Not doing product research Properly & picking Saturated Markets

We’re all guilty of this. It’s easy when doing PPC to forget about the detail & just fire as many keywords as you can into Adwords or 7search, load in 100 products & “hope for the best.”

Maybe if you’re doing blackhat stuff you can afford to be more lazy & go for volume, but whenever each click is physically costing you money you really need to be one step ahead.

Product Research should take up at least 30% of your time.

I normally plan like this:

1. 30% Product Research
2. 30% Keyword Research
3. 20% Writing Creatives
4. 20% Tweaking

For example, you log into clickbank to look for products to promote. Most people instantly go for the products that have the most Gravity. Firstly, there is a few fundamental faults with this:

1. The Competition is Fierce
2. The Product has been around for a while already
3. PPC Prices will probably be more than your CPA

That is the main problem when you promote a “single product.” You only have a few set paths that you can follow. Most of the Affiliate Marketers follow those paths leaving the market saturated & hard to come up with new ideas or new methods.

So what should Product Research Entail?

Research should be all about assessing the risk of a particular product verses the potential ROI (Return on Investment). They way I like to do this is by picking products then looking at the current competition.

So for example I find out in Adwords how much you would need to bid to get into the top 10 for the brand name & other variations of the brand.
So say for example I was promoting Affiliate Project X, which at the moment is so competitive it’s probably not worth the hassle.
The average person is making $33.52 per sale (which also shows there’s quite a high return rate). However to get into the top ten on Google you’re having to bid around $1.50 Per Click.

This means that you would need to get a conversion rate of about 5% just to break even at the start. This sort of analysis tells me that the market is saturated & would take a lot of time to get a steady position for a reasonable price. Bear in mind that CPC does come down over time provided you can get a good CTR (Click Through Rate).
You should also research your competitors shelf life, take a screenshot of the top 10 adwords ads for your main keyword then compare it with next week. If the ads are still there then it means that particular campaign is profitable for that webmaster. Wash Rinse & Repeat this process, you will be gaining valuable insight into proven campaigns.

Pick up & coming products in the market, I also try & focus more on brands & brand names. So for example if someone were to search for a Nixon D2X Camera Lens they are probably looking to buy one. If I can redirect them to the merchant page for that product I have a high chance of getting a sale. Moreso than redirecting someone who is searching for Affiliate Marketing to the Affiliate Project X sales page.

If anyone else has any interesting methods they use for research just drop a comment, I can think of hundreds more but I want to get you guys thinking outside the box for yourselves

Related Reading:

• Super Affiliate Handbook
• Affiliate Project X
• SEO Book

Related Resources:

• SEO Tools
• Agloco