A niche without affiliate programs?

[tal]

Hi all,
I think I have found a niche that could be profitable. The problem is that that I can not find any affiliate program that is related to it. There are some products that are available in the market so I would have expected that there will be some related affiliate program. The fact that some of the products are available for online purchase strengthens this argument. Nonetheless, I have failed to find a program.

My questions are:

I am probably just not searching well enough; do you have any suggestion how to find an appropriate program?

If there are no such programs, should I suggest the sites that sell the product to become their affiliate?

This solution will require them to develop an affiliate program and I will probably lose my idea to stronger affiliates.
Any suggestion on how to approach this?

Thank you very much,

[Linda Buquet]

Hi Tal,

I assume you Googled and checked Refer-it and Associateprograms.com? Did you do a key word search on Google and Overture to see if anyone is using PPC to advertise the products?


If there are no such programs, should I suggest the sites that sell the product to become their affiliate?

It would take some education and selling to get them interested enough to even commit the time, resources and $ to launch a program. You could try, but if they don't know anything they could pick the wrong software or set it up wrong. It's a long shot.

I BET there is already an affiliate program out there somewhere. Unless this is such a narrow niche that hardly anyone is interested in the products.

[tal]

Thank you Linda for your answer,
I have Googled and checked Refer-it and Associateprograms.com and no program came out (I was hoping that there is some additional “secret” resources) .
It is weird because when I googled it and checked overture I saw adsense ads for some of the products. They probably chose this way instead of actual affiliates.
I guess the only way to profit from this niche is to optimizing a site to this niche and add adsense ads. I wanted to avoid this because I wanted to build an affiliate site, but I guess it is unavoidable.
Thanks again,

[StephenR.]

It's odd you have found a niche where there is no affiliate program to promote. It has been my experience if there is no affiliate program available the niche may be too small to target. Generally I will not promote an affiliate program if there is not a demand of lets say 30-35K searches on the topic a month.

If your niche is too small you have two options:

1. Create the product and become the expert. Capture 100% of the market share.

2. Every niche is part of a greater subject matter. You can still provide information about the niche on your web site and then direct potential prospects to investigate the most closely related affiliate programs to your niche.

It is very rare you find a super niche so I recommend you CREATE the product or service. Go to http://www.elance.com or http://www.rentacoder.com/RentACoder/default.asp to have the product scripted or ghost written. (I use elance)

[tal]

Thank you Stephen for your answer,
My niche is probably a “micro niche” because it has less then 30-35K monthly searchers. However, I am far from your (and the other members of the forum) level of professionalism; therefore I aim much lower. Aren’t 30-35K monthly searches making a niche a competitive niche?

I think I will go with your second suggestion since I don’t have the resources and expertise for the first one.

I guess rent a coder and elance will have to wait until I became much better at this.

Thanks again,

[StephenR.]

It has been my experience that 30-35K searches done on a particular niche offers a level playing field for any marketer to establish themselves in...if you have the appropriate product or service.

Take photography for example. There were 411,887 searches done on "photography" according to Overture for the month of May. Thats way to broad to target obviously unless you have deep pockets. If you drill down to a specific niche you'll see that "black and white photography" generated 39,614 searches. While black and white photography is still a fairly popular niche there is room in the market for any beginner or intermediate marketer to establish themselves.

Do not be discouraged if your niche has fewer than my preference of 30-35K searches for marketing. Depending on the demographics and fanaticism of the potential prospects within your niche you could do very well for yourself with minimal traffic.

Do do some testing and researching on your niche and see if web surfers would be interested in the product first. If the respsonse is good I still strongly recommend you personally create the product or have a freelancer create it. Depending on what the project is a freelancer may only charge you a few hundred dollars or a few thousand.

[splodge]

Although I agree with what has been stated here I would also bear in mind that there are many 'lesser' search terms that can be more productive than the more competitive ones. It is easier to sell if the customer is already wanting to buy.

For example the term 'photography' is very broad where as the term 'where can i buy a nikon' is more focussed and will produce a higher percentage of sales.

Hope this is of some use to you.

Splodge