Undercover Profits - More on Niches

X has been having a lot of fun playing with Undercover Profits -

No this isn't a sales pitch; I expect this software is going to be expensive and I don't recommend it for everyone.

Following up on the last post on selecting a niche, or target market, I've been playing around with a bunch of niche topics that I know very little about (at least as far as selling in that market).

What's cool about Undercover Profits is that I would normally advise you do A LOT of research into a market before you start investing time and money to promote products on terrain you don't KNOW. That would mean definite failure in war - and you need to think of the PPC as that; war.

Entering a new market, you're like the guy charging the enemy who's already entrenched on top of a hill - he's looking down on you. He knows the terrain and he can see more of the picture than you can. Plus, it's tougher to run up hill than it is to fire down.

With Undercover Profits you can get a satellite image of the terrain - you can see what's working and who it's working for - because in PPC, the people consistently promoting in the same ad spots are probably on to something.

If you find a set of keyword phrases where affiliates are consistently promoting a product by sending searchers direct to merchant (the least profitable way of playing the game), then you know you've found an easy money market.

And, you can EASILY destroy that affiliate by employing Black Book techniques.

So after just a few days, I'm selecting the "guitar" niche.

I am not going to reveal to you the products I'll promote, or the keywords I'm going to use to promote - not until a while down the road. While I love playing guitar, I know nothing about marketing in this niche.

Here's my plan:

1. I already know which affiliate programs are making money - I can see that by looking at my Undercover Profits data.

2. I need an enticing offer to gain subscribers. I'm going to hire a friend of mine to record 10 short 3-5 minute guitar lesson videos. The first five videos will be used as an enticement to subscribe. The second five videos, plus guitar tabliture, will be used on the backend as an enticement to recommend the site to five friends (I'll use Scott Boulch's "The List Virus" to manage this process).

Getting these videos done will probably cost in the range of $500-1000 dollars, but I'll have a KILLER optin offer that will be difficult to beat. I could probably get cheap on production and do a lot of this job myself, but I have other things to focus on so I'm betting it's worth paying for.

3. Once I've achieved a level of conversion I'm happy with, I'm going to put a link on my site for "affiliates" - one of the really cool features of The List Virus software is that it allows me to build a squeeze page that any affiliate can send traffic for a Clickbank product to - and that affiliate gets paid for the sale (while I build my list).

The advantage to the affiliate for sending traffic to my site instead of the merchants? Most of the time I'll be able to outconvert the merchant by a lot - which means more sales to the affiliate for sending people to my site instead of the merchant's.

And the merchant? Don't feel sorry for him - he's also going to make more money.

4. My follow-up emails will continue selling a variety of guitar related products - from guitars to amps to instructional videos.

5. Maybe I sell this site up the road.

You can follow the exact same process as above. You don't need Undercover Profits - or The List Virus to do any of this, but they're definitely tools to consider when you start making some money - LEARN TO VALUE YOUR TIME APPROPRIATELY and buy only tools that fit with what you're already doing.

I only recommend software and info products that directly complement or add too my own way of doing things.

Oh - and of course, I'll be using Keyword Xray to track all of my keyword phrases so I know exactly which phrases are converting (and if not, then I'll either cut those terms or revise my landing page to get more out of that traffic).

X