Pick a Market... Not a Product

Almost everyone starting out in Affiliate Marketing picks a product rather than a market and tries to push the product w/o knowing exactly who they are pushing it to.

I used to be the same way and find high selling products and try to push them. Things started turning around in my Affiliate Marketing once I started following the philosophy of finding a hungry market and THEN finding a product(s) to give them. I had been told this by many successful marketers but it just never clicked until I actually tried it.

Well, the past month or so I have been showing some people how to set up a campaign and it was not working as well as I had hoped. I had a few sales but nothing major and nothing consistent. I had already gone through all of my steps and determined that my market was a hungry market... that was actually my very first step of the process. So, it made no sense to me why they weren't buying.

So, the market I was focusing on has 2 big time sub-markets. I decided to do a little test and see how things were in the "other" sub-market. I threw up a new page for a product in the other sub market... nothing fancy, it probably took me 5 minutes. Then I set up an Adwords ad running to it and went to bed.

I woke up this morning and had sent 2 clicks for a total of $0.50 to the new test page. I thought "Damn, that sucks." I then logged in to my Clickbank account and saw that I had a sale from 1 of those 2 people that saw my page.

Now, I know this is far too early to be certain of anything on that campaign; it just illustrates me point a bit.

The moral of the story here though is that since I picked a market to focus on rather than the product, I was able to adapt and find something else to sell to that market.

If you focus on that market that opens their wallets and has a demand for something, you will be much better off. Travis Sago said it best when he wrote: "Are you a horrible salesperson? It's okay! Take a trip to the desert and come across a thirsty mob of people and you have a gallon of ice water... How good of a salesperson do you have to be?"

Now I would like to take his example even farther; you are going to be able to sell that market a lot more products... maybe they would buy some Canteens, hell maybe they would buy a Camel.

And on the flip side of that, the thing where so many people get stuck, just b/c ice water has a high "gravity" doesn't guarantee you will be able to sell it easily... you will have to find a market that wants it before you can sell it to them properly.