Are the not so popular items a recipe for success as well?

[Peter]

My overall lack of desire to go online this past weekend gave me some much needed time to think. And, because money is always a subject that a provider for a family of five must think about, I naturally spent some of my spare cycles on what I researched over the last week.

Based on my research over the last week and my limited experience, one pretty obvious trait of affiliate marketing is that people tend to center their focus and therefore their campaigns on the most popular items. This is logical of course, especially if you are just starting out. Following popular items can provide direction, good examples of what is likely to work and what is not, and with sites like Niche Choppers, many resources upon which to bounce ideas. All in all, it seems a much safer road to travel.

However, with that convenience generally comes a greater amount of competition. Your not only competing with fellow newbies, but affiliate marketing vets as well. Everyone is trying to grab their share of attention from the search engines and the customer in order to make those conversions and ultimately the money. That can be a daunting task and it's one that has caused me a great deal of concern. In fact, it's been on my mind so much that I had started working on ways to mitigate this reality.

One idea I had was to diversify my products and campaigns by pursuing both popular and other not so popular products. I suppose the question I want to answer is, "Can I be as successful pushing lower popularity products as the highly sought after products?". To that end, I created a list of important realities a strategy like this might require me to face:

"Cons"
-------
-much more time required
-higher cost in both start-up and maintenance
-increased hosting requirements
-much more copy writing required
-much higher level of organization required
-easier for mistakes to be made depending on the number of campaigns
-potential to become a full time job by itself (can it be balanced)

"Pros"
-------
-diversification to weather down turns in individual products
-exposure to a wider range of markets
-reduced pressure to make or break it on one product campaign
-better opportunities to test what works and what doesn't
-potentially less competition
-potentially easier to grab a higher search engine position
-higher conversion to click rate based on more serious clicks(PPC benefits?)

These are things I came up with after spending a little bit of time thinking on this. Honestly, though the "Cons" section has a lot of weight behind it, I think there are some definite positive points as well. I certainly haven't covered everything here and in no way think I closed out this question. I will definitely be researching and thinking on this further. In the mean time, if anyone else has anything they would like to add, please do.

[Ganceann]

It is some decent thinking on the topic and yes, lower competition products can be just as successful and more successful than higher competition products. The key thing is to be able to determine the market size and whether it is sustainable - understanding the market, the buying habits and the language used in landing pages for copywriting will help you become more successful in that niche area.

Diversification is always good... but don't run before you can walk. Before diversifying and splitting up your time you should at least have one success blueprint outlined that you can follow. This means working with one product and experimenting with promoting it via different methods or experimenting with the landing page etc to get a highly converting page.

Once you have success with one product you will move on to another product and aim to replicate your success... only this time, with all the knowledge gained, you should be able to gain success much quicker. Naturally, if the topic is not related to the one you had success in you may find yourself spending a great deal of time trying to understand your new market... critical if you want to have sucess in the long-term.

When you put together your own "success blueprint" where you can quickly get a new project up and running, your time will be maximized and less effort is wasted. When you are operating more efficiently you vastly reduce the cons associated with each project. In some cases it may become necessary to outsource work so that your time is better used.

[Peter]

I am not seriously considering a move like that until after I get some experience and some success as you suggested. The extra cost and extra work is too expensive both on the surface and in terms of impact to the learning I have yet to do. I'm trying to come up with a long term strategy as I learn and experience more and this was one part I was considering for later. The more experience I get, the less this may appeal to me.

Thanks for the reply!

[Blackman]

"Can I be as successful pushing lower popularity products as the highly sought after products?"

You see, the thing is that if a product is good-converting, then it has a high gravity, even in the niche small.

The "less popular items" you are talking about can make you money, but it's always better to go for something, which has proven to sell, and competition is only a good thing, which means more money to be made.

Don't take competition as a disadvantage, take it as an opportunity to enter a niche.

Small niches with only few products and no competition doesn't necessarily mean that you found a goldmine. Everything has already been found and discovered. If there's something, which has no competition, then it's very likely that product doesn't convert properly.

In my opinion, you should go for something, where is huge demand. There is always place for smart marketers.

[MedicAffiliate]

Actually, some of the lower grav products are the ones tapping into a huge marketplace, but don't get there because a majority of affiliates only follow the big guys and wait for them to sight out the next flare.

One niche that's interested me is child custody, seems like a product designed for a desperate market and has a sweet payout but I've never gotten the time to focus on this, anyone else have experience promoting this?.

[JeremyWaller]

I can't vouch for something like child custody. However, I can vouch for some low gravity products. I am promoting two skin care products right now that are converting reasonably well. Both have gravity of < 10. The key is having a publisher that cares about affiliates. On both of these products the publisher provides good affiliate resources and is constantly tweaking and working to improve conversion rates.