Much of that depends on what you're willing to do to keep it profitable.
- Some niches I let crumble away b/c I just don't care that much about it anymore.
- On another niche, I went from being an affiliate to a (modified) authorized distributor. Rationale was I would have more control over the upsells & downsells to increase my value per visitor and make any bonuses a more seamless process.
Instead of getting a bunch of merchandise sitting around, I opted to traded some of that price break for essentially a drop-shipping solution where I pay someone I trust a few bucks to punch in order info & purchase via my affiliate id. Merchant loses their opportunity to up & downsell, but I showed them I was doing it better and had less of a chain of command to try new things.
You could just set this up on your own w/o getting into it with the merchant I suppose, but you have to watch the merchant T&C very closely. With the merchant I'm talking about, I could have gotten in all kinds of trouble for being an unauthorized retailer.
Most of the guys here know perfecting rev per sale is far more effective (and easier IMO) at lengthening the window of time you can stay competitive vs finding new keywords or even split testing ads - not saying you wouldn't do the latter. Just saying in terms of priority, rev per sale will be the determining factor in how long most business people can stay in the game on a niche.
- Then of course there is developing your own product, but that could be a forum section in itself and more advanced than most people are able or willing to go.
