How To Profit From Untapped Affiliate Markets

By James Woolley
Affiliate marketing can be extremely lucrative as we all know, but when you're just starting out it can be daunting looking for affiliate products or programs to promote because most of them are already being heavily promoted by more experienced affiliate marketers than yourself.
So how can you find untapped, and therefore potentially highly profitable products to promote as an affiliate?
Well let's start off with Clickbank, the leading retailer of digital products, and one of the most popular affiliate networks.
You're probably wondering why I'm mentioning Clickbank, as most of these products have incredibly fierce competition, but because they sell so many products there are still some very profitable opportunities.
For example, most people naturally go straight to the best-selling products in each category to find products to promote. However, while it's a natural assumption to make that all the best products on Clickbank are the biggest sellers, you will often find some hidden gems that haven't yet taken off for whatever reason, that you can make very good profits from promoting on PPC search engines, in email promotions, on your websites, etc.
That's one way of profiting from Clickbank products. An even better way is to find new products and promote them heavily as soon as they go on sale, particularly the quality products that have strong sales pages. I'm not talking about the internet marketing / make money products here, as these are often heavily promoted by the internet marketing gurus, but the various different niche products which have far less competition.
This can be extremely lucrative, and is now very easy to do because there are specialist sites that will allow you to constantly scan for any new products that have just entered the marketplace.
Okay, let's now look beyond Clickbank, as there are many other untapped affiliate markets out there.
Do a search for 'affiliate networks' and you will come across hundreds of different affiliate networks, each of which will often list plenty of companies and their respective products that you can promote as an affiliate.
These networks present plenty of opportunities because the sheer volume of companies out there that have an affiliate program means that there will inevitably be some companies that are under-represented by affiliates, particularly on Google Adwords and other PPC search engines.
This is particularly true outside of the US, where you will generally find that there is far less competition in both the organic search results and the paid search results. Furthermore, if you look outside of the US, and look out for companies that don't belong to an affiliate network but instead have their own individual affiliate program, you can make substantial profits as you will have far fewer competitors.
This leads me on to my final point – promoting affiliate programs in non-English speaking countries. While you will find slightly less competition promoting affiliate products in countries like the UK, Canada and Australia, you will find that you will have substantially less competition in the various non-English speaking countries of the world.
This is potentially an absolute goldmine. The problem you have of course is not finding suitable products, but translating your sales page or website into a different language. Most translation software simply won't cut it as they very rarely translate perfectly into the natural language, and therefore will look amateurish, which will adversely affect your affiliate commissions.
The best way of translating your website, therefore, is by going directly to a native in-country translator. You can do this either through making friends with someone from that country over the internet, or by going to one of the many freelance sites out there and hiring someone to do the work for you.
Okay that basically sums up just some of the ways you can find affiliate products to promote that have limited competition. Remember there are so many opportunities out there because you will never run out of companies to promote. The world's a big place and there will always be good companies out there who need more affiliates in all kinds of different niches.
James Woolley is a full-time marketer who successfully runs a number of niche websites. His main site helps people make money online, and is essentially a complete internet marketing resource guide.
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