My Recent Niche Trends

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schoolishard

Hep Me Make the Moneys
Jan 9, 2008
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Tennessee
www.schoolishard.com
Take this with a grain of salt, these are just some trends I have been noticing recently in my campaigns.

Some interesting recent trends:
  • Offers targeting age 26-45 females consistently convert twice as well for me than any other offers I promote.
  • Offers targeting 18-24 males are very erratic. They either don't convert at all, or they pull in a 500% ROI.
  • Musicians are poor. I am now very cautious before starting any campaign involving learning materials or instruments for musicians. The only products that seem to convert decently for musicians are name-brand items that may be difficult to find in a store such as a particular kind of upright bass rosin or a particular electric guitar pedal. :music06:
  • Membership communities are tough conversions. There are so many free ways to collaborate online and obtain free information that most things involving membership need to be incredibly unique and almost life-or-death in necessity for somebody to want to join. Lead generation is static, but I have noticed a slow, noticeable decline in actual subscription.
  • The YPN network is better for me than Adsense. Ever since G made it such that the entire ad is not clickable, the only thing that brings Adsense conversion to anywhere near what it used to be is changing the bottom link to match the background. Even with this, it is a shadow of its former self. I recommend YPN.
  • Foreign Language affiliate offers are not as saturated. I speak French, and on a few French offers I am running, the PPC bids are practically nothing compared to their English counterparts.
  • Typo searchers don't click my ads when I use {keyword:}. It must look ugly to see "Spectacular beast enhancement"
  • I ran a gaming test campaign, and got more impressions/clicks for console games than for computer games. I don't know what is going on, but I think it has something to do with the fact that World of Warcraft players always click on the WoW desktop shortcut instead of looking for another game.
You may have been noticing the exact opposite in your campaigns, but that wouldn't surprise me. Unexpected returns and mistakes such as misinterpreting trends are definitely a few factors that add to the difficulty of affiliate marketing.
 
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Thanks for these. I noticed the same thing with Google Adsense and YPN as well. I've had Google online for more than a week with no clicks. I had 10 a day with Yahoo.

Justin Dupre
 
This was great info. I don't typically like to get too deep into my niches but in the spirit of sharing let me expand on one of these:

Musicians are poor. I am now very cautious before starting any campaign involving learning materials or instruments for musicians. The only products that seem to convert decently for musicians are name-brand items that may be difficult to find in a store such as a particular kind of upright bass rosin or a particular electric guitar pedal.

Two words: "reviews" and "eBay" I am continually suprised at how many signup commissions I get from eBay off of my music sites. There are lots of fairly low-dollar auctions at eBay, and to qualify for the $25+ commission you just need to have someone who signs up and bids (doesn't have to win.) User-generated reviews and discussion of specific products with links to running eBay auction for those products are pure gold in terms of how many new accounts you can see sign up for them; the beauty there is that if you're in business a while you end up with a large searchable archive of user reviews -- Google loves you -- kids and young adults looking for the item or info about same find you -- sign up -- make a punt bid at eBay -- you get paid.


Frank
 
Frank - Ebay is definitely one of my favorite affiliates. My main problem with Ebay is the people who click through tend to already have an account. Getting 8 cents off of the final value fee for a trumpet mouthpiece doesn't make me too happy. :D
 
What you said about the video games is interesting to me, as one of the things my affiliate program niches in is P2P.

I've definitely noticed a turn away from the PC as a gaming system because so few games for a single player are coming out nowadays. Everything's either an MMORPG (why are MMOs always RPGs? Seriously!?) or a deathmatch game that just happens to have about 3 hours of really shitty story tacked on as a way of selling the engine itself.
Hence the drive to consoles, which remember that some people like to play alone...

Also, the foreign language one's definitely a good lead.
I dunno how many people are watching foreign language markets at the moment, but Spanish domains are going off like suicide bombers on a Jerusalem bus route.
Both .coms that are in Spanish, and anything on the .es TLD.
I think the impediment on that front though is that lack of multi-lingual people that do what we do.
The only people I know that speak a LOTE are all my friends from Singapore that came here for Uni and ended up staying (because we allow chewing gum, J-walking & car ownership)
 
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