How Do you Identify Products to Promote

Choosing products is an art, one you need to have a gut instinct for. There are a number of tools that will help you with making the choice, and we will discuss them in detail later, but making the final choice is still something that is as arbitrary as you picking one because you like it. If picking products were totally scientific there would be no place for you to enter in at all because everyone else would use the same tools that you want to make use of and choose products to market.

It is because it is not so easy, and it requires a lot of hard work that there is potential for the person who is willing to work hard at it. There are a few basics to selling both online and offline that are applicable and the primary among this is that selling is very easy if you are catering to a need. For example, selling clothes is never difficult. What is difficult is to sell them at a 300% profit, because buyers know when they are being ripped off.

Most of the advice you get will be different variations of the same thing. Find something that people need and start to sell it. A slight tweak on the same thing would be to find things that people need, that other people do not sell, and then sell it. This is just to make your job of selling it much easier than it would be if there were a horde of others selling the same thing.

The problem is that most of the needs of people are already met. Not only that, there are a large number of sellers already in the market and finding a spot where you will be alone is going to be a difficult thing to do. Taking advantage of changing trends will give you huge returns in a short time, but there is nothing permanent about it. You will have to keep finding new things to market and will always have to be on your toes.

It is simply because of all these difficulties that choosing the product to sell becomes an art. You make use of the tools available to you to gather as much information as you can about the product and then take a call on whether it is a good idea to promote it or not.

Below we will take a look at both what you can do as well as the tools available to you to help you choose the product to promote on your site or blog.

Become an Expert

This takes a lot of time, and even more hard work. The Internet is amazing in that it basically creates a level playing field for everyone. It takes very little money to start a website of your own, and if you are not particular, you can even host your site for free at certain places. This means that you have just as much of a chance as anyone else out there to make good. The bad thing is that this increases the competition tremendously.

While in real life, it takes a lifetime of hard work to not only become an expert in a certain field, but to be accepted as such, it takes considerably less time online. Yet, this same factor means that there is no shortage of 'experts' in any field on the net. You will therefore have to put in a lot of hard work to show people that you truly are an expert and that what you say is reliable.

This is because most of these so-called experts are really not, and all they do is scrape information off other sites and put it on their own. It does not take long before people find out that such people rarely have an opinion of their own, and discard them. The true expert though will not only catch the fancy of the net going public, but will stay there for a length of time, and even build up a fan following.

Let us take a simple example to explain the point. If you are going to set yourself up as an expert on cameras, you will find that there are a number of affiliate sites that push products by saying the exact same thing, that they are experts on cameras. However, you invest in some time to build your site up as a place where people can come to for reliable reviews of cameras, you will find that pretty quickly there will be a number of people who will follow you because you are simply separating yourself as a brand.

As long as you make sure that your reviews are honest and accurate you are sure to become popular sooner than later. If you start to sell cameras from your site, you are poised to take advantage of a lot of traffic that comes to your site looking for reviews. Even if most of them are only looking for the reviews but are not interested in making a purchase online, you will still profit from the few who do.

The reason why the reviews need to be accurate and honest is because if not, the same people who came to you thinking you were an expert will go out of their way to tell everyone else that you are a fraud. You will find bad reviews about your site cropping up all over the net, and all of a sudden you have lost everything you had.

There is little in the way of research or analysis that needs to be done, and all you have to do is to put in a review of the model and sit back. The advantage of this model is that you have a regular income stream. Even if you have to do a little maintenance work like always making sure that your content is current, or ensuring that you have a new model up on your site within a few days of launch, everything else runs along pretty smoothly.

The flip side though is that you will not be able to take advantage of anything new on the market other than cameras. If Apple brings out its new phone, you won't be able to do anything about it. Having a site that is too general is not good because you will not be able to focus on any one product or niche, bringing down the value of your whole site. You will also not be able to target your market properly because you really do not have any target market.

Using Online Stores

Most affiliate sites go with the large online stores because not only is it easy to become an affiliate, it is also easier to sell the products. For example, if you have a site that promotes cameras, it is much easier to sell these cameras through Amazon or eBay than through some other site. With the number of scams only increasing, people are wary of making any sort of payment unless they know that the site is bona fide. This also makes it extremely hard for smaller online retailers to break into the market, so there is a flip side to everything. If you value small businesses vs the big corporate players, certainly make sure to do your research before you start promoting products from the smaller retailer.

The second good thing is that most of these online stores really do not even give a good description of the product, far less a comparison with similar ones from other brands. This means that they are just a place where people can buy, but it also means that people who want to buy will look elsewhere for expert opinions. If you are the person with the expert opinion, they will visit you, and if you have been convincing enough, will purchase the product online thus crediting you with the sale.

Let's say you have pitched on cameras as your niche, just keeping with the current example; you will find that Amazon stocks pretty much everything that you can find in your local store, in terms of brands and models, and then some more. You have two choices here, you can go with cameras as a niche for your site, or you can target specific manufacturers or even brands to sell.

The advantage of doing this is just that you can focus more narrowly on a particular brand or model allowing you to go even higher in the search rankings.Just looking through the most popular list on Amazon will tell you which model people are buying. Generally speaking, this alone is enough because if people are buying something, it means that there is a demand for the product. There are a few things that you have to do to confirm whether that particular model is what you want to go with.

Simply Search It

Doing an online search is the simplest way to check if the product you selected is already being marketed by other affiliates, and what kind of competition there is. If you see a number of paid advertisements as well as a number of affiliate sites coming up high in the display page, you know that this niche has already been covered and continue your search for your product.

The reason for this is obvious. You will be investing a lot of time, effort and money in building a site dedicated to a particular model and if you are going to have to fight it out, it will take you that much longer to start seeing any returns. Going in for something where the competition is less is a better idea. It's not a good idea to go swimming in over saturated markets.

Probe Your Competition

This is the stage where most of us find ourselves. Most new niches are already taken and finding one where there is little to no competition is not as easy as it seems to when you read about it. This means that you have to probe your competition to find out exactly how good your competition is. For example, let us take it that you are interested in selling washing machines. You are pretty confident about selling them because you know that there is a need for them.

When you do a search online you find, you find the best selling washing machines using something like Amazon, well then you go and do a search and find retailers selling it, as well as usually you will find a few blog reviews on the product.

Let's say that your product search comes up with six different reviews on the product, or product category in addition to several retailers that offer the product. It's good to not only check reviews on the stores, but read all the corresponding blog articles to see what products are ranking up. This will show you what is popular, and what people think about the products.

Let's say all the sites offer customer reviews, but barring one all the others have between two and five reviews, which is really not good. Even the one site that has what looks like a promising review by a customer looks like it has been written by a professional article writer rather than an actual user. This fact immediately shows you how you can improve on your competition.

When you come down to this level, you will be able to identify products that have less competition than others. Yes it is not a totally empty niche, but there are possibilities that are worth exploring further.

Use the Right Tools

You will also find tools that will supposedly help you find weaknesses in your competitor’s websites. These tools are generally paid and will do everything from checking the keyword density to checking if your competitor has the ideal address in his URL. The effectiveness of these tools is debatable, but then it is something additional that you can try if you want to. These can help you get a leg up on your competition, but not always guaranteed, and again, allot of tools like this, if not most, charge a fee for the service.

If you can do all the research yourself, it is probably the best, but where you cannot, you'll have to rely on these tools, even if they are not as good and are costly. The one thing that you need to remember is that all the pages that have made it to the first page on Google are those that have the product name in the URL itself, which shows you how important it is to target specific products.

Identifying products is all about legwork and although we have taken Amazon as the basis of our search, this can be done in many other ways.

Affiliate Networks

ClickBank and Google's affiliate network gives you a list of all the products you can promote on your own site. All you have to do is to sign up with them, and this information is made available to you. The sign up procedure is free, and if you go through the procedure of finding products and marketing it, you find that it is one of the simplest there is. You can search by product categories or you can go with specific keywords.

If you want to go with the categories, you will get a list of all the products including the “vendor's pitch” which gives you relevant information about the product. This information may often not be enough, but it will at least help you shortlist likely products. You will have to do further research before you choose individual products.

The stats button shows you how much your commission is for each sale and the promote button generates a HopLink that will link your site to the vendor's. This is the link that you will have to use in your site, as if you copy the URL of the vendor, you will not be credited with any traffic you drive to the vendor. Such a simple process has seen them grow tremendously and they are one of the more preferred affiliate vendors in the market.

When compared to online stores, they also offer much higher commission rates, meaning you earn more. The difficulty though is in you making the sale. Everybody knows Amazon and is comfortable with purchasing from them. When they have to give out their credit card details in other places though, many people will refrain from doing so meaning that you will find selling that much more difficult.

Going with the products that have a number of affiliates is a good place to start off. The more the number of affiliates, the more the chances are that that particular product is a large selling one. This is a different take on beating your competition, and your whole strategy is based on the simple fact that if everyone else is selling something, and making a profit out of it, then you can as well.

Yet, this logic is not without its pitfalls. Just because a particular product has a number of affiliates, it is no guarantee that you will be able to sell the same product. It also means that the competition is already stiff, and breaking into the market is not going to be easy. Moreover, all the juicy sounding URL addresses would have already been taken which will make it more difficult for you to get the product name into your address.

This is especially true of you are going in for a totally unrelated product from what you are selling now, or are starting out new. The other way is to look at the products with the maximum commission and then figure out a way of driving sales. Unfortunately this is easier said than done, and in many cases the commissions are high and the competition low because making a sale is so difficult.

The second thing that you will have to think about is that you can drive any amount of traffic to a particular site, but unless the home site is written well, no one is going to buy the product. For example, if you become an affiliate to sell eBooks for someone else, however much you do your part, unless the home site itself has something that will make the people you send, buy the product, you are not going to get any sales, and all your effort will be to waste.

Generally speaking going for the sure shot ones, like the ones that have a lot of competition is better, because if you work hard enough and get the ranking on your site up, you are at least guaranteed success. If you go for the hard to sell products, you cannot be sure that even after all this effort you will make any sale.

Promotional tools

Many times the affiliate site will offer all the promotional tools that you will need, like page banners, informative articles, and even email promotions. Of course, the articles cannot be used as is but you at least have all the basic information about the product to help you create a wonderful sales pitch.

If you find a seller that does not do this, it is better to stay away from them. This is because it shows that they are not serious about marketing online. It also means that you will have to put in that much more effort at marketing their product and their commission may not justify this added effort.

Use Keyword Tools

Although we do not support Google as a company, it is the best search engine as far as finding keyword information because they have different tools you can use. You can try to use Brave search as well, but honestly Google is your best tool in this case. That aside, let's move forward...

Most search engines offer free keyword tools that you can use to find related keywords. There are also other paid software programs that will help you do the same thing, but with increased functionality. While usually these tools are used mainly to find related keywords, they are also useful to find the most often searched strings. This process is time consuming and takes a long time, but will give you solid information to move forward on.

For example, if you feel that cameras are a good option, just typing cameras into the tool will give you all the related search strings that are being searched for, their local and global numbers for the month. This gives you an approximate idea of the number of people searching for a particular product. For example, if you type in Yorkshire Terriers, you will get a number of results that range from more than 80,000 to less than 2,000.

You therefore know that there are at least 80,000 searches for the Yorkie on average every month. On the other hand, if you put in Labrador retrievers, you will find that this number triples. It is pretty obvious that there are more people searching for them than for the Yorkie. This gives you a good baseline to start off on. While looking in online stores like Amazon may give you similar data there are two advantages of using the keyword tools that search engines offer.

First, you get actual numbers of the number of people searching for a certain product while all Amazon can do is tell you which products sell the most. While you may be more interested in promoting products that sell more, you may be losing out on a good opportunity to convert sales. Amazon gives you data for sales converted, while Google gives you data about potential for sale. There may be innumerable reasons why there may be more people searching for a product than there are buying it, and one of them could be that the sellers are not doing a good job.

This gives you the opportunity of entering into a market where even if there are other competitors, the competition is really nothing much to talk about. The second advantage is that Google offers you the ability to find niches that are as yet untouched. While this may be difficult and may take a lot of time, the possibility at least exists with Google, while with any other way this possibility is not an option at all. Of course, doing random searches will mostly be a waste of time. You will have to approach it in an organized manner.

The way to do this is to brainstorm and note down as many niches as you can come up with. Then go through Google with all these niches one by one. If you hit something, good, if not you continue the same process. It is simply because this process is so time consuming that many people prefer to go with the affiliate network or check on online stores. Yet, doing this is still not useless as if you do get lucky and chance upon a niche where there are a number of people searching, but very few people selling, you are on to a sure thing.

These tips and tricks can help you along your journey to becoming a successful product and service promotor! Along with your own website, if you are using Wordpress, you can use something like the @exxp plugin to tie in your review site with the Hive blockchain, and get paid from the community for your work in cryptocurrency. This can add a whole new layer of income for your blog!

Keep calm and Hustle on!

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