that, but what if Al Gore was to tell Larry King he regrets not campaigning for the Democratic nomination and would accept it enthusiastically if offered to him at the Democratic Convention in Denver.

The way I see that playing out is that more than enough of the non-committed delegates are probably sick of both candidates, see Gore as a person who could actually win with dramatic coat tails and that would unite the party - which is very much fragmented currently.

So on the first vote, Obama and Clinton both fall short of a majority and Gore gets a few hundred or so votes. My understanding is that the committed delegates are now free to vote for whomever they want, meaning that Gore, Edwards or lots of others could actually end up the nominee in what would almost certainly be the cure for low convention ratings.

Please dont read me wrong, an Al Gore fanboy I am not. I am however a huge fan of televised train wrecks and the last 4 months has been regularly scheduled Tuesday night train wrecks for the Democratic party. No wonder American Idol ratings were down.  If only Sanjaya had run for president, CNN might have had even better ratings.

Am I totally wrong here or is this nomination process very much not over? Sure, this is very unlikely to happen, but it can? right?

Yahoo tries hard. So does the cheesy guy at the bar, does not mean either of them ever scores.

We recently ran the Yahoo Tune-Up that was available in one of our accounts. (SERoundtable talks a little about it here.)

This was a totally wasted effort, it was so off base that we just had a good laugh and moved on.

For instance:

This is obviously not ready for primetime and shows just how in touch Yahoo’s engineers, business managers and customer service people fail to even understand their own product.

Read through the Google Patent applications that Bill at SEO by the Sea found.

Other than being great reading material for insomniacs, this is the perfect example of a patent that should not be granted. Not being a patent attorney or even very familiar with any of this stuff other than Google’s PPC models.

To my reading this basically says that Google can rate something on any of 44 different factors and then determine if it is “good” or not. It can use those factors unevenly and the ultimate arbiter of good is its human staff.

So what I get from this is that Google can rate one of your competitors sites a score of 88 (factors can include everything from bid to history to user bias to what the rater ate for lunch) and another one of your competitors sites a 55. They then look for ways to algorithmically arrive at those numbers and then use that algorithm to arrive at your ranking.

The best way for Google to arrive at that algorithm may be entirely unknown, perhaps it is the number of obscure punctuation marks on a page or the use of latin words or perhaps a URL that can spell a Google dog’s name when the letter are rearranged.

In other words, nothing is clear about how Google arrives at this ranking. It is completely and totally arbitrary. Trust me - when it is arbitrary big spenders and big brands are going to get human review and the benefit of the doubt and the little guy is gonna get the bag.

With my limited understanding of the patent system, it was designed to foster the sharing of knowledge in return for offering protection for the person who developed and shared that knowledge. Google just took the kitchen sink and threw it into a patent application with the realistic hope the patent inspector would be clueless and grant google a license to regulate all future attempts at an intelligent ad ranking system.

Under the spirit of the patent process, I would read this disclosure and be able to say these are the 3 most important things to focus on, and here are 5 more that are of lesser importance. That is not in any way done. It is not even till like item 41 of 44 where I even saw words like bid or CTR or anything having to do with what is historically Google’s model. I did not read it that close, but many of the other 41 items were things I was not even sure what they were, other than the fact that I cleared the cookies on every computer I owned after I read it.

Read an article about Google being sued over facilitating trademark infringement through their Adsense for Domains service.

I am not normally very concerned about trademark infringement as I don’t own any real brands, but I do have at least 2 sights that are huge in PPC where others have jumped in and bought variations of my domain name. Everytime I run a Performance Placement Report and see that i am paying for traffic from these domains it drives me nuts.

This is yet another area where Google is facilitating evil. The Yellow Pages would never have allowed me to advertise Capitol One (O not A in Capital) or Banks Of America and then just redirect the phone number to my own bank. Why is Google willing to allow this. I can somewhat understand the domain service (as much as I hate paying for those low converting clicks) if someone is smart enough to register a common search term as a domain name good for them, that would be the Yellow Page equivalent of calling your law firm DUI Lawyers or Emergency Plumbing Repair. But when someone comes along and just blatantly steals from a brand or even a non-brand like mine by registering a misspelled version of a brand then that is wrong.

I even know of an instance where we are not allowed to bid on competitors brand names, yet we show up on misspellings of their domain name through the parked pages program. I am not allowed to opt out of the program and I cannot see where my ads are showing up through that program and I cannot filter that page through negative sites options. Basically I am stuck violating a term a term of my affiliate agreement. Was a huge hassle and headache, that Google could easily have resolved by not allowing this junk in the first place.

The fact that Google is willing to help these domainer’s monetize this stuff is the reason the problem exists. If they had no ability to monetize the traffic, then they would not be willing to spend money buying domains to capitalize on this - the bad spelling idiots of the world would then Google the misspelled keyword and likely find the right place, I dont buy the argument that Google is facilitating people finding the site they were looking for by serving ads, because if I type in a misspelled domain name into Google I am very unlikely to get search results for the competition as is common on the misspelling domains.

I feel Google (which has very aggressively protected its own TradeMarks) is clearly on the wrong side and I hope this case helps to increase the quality of the Search Network by removing some of the junk. Best case scenario some judge says “You are serving Search Only ads in an environment where no search has been done?” but I very much doubt that.

Recently launched a new campaign in Google for search only. A brand new URL that was recently purchased and being used in Google only with Content network turned off.

I did a search for the URL string in the Google results to see if the page had been indexed yet.

Strangely, there were 2 results. One for my domain and another for the domain ChamberofCommerce.com (slimeball is good anchor text methinks) which has nothing to do with the US Chamber of Commerce or any other local COC for that matter.

So I went to the page (I am not showing up on the page I linked to…) and found a long list of sponsored results for which my ad was showing up amongst them. No Ads by Google link or anything. Just some scraped content (everything I copied and pasted from the site I found on other scraper type sites…) and then a huge list of sponsored results…

I had never seen a Google Ad group with 10 ads so this immediately got my attention, since not only are my ads only running on the Google network, but they are not running on content..So I investigated further…

I right clicked on the ad and clicked properties:

hotkeys.com/leadtracking?id=…ask.com (appended so it fits on the scree) which was then followed by a huge string of numbers….

Ask.com…I don’t advertise on Ask and never plan too after several experiences where they were distributing my ads outside of the search traffic, through Clicksor ads. I am a little pissed at Google that they will syndicate my ads and then allow that entity to re-syndicate them.

I immediately contacted my Google rep and explained the situation. They investigated and responded that this ad was not being served by Google, rather that it was being served by Akamai, which was not at all affiliated with Google.

Google was adamant that this was not a Google ad despite the fact that it landed on the proper URL, even going so far as saying it was possible someone was running this and not charging me….

What I had not told Google was that since I had rotating ad copy, that my ad was showing up differently each time I hit the refresh button. I asked the rep to hit refresh and the response was “we are not serving this ad, but we will see if there is some way that someone could know to rotate your ads.”

Even with pretty convincing proof of Ask.com serving my Search Only ad in a content setting, Google was unable to accept it. Now Ask is probably more important to their business than I am (and who am I kidding, I am not gonna quit Google…) but even when shown a blatant example of them intentionally re-syndicating ads in an improper manner they just do not seem to care.

Overture feeds are the single biggest problem at Yahoo. Google’s largest issue is the parked pages and that they seem to think the quality of traffic from excite, ask, & myway is the same quality as you see from AOL or even the Google network itself. Yes, I know you can go Google only, but I have tested it and even with all the fraud and junk clicks I am still better off than otherwise.

Google - you recently gave us insight into Content, but I think you need to follow that up and give us insight into the search network. Let me know where my ads show, give me a way to track it without having to use Google Analytics, and allow me to opt out of anything in your network, or set proper bids for individual traffic sources and I will pay you far more than I do now, because I will be able to weed out what does not work and concentrate on getting as much of what does work as possible.

Unfortunately, search engines seem to be in a race to the bottom, and quality suffers. They are falling all over themselves to give syndication deals to crappy engines with huge fraud potential. Google states they want to be about quality user experience, but seems to fail to recognize that the most important users are those footing the bill, what about the advertisers experience?

In the last week E-Bay has stopped displaying ads on Google (not even gonna link to it since every blogger seems to have already written about it…) and just today I see where Wal-Mart has decided to drastically cut affiliate commissions.

Combine that with my recent post about a major company who admitted to me they dont care about their affiliates, blockbusters recent pullback on payouts and I am seeing a pattern start to emerge.

Major name brands do not really need you for traffic, at least they have some data that makes them think that. Ebay does not turn off Google ads in response to a stupid party, they had a well thought out hypothesis that the ads did not pay for themselves in the long run. I suspect that Wal-Mart (which has one of the world’s largest databases and loves to mine it) sensed the same thing. They were paying too much to affiliates for the traffic, that much of the traffic would still come at lower payouts or that they could actually make more from less sales…

People will continue to argue about the logic of these moves, but multi-billion dollar companies are like glaciers. They move slowly. They are not making a rash decision. This was most likely well thought out and tested. It may not work, but they have thought through the downside. Anyone who has ever worked for a big company knows how stupid they are, but it is usually a stupidity from inaction rather than taking action.

When I worked for a Fortune 500 company - worst 9 months of my life - we got a ton of sales from our brand name. We intentionally decimated our affiliate program by not letting others bid on our trademarks, and saw a huge percentage increase in profit from that traffic - we went from paying something like $50 a sale to less than $20 without any drop in sales, we just moved them from one bucket (affiliate) to the other(brand search). Took months to get the change authorized and days to see the benefits.

If you then take the other side of the equation - traffic generation - and look at how hard Google is squeezing people on quality score you quickly realize that the internet is quickly transforming from a wild-west marketplace where anything goes and anyone can make money to a very corporate “brand is king” type of market. As someone who makes my living from affiliate marketing I see 2 outcomes for our breed - extinction (which will be the result for most) and scaling to a level where companies want to work with you and thus give you negotiating power, the status quo is a diminishing opportunity.

Not saying it is ending tomorrow, I just urge all of you out there making a nice comfortable 25k a month from 2-3 verticals to reassess the long term viability. I was once young and making a fortune every month I thought would never end and in the space of 60 days in 1999 everything evaporated. I will not make the mistake of being unprepared again and urge you not to as well.

Shoemoney has opened up his blog to guest posts, which not surprisingly turned into an opportunity to Spam a little.

I have no idea who Big Daddy Lawson is, but he writes an open ended glowing review of Miva - the former stink pile known as FindWhat.

He talks glowingly about his particular niche and how Miva gets him clicks for half price, then hints that Ringtones or Home Equity loans would be worth trying there. Then ends with it “being all about the Money”

Got me to thinking that I know not a soul who has ever received any kind of ROI from this company. I have used them at 4 different companies that spend over $1 million a year for search (most far more). Each time giving them a try, setting a very low budget, very low CPC’s and still getting my entire budget depleted within a few hours and always with no conversions, despite enough traffic to have generated several at a minimum.

Now some might say, I had a bad landing page or bad ad copy or that even my server might have had issues that day, Miva reps certainly tried to make that point. They even went so far as to claim that what works for the other engines is not likely to work at Miva, because the audience is a little more sophisticated.

The last time it happened, I pulled server logs and realized that I was billed for hundreds of clicks despite showing only a few visits from Miva. Miva countered that the visits are from partner sites and would show up differently on server logs. We had set-up a unique URL just for them for tracking purposes and that was the data…Bottom line they were fraudulent clicks, Miva knew it and was trying to gloss it over.

Then a few months later, I get an email from a guy at Miva with a memorable enough name that i recognized it immediately when I got another note 9 months later at my new company. He sent the same exact 3 paragraph email to me at 2 different companies, even with a fake datapoint being the exact same data with the name of the industry changed. Slimy. He signed it “The traffic speaks for itself and results don’t lie.” Which is exactly what i thought about when I read the post on shoe’s blog.

I had a long conversation with someone yesterday who did not realize that Click through rate is important. he made the comment “Even on google?”. This made me think that there are lots of naive new affiliate marketers out there who are gonna read this post on Shoe’s blog and go throw some money at Miva.

Please save your time and money.

Please!