Last August, I met a woman at NAMS2 who quietly sat in the back of the room and absorbed everything. I knew she was a sharp cookie just by the questions she asked and the people she hung out with.

Last week, Nicole Dean sent me a note to tell me that I should take a look at Susanne’s Affiliate Niche Packs – they fit right in with my Niche-Mall storefront. (I’m always on the lookout for high-quality products to drop into my mall – hint, hint.)

And she was right; these are excellent. I bought them all. But more than that, I realized Susanne Myers really understood how to find profitable niches. One of the things she includes in her niche pack is a marketing checklist that shows step-by-step how to start promoting in the niche.

So, I ask her to write a guest blog post giving you a lesson in finding your niche. So, I’ll turn it over to Susanne…

Author: Susanne Myers
Affiliate Niche Packs

I’ve attended the last two NAMS events in Atlanta and spend a good bit of time chatting with other affiliate marketers. The question that kept coming up, especially from those just starting out was how to choose a niche that’s PROFITABLE.

Susanne Myers - Affiliate Niche Packs

It doesn’t take long for a beginning affiliate marketer to figure out that broad topic websites and wanting to provide information on everything and anything to EVERYBODY doesn’t work. Most of us quickly realize that choosing a niche and becoming an expert catering to a tight group of people is the better way to go.

The big stumbling block is often what niche to choose. Coming up with niche ideas is easy. Heck I could probably come up with about 50 of them in just a few minutes doing nothing more than jotting down my various hobbies and interests. The hard part is determining which ones have a good profit potential and are worth getting into.

Over the past 6 years, I’ve learned a lot through trial and error and have come up with some pretty good “tests” that I use anytime I’m considering a new niche. While I obviously can’t promise you you’ll be profitable if you apply these tests, they are a good indicator of whether or not a niche is profitable.

Does It Solve A Problem Or Reduce Pain

Think for a moment about what type of information products you have bought in the past. Chances are pretty good that they helped you either solve a problem or reduce pain. Those are both two very strong buying motivators.

Let me give you some examples. If your dog is barking like crazy any time someone walks up to your door, that’s a serious problem. If you came across a little ebook that promised to teach you how to stop this behavior in your dog in just a few days and it was $17, you’d buy it wouldn’t you?

Or let’s say you have chronic neck pain from sitting at the computer too much (I do). If there was a video or a report with some stretches that will help eliminate the pain, I’d be the first in line with my credit card.

Is It Entertaining

If you are not solving a problem, you have got to be entertaining (which in fact solves the problem of being bored). Think about it… If you look at the various information products available, they fall into one of those two categories. You are solving a problem (i.e. chronic back pain, bed wetting etc.) or you are helping keep your customers entertained (i.e. improving their golf game or learning to play the piano).

Is Someone Else In The Same Or Very Similar Market

Once you’ve established that your niche will either help solve a problem or entertain your readers, there’s one my thing I like to test. Make sure someone else is already profitable doing the same (or very similar thing).

There is no need to reinvent the wheel. Chances are that someone else already has tried just about any niche you can come up with. The ones that are profitable usually stay around. How do you find out if there are serious competitors who are already making money in your niche?

My favorite is to use Google and Google Adwords. Google one of the main keywords in your niche and pay attention to the Google ads on the search results page. If you can’t find any ads for paid products for several main keywords, chances are pretty good that this is NOT a profitable niche.

If on the other hand there are several paid products advertised, chances are good that this will be a good niche to try. Don’t forget to visit some of the offers that are advertised and see if it’s something you may want to promote as an affiliate.

To see what I mean, I invite you to take a look at my affiliate niche packs. They are a great shortcut for getting started in any niche. I research each topic to make sure it has a high profitability potential using the steps outlined above and then provide you with the following:

• A niche and target market description
• List of some of my favorite affiliate products available in this niche
• 100 domain name ideas
• 1000+ keywords
• 100 article and blog post ideas
• 15 sample author resource boxes for article marketing
• 2 different step-by-step marketing plans with daily action items
• PLR content available in this niche
• List of tools and service to get you up and running fast

Ready to give it a try? Grab an Affiliate Niche Pack today.

Susanne Myers

P.S. I under priced these niche packs quite a bit for the first few months. I am going to raise the price to $27 on March 15′th . Until then you can get them for $14.97.

Visit the Affiliate Niche Packs today

The secret to success in online marketing is not what you think…

Before we get get to my personal secret of online success, I want to talk to you about the Niche Affiliate Marketing System pre-workshop training.

It’s ever evolving.

As we learn more about the needs of our members, we deliver more focused training. And as we get more great content from our previous workshops, the training library becomes deeper and more complete.

But it also becomes more overwhelming as the thud factor gets greater and we build quite a library of valuable content.

With that in mind, each workshop will have pre-training that focuses our members towards achieving their goals. And often that training comes with bonuses. Sometimes, it will come with introductions to outstanding (but not free) training by some of our faculty, NAMS members, or trusted colleagues.

Bob (the Teacher) Jenkins’ outstanding Freemind Mindmapping video training is a good example of that. Freemind is my tool of choice for brainstorming and Bob opened my eyes to all kinds of new possibilities with that tool.

NAMS 1 and 2 pre-workshop training was conducted before the workshops were sold out. NAMS 3 pre-workshop training is conducted after the workshop sold out.

This is a better approach for members obviously.

You are in it for the training, not the pitching. In out continuing effort to avoid the pitch and bring you real value, we’ll focus training that supports our primary themes of the NAMS workshops.

We’ll always be focused on:

• Affiliate Marketing, and
• Driving Traffic

They fit hand-in-glove. If you can’t drive traffic, you can’t make sales. And making sales is what affiliate marketing is all about.

So, you can always expect to find the pre-workshop training heavily focused on those two factors.

Beginners especially will get significant doses of that medicine.

After a strong base there, we’ll branch out into other more specific areas such as social marketing, press releases, short reports, SEO, building landing pages, video traffic, ezine advertising, keyword research, getting the right mindset and more specific aspects of building a business.

A topic near and dear to my heart is…