The key to making the most out of niche affiliate marketing is to find the best products to promote. You need to find the hidden, undiscovered niches that have low competition levels that you can thrive in, but have a high customer demand.

These could be a small niche that most people would not consider but actually has a surprising amount of prospects. It could also be a smaller niche within a much larger and competitive market. If you can drill down in these markets and find the longtail keywords and phrases that customers search for you could be onto a winner.

In order to find these niches I would recommend three things;

Firstly, take a look at Google Trends and Ebay to find out the hottest searched terms. When you know what people are searching for you can then find an affiliate product you can market.

Secondly, have a look at books and magazines in a bookstore. If there is a magazine or popular book in the market then you can be sure there are potential customers you can target.

Finally, select a popular market in its broadest term. Then take a look at the forums in this market. By browsing through these you will find the niches that people are talking about and you will have a long list of niche ideas you can find products for.

I provide much information on this in my niche blueprint bonus.

The next step is to go out and promote to these prospects and you will stand a good chance of prospering. For more info take a look at the niche blueprint.

Earlier this year, when I joined Affiliate Cash Secrets By Derrick Van Dyke, one of the main focus of setting up a successful affiliate campaign is actually to create a squeeze or optin page. It’s a type of landing page which you can see an example of one of my affiliate offer early on at freePPCads.biz The purpose of a squeeze page is mainly captured your visitor name and email address before they head on to the merchant site. When I was taught it is extremely important if you are paying for traffic such as Adwords, Yahoo sponsored search, or various form of paid advertising.

Why a Squeeze Page?

The reason for a squeeze page because can either buy the offer or leave the offer totally and buy getting the leads, you can following them up throughout an autoresponder squeeze, and hopefully they will buy. At the end of the day if they don’t you will still have a chance to show them other offers later on which I am currently doing with my private label rights products as well as some affiliate offers as well. So it leaves to how actually you can create a squeeze page for an affiliate offer.

Cookie Pre-loading

After reading the ebook affiliate rescue, they taught a quite “sneaky” method which some merchant may have problem with you…i.e. copy the merchant site entirely and stick your affiliate link in the web copy with a 1 by 1 pixel transparent image. The actual HTML looks like:

[quickcode] <img src=”YourAffiliateLinkHere” height=”1″ width=”1″>[/quickcode]

Indeed I’m doing that today with all my affiliate offer, as examples, you can go to blogtradesecrets.biz and biggestfiresale bonus page but I am necessary copy the merchant but create a simple squeeze or landing page for each offer. The purpose of sticking your affiliate link is with a transparent is important (it’s also known as cookie pre-loading or cookie dropping) because your visitor doesn’t have to go the merchant site before your affiliate is recognized. Well you don’t know what your visitor will do, some may fill up their name and primary email address for your squeeze page form and some may close that page and don’t bother to enter their information! Therefore by pre-loading your cookie with your squeeze or landing page, you increase your chance of getting commission.

Next time I will talk about how to set up a sales funnel so that you know what price range of products that you can market to your list so stay tuned!

Ok, last time, you saw and example of my landing page when promoting Biggest Firesale, well I finally made 14 sales when promoting to my list and also at warrior forum, now today I want to give you some reasoning why you need a landing or a squeeze page kind of thing before promoting an affiliate program especially products in Internet marketing niche. Ok what is landing page?

Affiliate Marketing and Landing Page

According to Wikipedia, a landing page is

In online marketing a landing page, sometimes known as a lead capture page, is the page that appears when a potential customer clicks on an advertisement or a search-engine result link. The page will usually display content that is a logical extension of the advertisement or link, and that is optimized to feature specific keywords or phrases for indexing by search engines.

In the context of affiliate marketing, a landing page can be used as a pre-sells page. For example, when you Google the terms “Google conquest” review, and click one of the listing, and they are a typical example of a review type of landing page. The purpose of this landing page is to warm the site visitor up into buying mood or capture leads for future used. Certainly there are other types of landing page where it shows all the relevant topics in a single page. For instance, this one here.

In general, if you want a higher a sales conversion when promoting an affiliate program a landing page is needed. You can offer a bonus in the landing page like I did in Biggest Firesale or a review type of landing page like as my aweber review page where I tell my truth experience of using an autoresponder services. Which type of page design is more effective? Well I am not sure but the fact is again you’ve got to have a landing page. This is truth fact of promoting affiliate program or affiliate product. I see so many people just do a direct linking their sites to the merchant. Well, by luck you may have some sales but most of the fact you don’t. I tried it before and I am not going to try it again because there are a lot of people who are smart and they do something extra. The smartest probably is the one who offers a bonus to their offer. Trust me, you need to do that if you want to succeed and perhaps due the fact there always competitions in any market that make money!

In my next series here, I am going to show you another interesting fact I have discovered early on, multiple results for a given keyword in Google, so stayed tuned!