The affiliate marketer's power guide to niche
product evaluation
If you built and sold the first teleportation
device you would make some serious money.
But...
If you built the network that connected
the teleportation devices and charge a subscription fee to use it,
you're set up for a future of enormous passive income.
This is the view many entrepreneurs are
taking in the 21st century. Passive income can only be derived from niche
products with a sustainable market.
We love niche products because they inherently
don't have many competitors and solve the problems of people who have money
to spend. It is no wonder affiliate marketers fall over themselves in a
rushed "grab-for-cash" type frenzy whenever a niche product with affiliate
income opportunities launches. Unfortunately many are too late and end
up scraping the bottom of the barrel for the last few customers.
If we analyze niche products closely we
can divide them into 2 distinct categories:
Un-Sustainable and Sustainable.
Unsustainable niche products may or may
not make money. If they do make money, they only do so for a short period
of time, then they need to be re-invented to become new niche products.
Affiliates who get in early stand to profit. But sales usually diminish
quickly once new competitors or hot products arrive to saturate the market.
Take for example a car or a DVD player, when first released the manufacturer
sales margin would have been massive. Only the rich would have been able
to afford one. But as competitors enter the market, margins start to reduce
drastically and there is no longer much profit to be made. Mobile phone
handsets are an example of this. The market is so saturated that the phones
are often given away for free.
Sustainable niche products are those products
that grow in value the more people know about them. Drawing on the mobile
phone example, the telecommunications network would be a sustainable niche.
The more people on the network the more valuable the phone becomes to the
owners. Affiliates of sustainable niche products stand to profit considerably
more using this long-term strategy compared to the possible quick profit
from unsustainable niche products.
Sustainable niche products can be sold
to each individual in the market. They are inherently viral as every individual
who has the product can derive greater value when they convince others
to use it. For example a fax machine has greater value when everyone has
one. With subscription or disposable services, there is generally no market
saturation. You can re-sell the same niche product back to the same customer
again and again.
So before you invest your time, effort
and money promoting another merchants product, ensure the niche product
passes the following checks:
#1) Does the product meet a continuous
need of consumers? Can you sell it 10 years from now?
#2) How viral is the product? Will people
rave about it or keep it as their secret weapon?
#3) How big is the market that would use
this product? Is it likely to shrink in the next 10 years?
#4) Does the product lend itself to a subscription
based, limited license, or a disposable user pays model? Can you
re-sell it to the same customer again and again?
#5) Do the product benefits grow exponentially
for every user that purchases it?
Here are some examples of sustainable (past-niche)
products:
#1) Internet Telephony
#2) Online Auction
#3) Online Dating Service
#4) Customer Acquisition Exchange
#5) P2P file sharing services
If you're an affiliate marketer looking
to derive sustainable passive income, make sure you market the right kinds
of product.
Author-Bio: Michael Lever |
