After Dave posted his epic post on how to dominate your niche, I thought I’d make a quick post on how I go about finding great products and niches to enter. This post will have tips for both beginner and advanced marketers (and if you love making excel spreadsheets like I do – then you’ll probably love it).
What I look (now) for choosing products are two main factors: one is that it already HAS converted for me, and two that it earns a decent commission as well.
Casting the Net
If you are an absolute beginner to promoting Amazon products then I first suggest that you take up the challenge I made prior to Christmas. Basically I suggest writing up to 10 different Squidoo lenses based on popular bestselling products in Amazon’s bestseller lists. You probably won’t earn as much as you would at Chrissy time – but you still should get some sales.
Actually if you can do more than 10 that would be great, but I don’t want you to get overwhelmed straight away. Once you have done your 10 you will need to backlink them.
If you have BMR (which is great and should pay for itself within a month if you use it) then send 10 links per day to your 10 lenses. You can decide whether you want to concentrate on one lens at a time, or do 1 link per lens per day until you reach your 10 quota.
If you don’t have BMR then you’ll need to do other methods of backlinking such as guest posting, writing articles, blog commenting and so on.
Try and get around 20 links to each Squid.
Check your Stats
It should take around 2 to 3 weeks for your lenses to start ranking and bringing in some sales.
At the start of a new month, go into your Amz Associates and look at the Earnings Report for orders from the last month. You can look at it on screen, but I actually prefer to download the report (choose xml or tsv) and then open it with Excel to get it into the excel format.
You’ll get much more information this way – including which id gave you sales for which product (important if you use different tracking id’s).
Next you can filter or sort your results so that you can mine for different information. I usually just filter them to only show results on products that have earned me at least $20 commission per product.
You can also see which products sold the most too to see which ones convert the best.
Most of the time it will be products that you are already promoting, but often it will also show items that you were not promoting.
For the products you were not promoting
If you were not promoting a product that earned you a good commission then I suggest creating a squid around that product to see if was a fluke, or might be a good product to promote later on.
Send that new lens 20 BMR’s (or other links)
For the products that you were promoting
Congrats – you’ve found a product that converts AND earns you a good commission rate. This is one that you can then use to build your niche empire with.
The next step is to create your own website/blog. Keep the domain name general if you can rather than specific. That way you can add lots of different products to it over time as you build it up.
I like to write a good original review and have a big call to action on the post. Add your product review to the site and then link your squidoo lens to it (your first backlink).
If it’s a new site, then start to add backlinks to it slowly. Perhaps no more than 1 or 2 per day. If it’s aged 6 months or more then you can be more aggressive – but I’d still do no more than 10-20 per day.
With your new money site – you want to get a variety of links – not just BMR’s. If you can get guest posting gigs then go for it because these are usually the best to get.
Also add some analytics to the site – either Google Anal, or another one you prefer. (I’m not overly paranoid so usually do use G Analytics). That way you’ll start to get a feel for more keywords that people are using to find your website. Write more posts around those keywords and link them back to your review post to funnel the traffic and build up the authority of that post.
All the while you still should be creating more lenses (or hubs if you prefer) to mine for more profitable products that convert to add to your main site.
And so as the cliché says – rinse and repeat.
Over time then you can start to create support sites and the like for your main site to increase the rankings even further – but that’s a whole other post and I’m on a time deadline so must run.
Enjoy and comment below (so I feel like someone actually read’s my posts 
)
great post. had a question on BMR. do you always create a 150 word post for your link or do you write larger post with more links.
thanks
Hi Alex, I usually do just 150 words with one link in it.
Cheers
Tracey
Re: BMR
I don’t get it, could you please clarify;
Doesn’t BMR only allow 5 different sites/urls
to send 10 links per site per day – total 50 links per day.
How can you send 10 links per day to 10 Squids (sites/urls)?
This post plus Dave’s dominate niche post are greatly appreciated for noob me to get started out. Thanks.
Yes, I meant 10 links to squidoo as a whole – of which you can either choose 1 link per lens per day = 10 per day OR 10 links to one lens one day, 10 links to another lens the next day = 10 per day. But if you do have squidoo in more than one project then you can certainly do more – up to 50 per day as you mentioned.
Glad to hear that you liked the post.
Tracey
Can I use the same strategy with Hubpages or not ?
Also will I be able to use BMR links with hubpages or I need to stick to Postrunner for those
Yes you can absolutely use this strategy with Hubpages if you prefer. And yes you can use BMR with hubs.
That Lionel picture is TOO funny!
Solid info here, but I’m still laughing over that image. Thanks.
I know, when I saw it I cracked up laughing.
Hello?
Is it me your linking for?
Gettit? Thanks for the link Tracey, my wonderful inspiration to earn from Amazon all those distant many months ago. Love the “Google Anal”.
How is it you sum up so succinctly what I take a few days to write? Glad you found your Cat. Yes, I have spies everywhere. Well, that or I saw it on the EVIL site!
Aargh, you have one of those spammer traps that made me nearly shoot James.
Was that you outside my window with the binoculars? I thought it was the pervy neighbour. Or perhaps it was you that inticed the cat under the house in the first place .. hmm conspiracy.
I’m still looking for that one lens that will rank with only 10 or 20 BMR links to it.
Perhaps I’m sending too many links all at once, so I’m gonna try and take it slower now.
They don’t have to rank #1 to make sales. I have some on pages 2 and 3 that still bring in the odd sales. And usually I just send 20 to start it off. If it proves to convert then I’ll throw more links at it.
You say you filter products by commission of $20.
Now we’re talking about products that cost at least $300 (assuming you make 6.5% with Amazon).
Are there really that many products at a minimum of $300 that you can also rank for with 10 to 20 BMRs?
I’ve selected 20 products I’m going to do that are NOT more than $300. In my opinion, there is a lot of competition for > $300 products.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but once again… some stuff isn’t making sense to me.
My commission level is usually higher than 6.5% and yes there are LOTS of products that you can rank for that bring in decent commissions. Many of these are not in the bestseller ranks though and I usually only find them by accident if someone purchases it through my link (from clicking another product link). The Kindle is one that I make regular sales on (although yes there is TONS of competition on this), as well as kitchen appliances (microwaves, coffee machines) and even power tools (something I know NOTHING about – but I do know heaps of people buy them! LOL). That’s what I mean by casting the net. You’ll often find products that you wouldn’t have normally thought of. And if you haven’t thought of it, chances are that other affiliates haven’t either.
Cast the net Blackthorne, you’ll never know what you’ll catch
Well, I’ve picked 15 products that are all over the place and I’m just gonna DO IT.
Awesome. Let us know how you go.
t
You know… I did a few coffee machines myself. Sent them 35 links each 2 or 3 weeks ago.
They’re floating on page 2 and 3 but no traffic from those.
What do you do with lenses that have 35 links and aren’t getting traffic after a few weeks?
Send more? Let’em go?
Sometimes I’ll just let them go, sometimes I’ll work them a bit. Depends on how much time I have. If I decide to work on it, first thing I’ll do is check out what sites are on page 1 for that keyword. If I see a hubpage or another squid then I know I can usually knock them out with a few more links. If I only see ‘shopping’ sites then I might give it a miss.
If I do decide to go for it, first thing I do is add more content to the lens, usually 100 or more words to give the search engines something more to chew on. Then I’ll add some more links using a variety of different keywords (don’t just use the product name though, make sure you throw in a few ‘click here’ and ‘visit this website’ as well to make it look more natural.
Sometimes I’ll also do a bit of blog commenting if I have time.
But generally I don’t spend too much time on any one lens. If it isn’t pulling in sales then I’ll leave it until I find one that does. For example I have three different bbq grill lenses – and only one of them regular pulls in sales even though the other two are slightly higher for their product names respectively. Don’t bother too much with the losers – just concentrate on the winners.
So the 3 bbq lenses, they all had only about 35 links to them?
Oh I don’t know exactly how many links each had to them. Probably less than 35 each though. Usually I only send a handful 10 to 15 to start them off and only ever send more if they start converting for me. So my winners definately have more links than the losers. Plus I add more links every month as long as they keep performing well. Although really, I don’t spend a whole lot of time on the squidoo lenses. I mainly use them just to find profitable niches and then add them to my general sites.
This sounds like a good approach. So far I’ve just been building sites around one type of product like electric shavers and then promoting all the different types of electric shavers on it.
I’ve yet to take the plunge into a more general site that has lots of different types of product on.
Can you really get these individual pages to rank? I’m not saying I don’t believe you, just very skeptical from my personal experiences but I don’t have much experience with successful backlinking. So I guess its me not you!
I’d be interested to hear about how competitive your niches/products are and how easy it was to rank well in Google.
Thanks for the info!
I think you need to increase your backlinking. Sounds like you already have a great site with the electric shavers so it’s just a matter of adding some backlinks to all the pages. Try 10 or so links per page. My general rule is to spend about 30% of the time writing content/adding pages to my site, and 70% getting backlinks.
Hi Tracey,
thanks for the tips!
Quick question: do you create your lenses based on specific products like “NIKE 6.0 Mavrk Mens Shoes” or something broader like “best nike shoes”?
thanks in advance!
Finding the right items to sell can be difficult for new users. We all have to understand we will be only obtaining a certain percentage of any item sold, so with that taken into consideration we need to sell an item that will give us the highest margin of profit.
I tend to sell items over$100.00 so I know my profit will stay over $5.00 per item sold. If you can get a page that has a niche product that is currently selling at a high rate of speed, you can make bank.
I like the post. I am new in online biz. Here I learned Squidoo and BMR. The most important is your strategy of how to make profit in niche product.
Tracey, thanks a million for your wonderful reminder of Amazon!!! It comes right the way when I was thinking of a CB alternative
As I never had heard until now about BMR, I naturally will give it a trial too.
Enjoy a fantastic weekend …. Rieke
If you find a product that you are already promoting then you can expand on that general niche and select other similar products. Alternatively, you could create another site/web2.0 property (or 10) promoting the same product and totally dominate the SERPS. you already know about the product and, if you have sold it, you may even understand who buys it so making new sites would be easy.
I think a lot of people will do their research in a store and then buy at home….this is especially the case for bulky items that they can’t or don’t want to put in their car to take home. Home delivery for bulky items is a plus point or feature for a potential buyer so look for those sorts of items too.
I completely forgot about this post until I logged into my Squidoo account and found that a lens I created off the back of this post had earned some money
I was thinking about picking it up again. What’s your thoughts on that?
I wouldn’t put too much effort into squids. I lost a lot of juice from them even though they were not ‘officially’ hit by panda. But if you can throw up something quick and get it to rank then a few backlinks certainly wouldn’t hurt.
Just as a matter of interest, what are you focusing on now?
im confused…do i use squidoo to promote amazon products, or is it better to do wordpress or hub? should i have my own main site to link everyting back to? and is this the same thing as an astore?
Hi Tara,
Use everything to promote your products! And ALSO provide a backlink to your main site. It’s not the same as an astore – which in my experience don’t convert at all.
t
Yes amazon products are great to promote. Gadgets are nice to promote but you’ll have lot of competition. But it’s really profitable specially if you are serious in promoting it.