I don’t know about you, but having been blogging for over 3 years now, I have always been looking for that ‘top affiliate product‘ that just sells like hot cakes every time I promote it.

After reading  a post over on BuildThatList about the best affiliate products, I was reminded of the most important key when it comes finding that top affiliate product.

The products you use are the best affiliate products to sell!

I think that Tom has made a fantastic point that I recently had the pleasure of experiencing.

My Top Affiliate Product

I am not the type to go around sharing my online earnings, but I have set myself a goal to go full-time online by the end of the year with a minimum income of $3,000 a month.

While I am still quite a long way off this figure I have been taking the necessary steps to make sure that I find myself on top of the goal by the end of the year, and the first of those steps was to find my top affiliate product.

Now I know it is going to take a lot more than just one successful affiliate product for me to consistently make $3,000 a year, but I found my start when I downloaded a trial of a keyword research product called Market Samurai.

After purchasing the product, I seriously could not think of why every single affiliate marketer and blogger was not using this software – I believe it is that good!

The Problem was when I started looking for their affiliate program.

At the time they didn’t have an affiliate program and all I could do was email them my details asking them to let me know when they decide to set one up.

I got a reply saying that they were working on adding about 7-8 new affiliates a month, but there was a long waiting list  – so I was left in limbo until sometime near the end of January.

I was estatic.

Here I had a product that I love. That I seriously recommended to everyone who asked anyway and they offered to give me about half of every sale that I sent over to them. Sounded like a pretty good deal to me.

In the month of February, I sent an email to my mailing list and made a couple of blog posts, one about a Market Samurai Discount, one about a review of the software using a case study for my new large dog kennels niche site.

During the 28 days of the month I made 12 sales (which is almost one every 2 days)  and this month is on target to do even better.

Why Is Market Samurai My Top Affiliate Product?

If we go back to the way to find your top affiliate product,

The products you use are the best affiliate products to sell!

The reason I believe I made the sales that I did was a result of my review posts, where I showed my readers how I personally use the software to find the keywords for my websites.

So Where To Now?

Obviously I am going to continue to find ways to introduce bloggers and internet marketers to Market Samurai but now my focus is to finding my next top affiliate product.

Sure 10 x $50 commissions a month is nice, but that is not even 20% towards my monthly goal for the end of year. So now I am looking for my next top affiliate product – because we can either continue to improve our sales of one product, or introduce a new pipeline (I am trying to do both!)

So what is your top affiliate product, and why is it working for you?

I’ve been focusing quite a bit lately on two topics on this blog – Market Samurai and ‘cheap article writers‘.

The reason I have been doing this is because these two tools are really all that you need to create a fantastic, profitable niche blog. One the one hand if you buy Market Samurai you have probably the most advanced keyword research tool that will not only allow you to analyze topics to find highly targeted, money making niches ( my indoor dog kennels site is already starting to get Google traffic and Adsense dollars!)

But What If You Find A Profitable Niche You Have No Knowledge In?

This is exactly what happened to me. I found a fantastic niche that I saw had a handful of keywords with niche search traffic, and not to difficult competition (I knew with a little work I could get front page of Google) – but the problem was that they keywords had to do with dogs….and I don’t really like dogs. To be quite honest, they kinda scare me. So the fact that the niche was to do with extra large dogs – I had even less interest.

But It Was A Profitable Niche!

So I bought a great keyword domain and started writing my first article – but was failing miserably. I don’t know about you, but I cannot write about what I am not passionate about. So I needed to find someone who was. But since I was only testing the niche at the time – I needed cheap article writers!

But Where Do You Find Cheap Article Writers?

I was willing to pay up to $5 an article because I knew that was about the price that they were going for if I went to the DigitalPoint marketplace, but if you have ready my SEO article writers post, you would know that I took a completely different route.

The best way to get the cheapest article writers is to get the writers bidding against each other for your business and that is exactly what I did.

If you have never heard of oDesk, you need to head over there and sign up to their freelancing website.

What Is oDesk And How Can I Help Me Get Cheap Article Writers?

oDesk is an online services marketplace that has freelancers performing over $6 million of work a month.

It is totally free to join and as soon as you have registered you will have access to 1,000’s of writers, designers, programmers and many other services that will help you focus your efforts on other parts of your online business.

All you have to do is post a job, if you are looking for cheap article writers then you will obviously post a job in the article section – you set the maximum price and then just wait for the writers to start bidding for your work.

You will get a range of expensive and cheap article writers, quality writers and not so professional writers. The good thing about oDesk is that before you have to decide which SEO article writer you will give your job to, you can view their resume and application, check out their previous work rating and contact them for a further interview.

What’s This About $1.60 Articles?

As I said earlier, I was more than happy to pay up to $5 an article but after seeing a couple of people posting writing jobs on  oDesk for about $2 an article I decided to put that as my maximum price ($20 for 10 articles or $2 each), but as the applicants came in I started to see people offering less to try and gain my job.

You have to be careful when you are selecting candidates that English is their first language. But you can set this as a requirement in the job description.

)ne lady’s application caught my attention, because she was American (so English was her first language), she had and loved dogs, her sample articles were fantastic (extremely personal writing style) and her bid on the job was just $1.60 per article!

I made the decision to approve her application, sent through the keywords that I wanted articles written for and as they say, the rest is history.

Here Is A Sample Of The $1.60 Articles

• Dog Kennels And Runs
• Dog Kennel Fence
• Indoor Dog Kennels
• Outside Dog Kennels

I don’t know about you, but that is much better than I could write, and for $1.60 each I can’t wait for my next niche project to use oDesk again!

So, I guess the whole point of this article was to show you that creating a niche website doesn’t have to take a lot of time or money. For me it took some keyword research using Market Samurai, and hiring cheap article writers to create my content for me. Now all I have left to do is perfect my monetization strategies and do a bit of link building!

If you are looking to purchase a copy of Market Samurai, then make sure you grab our Market Samurai Discount which saves you 35% off the RRP
(Saving your $52)!

From the amount of traffic that I am receiving to my posts on the Market Samurai SEO and keyword analysis software it seems like a lot of you are not looking to buy Market Samurai (testing out the whole Squidoo thing), but you really want to learn more about what it does.

Wouldn’t it be great to see a Market Samurai tutorial for each of the features so you not only know before you purchase, what is involved. But if you already own Market Samurai then don’t you want to be making sure that you are getting the most value out of the software?

Well, sure I could go and make a handful of them myself, but if you are like me, then you would prefer the people who made the software to be showing you all the best tips and tricks to makes sure you are using it to its potential!

Market Samurai Tutorials From The Market Samurai Team!

If you want to their list of tutorials you can do so now, but I thought that it would be nice to pick out a few of the Market Samurai tutorials that I think do a great job to show you the basics to get you started.

Market Samurai Tutorial – Introduction To Keyword Research

Market Samurai Tutorial – Introduction To Search Engine Competition

Market Samurai Tutorial – How To Find Quality Products And Assess Market Viability

These are a few that I found really helpful when I first started with Market Samurai and I think you will love getting an inside looking into how the program works and the opportunity to become familiar with it.

Don’t forget that if you are looking to purchase a copy of Market Samurai, then make sure you grab our Market Samurai Discount which saves you 35% off the RRP (Saving your $52)!

It seems like my SEO Article Writers post has caused quite a bit of feedback – both positive, negative and also those who are waiting on the articles before they cast an opinion.

If you have no idea what I am talking about, in my previous post I wrote about how I was looking for an article writer for my extra large dog kennel niche blog.

I found a freelance website called oDesk where I posted a job for 10 keyword optimised articles and ended up finding a lady who offered to write all ten articles (I provided the keywords) for just $16 ($1.6 an article).

As I mentioned earlier, I had quite a few negative comments which pretty much told me to expect inferior articles because of the price I was paying – and I was ready for it (because I was only doing this as a test).

Well I can report that the articles are back, and two of them are up on the website (with the 8 others to follow in coming days). And I thought that now was a really good time to reveal the results and let you decide if you really can expect to only pay $1.6 for quality seo article writers!

Two Of My $1.6 Keyword Optimised Articles:

Dog Kennel Fence

Dog Kennels And Runs

If I can put my biased opinion into the discussion, I am really impressed with the articles. Not only where they really well optimised, they also were extremely personable.

Given the opportunity again, I wouldn’t hesitate to use oDesk for outsourcing my articles again.

What Do You Think?

As I said at the beginning, I really want to hear your thoughts again now that you have seen the articles? Do you approve of the quality? And would you be willing to pay $1.6 for articles of similar quality?

This is a part of my Market Samurai Review, make sure you take advantage of the Market Samurai Discount!

As part of my Market Samurai Review, I have created a new blog from scratch and using the power of Market Samurai to help me create a profitable blog.

I will be using article marketing and a lot of free link building methods to generate top 3 search rankings for my desired keywords. This means that I will need either need to start writing a heap of articles or hire a SEO article writer.

However, as this is a bit of a side project, and I have quite a lot on at the moment, I decided to take the second option and start looking for a place to hire SEO article writers -but I didn’t want to pay too much.

Where Do You Find SEO Article Writers?

There are a heap of freelancer websites that you can choose from, but the one that I decided with was oDesk.

I found out about oDesk from a friend of mine who managed to get a personal assistant for less that $2 an hour! As soon as I heard that, I thought:

‘WOW, if there are people that are willing to work for $2 an hour or less – then why should I have to pay $5 an article?’

So I decided to head over to oDesk and check out whether I could find some cheap SEO article writers, and I was pleasantly surprised.

There were a heap of SEO article writers willing to work from about $1-2 an article.

I Am Getting 10 Articles As A Test

I decided to test out oDesk and put in a job request for 10 Keyword Articles of between 400-600 words and within 24 hours I had 4 candidates and selected one from America for $16 for the 10 articles (or just $1.60 per article)!

Right now I have given the keywords to the SEO article writer and she has started writing them, and I will give an update once I have received them.

But for $1.6 per article, I can see myself using oDesk on a regular basis, as this will help streamline my niche blogs!

Has anyone had any experience with oDesk?

I had a little bit of confusion in my Market Samurai Discount post, from a couple of readers. So I have decided to give explaining it another go.

Market Samurai is quickly becoming one of the most popular SEO and Keoword Analysis tools on the market, and it is constantly being updated with new features (which are included free when you purchase). I personally use and love the software, and with search engine traffic accounting for 70%+ of my blog traffic – I know that it works!

How To Get Your 35% Off Market Samurai Discount!

It really is a simple three step process to access the Market Samurai promo code that will save you over $50 (35%) off their retail price!

1. Download Their Software

   Market Samurai allow you to trial their software, and before they will let you access the Market Samurai promo code, they first want you to trial their software!

   Signup And Download Market Samurai Here

2. Install And Run Market Samurai

   I am extremely surprised when I look at the statistics of the people who have signed up for the Market Samurai download, because only about half of you have actually downloaded the software.

   The Market Samurai discount is build into the software, so unless you download and install the software, you will not be able to access the promo code!

3. Take Advantage Of The Promo Code Quickly

   Once you install the software, you only have a couple of days to take advantage of the Market Samurai discount before the price goes back up to $149.

   But it is extremely easy to find the discount. All you have to do is install Market Samurai, run the program, and you will be presented with the offer through the software!

If you want to see how it all works before you take advantage of the Market Samurai promo code, then check out my previous post which includes a Market Samurai review – with full analysis!

Following on from my Market Samurai Discount post, I late last week let you all know that I would be showing you the capabilities of the Market Samurai program.

Initially I asked for niche suggestions because I wanted to help one of my subscribers, but I only received two entries and one of them I had no clue on the topic (Sorry, don’t know too much about the hip hop culture), and with Dennis’ queary for the ‘direct sales’ niche, while there were a couple of keywords that had promise – it was just a really competitive niche.

So instead I decided I would take the following action:

Using Market Samurai, I would research and create a niche blog and provide the whole process right here in the attempt to provide a quality Market Samurai review.

Market Samurai Review | Niche Website

I am going to go through the exact steps that I would normally take in finding a profitable niche and the things in Market Samurai that make this whole process a lot easier.

The information in the niche site creation is going to be much to long to have as one post, so make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed so that you do not miss the rest of this series!

My Niche Brainstorming

I always start my niche brainstorming with Market Samurai open, this way I can quickly gauge it a niche idea has enough searches to warrant further research.

So to start it all off, I needed a niche idea, and one I had been playing around with for a while now is ‘house plans’. As I work for my brothers design firm doing architectural 3d, I thought house plans would be something that I would be comfortable writing about. However after further research the niche seemed to be a little crowded (plus I couldn’t get a decent keyword domain that had direct search traffic).

One of the keywords that did appear in the house plans that sparked the need for further research was the keyphrase ‘ cubby house’.

So I plugged cubby house into Market Samurai’s keyword research tool and got some promising results:

As you can see, there are some really niche daily searches on the keywords, and the rest of the stats (I will explain the columns later) show a lot of potential for a niche blog.

However, after looking into the Adsense click price and noticing there where not many products that I could promote , I decided to move on to another keyword that I noticed when I searched ‘cubby house’.

Dog Kennel – Market Samurai Review

Now I am not a pet person, so I didn’t really like this idea to start with, but I remember seeing a Dog House Design product in ClickBank, so I knew there would at least be one product I could promote, so I decided to plug ‘dog house’ into Market Samurai, got some nice keywords but decided to try a derivative of dog house in, ‘dog kennel’ . Let me take you through the process!

Project Settings

The first thing you do when you open Market Samurai is to start a new project.

Input your niche and unless you are purchasing a country specific domain just leave ‘All Countries and Territories’ selected. Then click ‘Update’.

New Keyword

After that, click the ‘New Keyword’ tab in the sidebar, and input your niche (or the main keyword) – In my case it was ‘dog kennel’.

Click Submit, and the click the Keyword Research Buttom – (Download a trial of Market Samurai to follow along on your computer)

Keyword Research

This is the section that spits out usually hundreds of related keywords and there are few suggestions to help you get the most out of your research.

Make sure you have Both Google Synonym Tool and Google Search Keywords selected and to get the maximum search results leave phrase length as 1-10.

Google Synonym Tool
There are two selections under the Google Synonym tool.  ‘Include Addition’ and ‘Exclude Addition’. If you choose to exclude addition you will only be shown results that include the keyword you have chosen.

Whereas if you choose to ‘Include Additional’ you are given addition words that may relate to your keyword.

Since we are trying to get a broad overview of the niche, I selected ‘Include Additional’

Once ready, just click ‘Generate’ and you will notice that I now have 551 keywords to work with. Now the majority of these keywords will either have no traffic or be much to competitive. but that is why the next step helps us dig out the promising keywords.

So once you have your list of keywords, click ‘ Analyze’ at the bottom of the screen and let’s start the actual research.

Keyword Analysis

To start fine tuning the keywords, the first thing I always do is change the ‘match type’ to ‘exact’ (I will explain Match Type in a future post) and SEO traffic to 10.

You will see from the image below, that this has already cut over 50% of the keywords (removing all the very low traffic keywords).

Now Let Us Get Some More Details So We Can Refine Further

Don’t worry if you do not understand what all the terms are. It can seem quite daunting to start with, but you will pick it up quickly.

Use the image below as a gauge and check the following boxes:

• Total Searches
• Trends
• Adwords CPC
• SEO Comp
• Title Comp

Then once again click ‘ Analyze’.

Finding Potential Keywords

Now that our results are being generated, I figured it was time to share with you my criteria for a high potential keyword.

1. Over 50 Exact Searches A Day
   Some people would probably be looking for more, but if I can find 10 keywords that receive 50 exact searches a day, then that is the potential of 500 visits a day – enough for a profitable niche site.
2. Under 2,000 SEOTC
   SEOTC means ‘Search Engine Optimisation Title Competition’. This is how many pages have they keyword in their page title. This is a really good gauge of the competition of the keyword, and anything under 2,000 should be fairly easy to rank of the first page of.
3. High Adsense Cost Per Click
   You don’t want to have a really good niche only to find out after you have set up the website and are getting traffic, that you are only get 5-10cent clicks. I like to have an average CPC of over 80cents.

Was The ‘Dog Kennel’ Niche Likely To Be Profitable?

After letting Market Samurai review my list of keywords, let’s take a look at the keywords that fitted my criteria!

That is 11 keywords, without competition that while will not be simple to rank number 1 in Google for – they are very much achievable. And taking into account the product I found on Clickbank to promote (Easy Build Dog House Plans), I just had one more check before deciding to go with the niche.

Is There A Keyword Domain Available?

One of the easiest ways to help your ranking on a keyword is to have the keyphrase as your domain, so I decided to export the results and plug them into the Godaddy bulk domain registration tool.

I found that two of the keyphrases were available in .com, so I decided to take the plunge and purchased ExtraLargeDogKennel.com.

***Update***

That was yesterday, and since then I have already added Wordpress, installed a new theme I am trialing, wrote a couple of posts and added Adsense.

My next steps will be link building and content writing. And I will update you as I go.

If from the Market Samurai review above, you can see great value in the software, then make sure you vist my Market Samurai Discount post, where I show you how to grab a 30% discount!

I have a bit of an apology to make. I may have been a little over zealous when I promoted Market Samurai last week. As Dennis pointed out in his comment:

This is not a put down but an observation, so please don’t take offense…I think you’re taking a big chance on trust going for the sale BEFORE the posts on features and benefits.

I totally agree Dennis, I guess since I already use the product – that I know how fantastic it is, but for someone who has never heard of the product, it may seem like I was trying to thrust the product down your throat.

Now, I hope you do take advantage of the Market Samurai discount, but so that you can have a better understand of the benefits of using the software, I want to start doing some free keyword analysis right here – and I want you to give me the niche (so I don’t just pick the easy ones!

What’s In It For You?

What I want is for you to start throwing me niche suggestions in the comments below.

This could be the:

• Current Niche of Your Blog
• A Niche You Are Looking To Enter
• Or Just A Niche That You Think Will Stump Me And Prove That Market Samurai Doesn’t Really Work!

What Will I Provide?

Using the Market Samurai software, I will:

• Find A Series Of Long-Tail Keywords Related To The Niche
• All The Data On Those Keywords You Will Ever Need
• The Process And Criteria That I Use To Select Keywords That Will Drive Traffic

So hit me up with your niche suggestions and I will choose one from the list ( or maybe even let your guys decide) and create and post the keyword analysis over the weekend – posting it early next week!

The one product that I would call my ‘find of 2009′ was Market Samurai.

If you have no idea what Market Samurai is, it is a fantastic all-round keyword research tool that has some of the best features (so many that I haven’t even had a chance to look into them all), that will help you pinpoint target keywords that not only have traffic, but also have low search competition.

The one thing I absolutely love about Market Samurai is that I can do all the keyword analysis for my Australian blogs and find all the information I need based on Australian searches (and you can do the same for your country!).

Now I know I promised a Market Samurai discount in the post title, and I am not going to disappoint.

I plan on going into some of the features of this fantastic product in upcoming posts – and even am in the process of working out a weekly post that will highlight the capabilities, but today I want to show you how you can get a Market Samurai discount!

How To Get Your Market Samurai Discount

Now if you visit the Market Samurai website, they do kind of dodge the whole price question and focus on how you can get free access to the keyword analysis program.

However you will notice that they say Market Samurai is ‘valued at $149′ and in fact if you click the ‘full version’ tab on their homepage and order the program, you will be charged $149 – which I still believe to be amazing value. But why pay $149 when you can pay $97?

The process of getting your Market Samurai discount is quite simple and if you are familiar with the internet marketing process and the squeeze sale concept you may have already guessed it – but for those of you who have not, here is how it works.

When you sign up for a trial of something, you show and interest. And in an effort to capitalise on that interest the internet marketers will offer you a time-limited offer that will hopefully encourage you to purchase their product.

So In Market Samurai’s Case…

1. Sign Up For A Trial Of Their Software
2. You Are Offered The Opportunity To Purchase At $97 ($52 Savings!) – This is when you install the program
3. You Have 12 Days To Take Advantage Or The Price Rises Back To $149.

It is a really good marketing strategy, and one that has worked extremely well for them. So if you are considering purchasing Market Samurai – don’t pay full price!

Learn about my experience with the program on my Market Samurai Review post.

I found out about these ebooks from Tom at BuildThatList.com.

To thank him can I recommend you subscribe to his blog or download his free squeeze pages?

Jason Fladlien is one very smart internet marketer.

You see, pretty much every website I visit that is selling an information product always focus on trying to grab your email – subscribing you to their list.

They always offer you an ebook or ‘leaked first chapter’ to try and convince you. But Jason does things a little bit differently.

He still does the ebooks, but you don’t have to opt into an email list and he gives you the actual PDF link on his page.

Now don’t get me wrong, he is still marketing his products, he just decided to put a few links in each ebook to his products – and you can decide whether you want to learn more about them or not. However, he does not fill his ebooks with links – there are actually some fantastic tips in them (so I decided to share a few of my favourites with you!).

So let’s get straight into the free internet marketing ebooks.

The Great Article Marketing Hoax

Jason writes about a few methods that you should consider instead of just writing articles for EzineArticles. Has a few great ideas (one that was making him $40 an hour).

=> Download The Great Article Marketing Hoax

Email Marketing Genius

I gained a lot from this ebook about how to write email headlines that will make people open your email to great strategies to get a better click through rate.

=> Download Email Marketing Genius

The Case Against Video Sales Letters

With the recent increase in video sales letters and squeeze pages, this is a timely reminder to to just do things just because everyone else is.

=> Download The Case Against Video Sales Letters

Instant Action On Info

In what seems counter product to the sale of his products, this free ebook actually looks at how people spend too much time studying information products and not enough time acting on them. If you struggle with productivity, you may want to consider checking this one out.

=> Download Instant Action On Info

Feel free to take advantage of the free internet marketing ebooks, because even if you can learn one or two small things from each one it will make your blogs and email list more profitable.