Case Study $1,000+ Commissions Find a Niche with Large Commissions, Little Competition & Lots of Volume.

One problem many new Affiliates have is finding a niche to start in. Many may create banner farms, coupon sites or throw together a shopping mall. That rarely ever works no matter how hard you try. What does tend to work is finding an industry that is large enough and either has niches not being catered to or has no major competitors. Having a high volume of traffic for their products doesn’t hurt either. When someone asks me why I work with small companies instead of just large brands, this is the reason. Usually they are small companies with a huge potential and a great market for Affiliates. This case study is for an Affiliate Management client called DecorativeCeilingTiles.net of Adam Riemer Marketing. You can join this program by clicking here.

Finding an Affiliate niche with huge potential for making money

You wouldn’t think that ceiling tiles would be a lucrative niche. However, if you think about it, it is part of home improvement, design and redesign, restaurant, hotels, nightclubs and hospitality, antiques, DIYers, crafting and a ton of other larger niches. All of them are looking for this type of product, but it isn’t something that has many large competitors, you cannot usually find a reasonable selection in big box or even small mom and pop owned retailers so people need to shop online and there are a ton of great urls available.

You have manufacturer’s sites that don’t do well with SEO and no main vendors or large players, until now with DecorativeCeilingTiles. If you use a keyword research tool you’ll discover there is a large volume for these products. When you throw in the cornices, backsplashes and crown molding, you now have great cross sells and upsells. Lastly check for available exact match or brandable domains.  This alone should make an Affiliate’s mouth water. Some of the Affiliates who have found it and put a lot of effort into it are now starting to generate nice sales as you can see from the images below. All of these sales came between 9/20 and 9/26 so it is just within a week. The images don’t show the other sales that came in which range from $1 to the highest which was $12,858.

Things to think about when finding niches with huge potential:

1. Is there a large industry with a need and also has a niche not worked on?
2. Is the product readily available in large cities, in the country and in big box or local retailers or do people have to shop online?
3. Is there a search volume for this?
4. Are there any major sites or well SEO’d sites that are competing or is it opened for you to take over?
5. What types of domains are available within the niche or can you tie this new product line into a current site?

By going through these you may have found an awesome opportunity like DecorativeCeilingTiles.net which has new partners joining all the time and some are starting to send traffic and sales.  Next you need to find out if there is a program for this niche and if it is properly managed so you have a good chance at making money.

How to determine potential losses and profitability before joining an Affiliate Program

When you look at this program, you’ll notice that there are little to no trademark bidders or extension bidders with active links. There are no coupon sites with active links in the top ten results in Google ranking for url or trademark + coupons and that all major adware players have been booted. If we find them or someone sends us one, they are gone instantly. This program is set up for content sites, bloggers, PPC people and value adding partners to make a killing!

When you find these niches and then the programs within them, you want to see what the potential losses are before you dedicate your time to it. We addressed these with the program after it went unmanaged for a while and decided to strategize as numerous partners had snuck in when it wasn’t being watched.

1. If coupon sites and trademark bidders show up, they can replace your cookies and you lose your sales.
2. If they have toolbars and adware affiliates, there is a chance they can replace your cookies and you lose your commissions.
3. If there are leaks, your traffic is being sent to other sites and you may lose your revenue.
4. If it is a high ticket item, make sure phone tracking is enabled and call to see for yourself so that you feel confident they will credit you.
5. Make sure they are willing to share their highest AOV orders and the products that help to increase the AOV, best sellers and give you everything from videos to datafeeds and other things that will help you succeed.

When you have access to this information you can find the search volume for high and low volume products, compare them to conversion rates if they are available and also look for the brandable or exact match domains to buy for your campaign. Now you are ready to decide if you are going to give it a shot. One thing to also find out is if they have leapfrogging in place. Leapfrogging will credit the content site and not the site poaching from the cart if it is set up the right way.

Launching a new affiliate site to make money in a new niche.

If you decide to move forward with this new niche, program and site, now you need to plan out how you will build your new affiliate site, how to target your keywords and how to launch. Here is what I do and recommend to new Affiliates.

Write 20 articles at least 500 words long that are unique. By doing this you can start with great copy on your site to help visitors when they find you. Use around 10 of them for your own site copy, 8 for backlinks from other content relevant sites and get them scheduled to drop around the same week your site goes live and save two for other bloggers who many come across and ask you to contribute to their sites.

Make sure you heat map your site so you can see which products or tiles are getting the most action out of the pages and try to move them to the most optimal spaces, especially if they are leading to sales.

Create a social strategy behind the new site so you can show the search engines that there is an interest for this site and it is legit.

Incorporate all of the tools that you think will help. DecorativeCeilingTiles.net offers great how to videos for DIYers or contractors if that is your audience. They have amazing photo galleries that you can use if you have designers or DIYers and Restaurant people with really creative ways that people and companies have used tiles and they offer a full datafeed so you can sort and create storefront styled pages. All of these together help to presell and build confidence, as well as generate an actual interest for people because they realize they could actually create these amazing accents in a room, decorate walls and other spaces without spending a ton of money or having to hire professionals.

If you’re looking to make money as an Affiliate, coupon sites, shopping malls and banner farms are probably not going to cut it anymore. What I recommend is finding niches like DecorativeCeilingTiles.net that have a large search volume, little competition and a ton of potential. This program offers a clean and fair playing field, and has all of the tools you need to be successful. If all of this is available and you can find a great domain, it just takes a bit of hard work and there is a very good chance you can either earn large commissions like the ones that were all earned within a 1 week time frame above or a ton of smaller commissions that can equal up to a decent amount of money each month.

Two other programs I manage that I personally feel have this potential are below:

National Autism Resources – https://bit.ly/15vzPBZ

Bachelorette.com – https://bit.ly/10JWuKh

Both of these have large audiences that are not being catered to, have tons of products with high volumes and no competition in the search engines. They both have products with huge price ranges with great cross sells and cater to their audiences very well. You might not get a $1,000+ commission off of a sale, but the volume, well run programs and are waiting for you to join.

This post was written by Adam Riemer who is a long time content Affiliate, ethical Affiliate Manager, SEO and conversion rate expert. With a passion for helping Affiliates make money and small to large business remove theft and scale, he enjoys as his clients and Affiliate partners begin to see success like in the program described above. Follow him on Twitter https://www.twitter.com/rollerblader or on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/riemermarketing.