My 500th post: Easy pickings - piggyback on physical product launches for easy affiliate sales!

Wow, it's time for my 500th post already! What can I say except, why on earth didn't I get involved in the WF some 3 or 4 years ago when I first encountered it, instead of hanging around on some vastly inferior forums. I guess I found it a little impenetrable (especially the WSO section, I remember thinking, what is THAT all about?! Ha ha). My learning curve since coming here has been massively steep but the best IM education I could have hoped for, and it's reflecting on my bank balance!

Anyway, in line with tradition, I want to give something back and share something that works for me and might help some Warriors out there. Only got time for a quick and simple tip this time, will wait for my 10,000th post for the real juicy stuff


Piggybacking on physical product launches

I am not talking about Clickbank-type launches, where you blog about Is XYZ a Scam (though you’ve never seen it!), I mean physical product launches. Actually, I know there are plenty of people out there capitalising on product launches in different ways. There was a good thread here somewhere recently about video game launches. But here's my take:

New physical products are coming out ALL the time. And if you are the first to blog, make a microniche site or write a good article about a new product, the chances are very good you will make Google page one, just because Google can’t find any other content on the subject, or because you got first dibs on it! In fact for one niche product I occupy almost ALL the page one slots with my properties of one sort or another!

This approach can be used by bum marketers, microniche site builders and authority bloggers (though these guys are probably already doing this). This would be my ‘MAIN sideline’ if I wasn’t focused on some more long-term projects and products. As it is, I don’t really have time for this, so I want to throw it out there to the Warriors.


How to be the first to write about a new product

Again, this will be blindingly obvious to some, but let’s go through a few ways I am doing this. The most obvious is RSS feeds. RSS feeds are not JUST for promoting your sites with, they are also an endless mine of niche product information.

When a new product is announced, the manufacturer usually puts out a press release and, if they are remotely tech savvy (which is why this approach is most straightforward in the tech niches, though see my reservations below) they also publish this release to their RSS feed. In fact, many of them have a ‘New products’ feed where they publish every new product that they are bringing out, many of which may not even get mentioned in a press release.

Actually, the top manufacturers have MANY different RSS feeds. For example, check out Sony’s RSS feed page: RSS : Sony. There are loads of different feeds on there, and if you subscribe to them, you can have TONS of freshly-baked new niche ideas shoveled into your inbox every day!

What I do is this:

1) pick my general niche, e.g. cellphones. Actually, tech is not the best subject area for this, as I will explain later, but easiest to use as an example.
2) if I am not familiar with the top manufacturers in the niche (unlikely in the case of cellphones, but in other niches you might need to research this), I go to Amazon and search the cellphones section, sorting by Bestselling, so I can see who the top selling manufacturers are.
3) then I Google for the manufacturers' sites and look for an RSS feeds section. E.g. I found Motorola’s site for their mobile phone business here: http://mediacenter.motorola.com/ then found the page with RSS feeds on: http://mediacenter.motorola.com/cont...NewsAreaID=139. Now I would grab the Mobile Devices feed (Motorola Mobile Devices: English) and subscribe to it in Google Reader. I have done the same with lots of different manufacturers I am interested in, and I check this every day, or at least every day I need some new niche ideas.
4) Let’s have a look at Motorola’s news feed. I see the latest headline: Motorola XOOM Tablet To Be Available On The Verizon Wireless Network On Feb. 24. Actually, this article was published 2 days ago, so we are a little late for this one, got to be quicker next time But anyway, for example’s sake, click through to that article and you will get the press release on Motorola’s site. Now, do you think there is an opportunity for an affiliate marketers here? Well, honestly, I don’t know for sure, so I would do some additional steps...:

• Research the product a little, see if it is a followup to an older model?
• How did that model sell?
• What’s the Adwords Keyword Tool search volume for keywords relating to that predecessor model?
• Is there an affiliate program you can earn from? (Amazon doesn’t have this Verizon/Motorola Xoom deal, but maybe you will find something. At the end of the day, there is always Adsense!)

How to make money from this knowledge

Assuming you have done some due diligence and think there is something to be made from this niche, it’s time to do whatever you do to get some content out there.

But just one thing to notice - try Googling that exact headline in quotes and what do you see? You see LOADS of sites with a verbatim copy of the same press release! So much for duplicate content! Google is crying out for something original to list on page one on the subject. You should note of course that the average surfer is more likely to search for ‘xoom tablet verizon’ (check out the Google Trend for this too: Google Trends: motorola xoom verizon and check out that spike!) or something similar. If you do that you get some quite different results - mostly tech blogs, some of them dated within the last few days, who have blogged on the subject, but written an original article and leveraged their authority status/high site PR to get to page one. Now how do you think most of them found out about the new Motorola Xoom tablet deal with Verizon? Exactly the same way we just did!

Now that’s why I said the tech niche wasn’t the best example, because these guys are QUICK, and they are packing some huge site authority. That doesn’t mean you can’t knock them out, by leveraging a high-PR site yourself, or creating an authority niche blog like theirs. But I would suggest avoiding tech and going for other less tech-savvy niches - household goods, whatever. The only problem is, these manufacturers often DON’T have an RSS feed (crazy but true), so you have to get a bit more imaginative. Go look at their press-room (usually a link in their site footer) and there will usually be some recent press releases. Subscribe to their email list. Even if they don’t have a feed, there are free services around the net which will monitor a page you specify (i.e. their press release page) and email you when something changes (e.g. here: ChangeDetection - Monitor a Web Page for Changes). Again, when a new product is announced, research it, estimate the chances that it will be a winner.

For the sake of the example, assuming we are sticking with the Motorola Verizon Xoom news, we want to leverage a high-PR site and get ourselves up on page one with the big boys, or in non-tech niches often ALONE on page one with no competition, much better So here are some ideas on how I have done this in the past - and these are just methods that I personally am comfortable with:

Build a quick niche site
PLEASE don’t ask me how to do this, what Wordpress template to use, what keywords to use etc.! Just go and do it What I have done in the past is write a static article for page one that is a rewrite of the press release and which includes other info that you have researched, anything related really, like what other similar models the manufacturer has launched in the past, what general tech trends this fits into etc. etc.
Other static pages can be things like a page of technical specifications, a page about the specific technology involved, a page about competing products bla bla - again, use your imagination, do NOT overthink this!
I have a site like this for a car accessory on a .info domain hogging the top FOUR slots on page one - the rest of page one is pages from the manufacturer’s site and some other articles about the product (guess whose ). Now, this product has turned out to be MONTHS late in coming out, but I don’t care. When it does, my position will have become pretty much unassailable - and it took me VERY little time or cost to do. The item in question can fetch me around $65 in commission per sale, and the predecessor model gets 8,000 exact match searches per month globally. Worth waiting for? You bet, and in the meantime I can earn a little from Adsense etc.

Other methods
OK, this is getting a bit long, so I will just mention a couple of other things - one is article marketing. Write a good, somewhat longer and detailed article on the product (again, a good rewrite of the press release with your own touch) and submit to some of the high-PR article sites. I would not look much further than EZA, ArticlesBase and GoArticles. The disadvantage of EZA is you can’t have an affiliate link, so register a cheap .info that you can redirect. One or more of these articles is very likely to make page one. The only disadavantage with article marketing is it may not stay there...

Or make a Hubpage, or make a Squidoo Lens, reworking the material slightly into a nice, varied Hubpage/Lens. These all work great.

Actually, do ALL of the above! For some niches I have MULTIPLE page one entries with my different properties.

Now, this method can be hit-and-miss, you will have some failures, and sometimes it can take a while before the search volume actually turns up for the product in question. But it is very simple to do - you can probably do bum marketing this way and knock out several articles/Squidoos etc. a day for different products - some of them WILL stick and you WILL make money over the life cycle of these products!

Hope that helps someone. There’s no rocket science in this, but let me know if anything isn’t clear and I will try to explain. Bear in mind I am not really trying to tell you how to monetise this - you will figure it out, whatever model you are comfortable with. The idea here is to be the first to publish content on new products by leveraging RSS feeds and other sources of product information which you will get delivered to your inbox in large volume and on a daily basis. As ever, it's up to you to take action.