Do you know anything about the products you promote?

I usually stick to niches I know enough about to be able to judge if its a good product or not.

For example I have never even thought about promoting a product on DIY Solar Panels or DIY wind turbines because I know nothing about it.

This is just my personal choice.

Although you will notice above I used the word "usually" because if I do choose a niche I don't know much about then what I do is learn enough about the subject first to be able to judge if a product is good or not.

Plus I then know enough about a niche to create content if I need to.

Of course content can be outsourced so it's not that important.

I agree with the three criteria posted by someone above...

Sure, you can promote something you know nothing about. But you aren't likely to succeed in selling it without any knowledge about it whatsoever.

Something to consider would be reaching out to the product creator and asking if you could have a review copy in order to promote it to your list. Many will gladly provide you with one, just be professional and make sure they know that there will be something in it for them. Tell them you can send some sales their way if you can check out the product before recommending it.

But yeah, ideally I would say try to find something you have actually used or something that you have an interest in. I tried sifting through hundreds of Clickbank products to promote, and I was in the same boat you are now because I didn't know anything about them either.

It didn't work for me. At all. Not saying it can't, but it sure didn't for me.

I had my first success when I found out about an affiliate program for a product I was already using, AFTER I had already been using it. Since I knew the product well and knew what it was best used for, I was able to position it in a way that appealed to the right group of people and the referrals started rolling in.

Sometimes the only way that works is the way we discover by accident, when we aren't even actively looking. Good luck to you.

No, not at all. That's just what you see here, because it's an internet marketing forum and a significant proportion of the members are here to do their own marketing to their own customers (i.e. fellow-marketers). I think the businesses of the overwhelming majority of successful, professional marketers have no connection with any "IM niches" or "MMO niches" at all.

It depends what you mean by "passionate", I think.

I have 8 entirely separate, unrelated niches. I have 2 or 3 about which I was genuinely passionate beforehand, and 2 or 3 in which I was really interested and new a little beforehand, and 2 or 3 in which I was slightly interested and willing, beforehand, to commit myself to studying and learning a lot more (I don't do quite as well with those).

They do, but they can also be good areas to keep away from, for beginning marketers, for all the reasons explained in the threads linked to above. Remember that the failure-rate in internet marketing is very high indeed (whoever's figures you accept and believe), so going for the "hot topics" perhaps isn't the optimal course?

Give them back to you, and (even more importantly) get mine back from you because you can't even stand in them anyway, let alone walk. :p

I don't know. It seems a little unlikely, but it can be surprising the things that turn out to be. That one could be a traffic-attractor, I can see, but I have no idea what you'd promote to them? :confused:

It doesn't seem that way to me. There are thousands of "non-mainstream niches". Go to a newsagents and look at all the things people buy magazines on. Look through Amazon's website and see all the things people spend money on.

There are hundreds and hundreds of others, too, though.

With difficulty. What do you like, apart from wrestling? What interests you? What would you look for magazines on, in a newsagent's shop? Look through the Yellow Pages for any major city?

Yes, I hear you there. There's nearly always some sort of compromise involved, between "something that has a real market and products to promote" and "something you can envisage being reasonably interested in and willing to write about".

There's a big world out there beyond clickbank and "money, health and love".

Do you think Vince McMahon would be a billionaire today if there were only a handful of passionate wrestling fans in the world?

Look at the crowd on your favorite show. How many are wearing t-shirts and waving their fake championship belts? How do wrestling videos dominate the sports video niche? How do the top wrestlers gather millions of social media followers?

If I were in your shoes, I'd be building a list of people who love the same wrestlers you do. I'd watch every pay-per-view event and write my own recaps and columns for my list. I'd go to any live event I could reach and write about the experience. I'd add photos and video clips I took myself.

From what I can tell, wrestling fans fit the very definition of what I term "obsessive buyers" - they buy the shirts and other clothing, the videos, the books, the movies. Vince is no dummy - wrestler bios sell very well to a crowd that most people outside believe can't read. They buy movie tickets to see people like the Rock, John Cena and others appear in movies. It's the ideal passionate crowd.

Just because it doesn't fit with the "desperate buyer" crowd peddling get-your-ex-back-you-pathetic-loser ebooks or how to cure genital warts cures or how to get rich without work courses doesn't mean you can't make money from them.