My name is Matthew Bredel and as of March, 2007, I am a full-time, work-at-home internet marketer.
For close to 10 years, I worked for a defense company which was an OK job, but I was so uninspired in life and frankly, I needed some more money. That is when I first discovered internet marketing! Now I admit that I didn't start making thousands in my first couple of months (in fact, I lost my shirt!), but I finally saw the "internet light"...
One of the most common questions I get these days is: “How do I choose a product to market?” This is not a simple question to answer at all. In fact, it may be one of the toughest questions when it comes to affiliate marketing (or even eCommerce). The success of your online business usually [...]
One of the most common questions I get these days is: “How do I choose a product to market?” This is not a simple question to answer at all. In fact, it may be one of the toughest questions when it comes to affiliate marketing (or even eCommerce). The success of your online business usually focuses around the products you choose. When I first started out, I chose to promote products that seemed “cool” or “a great idea”. The product was a children’s book that is personalized to the child’s age, name and interests. For $20, you can buy this book and I would get a $4 commission for each sale. I have kids! What a great idea! But after 3 weeks of promoting this product and spending $54 on PPC’s, I made zero sales. A few things to point on at this time:
- Popularity does matter to some extent.
- Not all products are promotable.
- No matter how good of an affiliate marketer you are, some are just lemons.
- Smaller payout items market better on bigger websites (that have multiple products).
- Larger payout items may have fierce competition.
- The marketability is only as good as the landing page you send them to.
So what happened with my custom book?
- Not many people are looking for “custom children books”. Therefore, I need to compete in bigger, lower quality markets like “childrens gifts” and “great gift ideas”. This costs more money to compete in and the visitors may not be buyers (when targeting keywords like these).
- The $4 commission is rather low. Let’s say I am paying $0.10 per click. To break even, I would need to make a sale for every 40 visitors. That is a 2.5% buy rate. (And that is high, by the way!) Still, if I could get the rate, I would only break even.
- The website I would send the person to was ‘cute’ but did not do a great job selling the product to the customer.
Looking back at the product (knowing what I know now makes me laugh!). A product like this may work with a large website with tons of products on it (because now you are distributing the costs among many products). For a solo product, it is a disaster.
And keep this in mind as well: Some products “stick” and some do not. Affiliate marketing only works if you are testing multiple types of products at once. Designing a full marketing website to one product without any testing is like putting all of your eggs in one basket.
Part 2 will go over some things to look for in a potentially good product.
- Matthew Bredel
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