In my last post, I briefly talked about the title of this post. I have been hearing a lot of people talking about ways to diversify income lately, and I wanted to help you if you were having some trouble outside of the mainstream acai + colon duo.

I know how hard it is to expand and attempt different niches, traffic sources, and offers, but it is very valuable. Here are a few ideas that should get your mind going.

Is Affiliate Marketing REALLY Too Crowded?

No way. First of all, affiliate marketing goes beyond the scope of dating and IQ quiz offers. If you are new in the game, I see how it is very easy to think those types of offers are what defines “affiliate marketing” but that is definitely not the case. When I started, I thought that green tea and hoodia were the only offers to run, but it didn’t help that every single affiliate manager I had did nothing short of jam those types of offers down my throat.

On the other hand, certain niches are definitely crowded, but that doesn’t always entirely involve affiliate marketing. Some of the larger niches like weight loss and finance are very saturated, so trying those offers as a beginner might not be the best idea (due to expensive entry costs).

Ideas and Tools to Help

1. Segmentation – If you are having trouble coming up with ideas and you still want to tackle a larger niche (dating, weight loss), work to segment your audience. The more personable they think you are, the better they will respond. If you are using Facebook, target with keywords, it really works. If you are using Plenty of Fish, laser target your campaigns, this also works – not only for click-through-rate, but also ROI.
2. Product Oriented – Another idea for a longer-term, potentially more stable business would be to either own products yourself, or just build a datafeed store. AdHustler did a case study on his experiences – check it out.
3. Content Oriented – You want to make money online but your true passion is traveling. Build a site about travel and include pictures, articles, videos, etc. SEO it and put some affiliate offers on there. Build a list and create trust between you and your readers. These sites take time, but they can be very valuable if you build them correctly.
4. Outsource – If you want, just outsource all of the above! You could pick different aspects of each and pay for someone to do it for you (like write the content for your travel site), but if you truly enjoy it, do it yourself. After all, isn’t the joy of owning your own business to be able to do what you love?

Tools to Use

If you have advertised with Plenty of Fish at all, you know the depth of the targeting options. On top of that, they built a demographic tool that allows you to type in a keyword or interest, and displays the demographic information that shares the keyword/interest. Very powerful! Leverage this tool with the ability to target specific interests on Facebook and build some extremely powerful campaigns on both platforms.

Exact Campaign Ideas on Plenty of Fish

• If you have used POF ads at all, you are probably aware that you can target people on their search type. I built a campaign using “intimate encounter” as the search type, and it is showing some promise. Don’t be too broad with this though, be sure to break down into age groups, test the idea of single/divorced/widowed, etc. In a few segments I am testing right now, there is definite promise, although the volume is rather low.

Title suggestions: Let’s Do Something “Fun” / I Like it Hot – Ad text: Single (man/woman) looking for a good time. Let’s make something happen!

Also remember you can use dynamic insertion (that sounds dirty) on POF to target location and age of the viewers.

• The other target variable I am testing with right now is “ready to marry”. This is actually doing a little better than “intimate encounter” for the time being, but again these are only small preliminary tests.

Try targeting those people and build the ads similar to the “intimate” ones, but change the tone.

Conclusion

Hopefully you have some ideas about the potential reach of being an “affiliate” now and can see beyond the acai/colon double-sell. I’m thinking about doing a case study and complete follow-along on a Plenty of Fish or Facebook campaign. I also want to post a video of how I make Facebook ads extremely fast and 100% manually.

Barman made my week

You know you’re doing something right (or at least something) when somebody calls you the equivalent of herpes! If you get a chance, try this contest from ppc.bz, but you will probably lose. To quote:

How to win: You get 1 point for every comment you post on new blog articles before Profit Addiction. You gotta be fast though, because I think he built some custom tools or something to read brain waves to see when bloggers are going to publish new articles.

Good luck with that!

Have a great weekend everybody.