I received a question a couple days ago asking for clarification on picking offers when doing brute force affiliate marketing. This person asked if they should be trying all different kinds of zip/email submit offers and other types of offers at Copeac. This post is inspired from that email.

When doing PPC affiliate marketing, there are basically two types of offers: those that you know convert but have a ton of competition and those that may or may not convert but have little competition. Both of them have their own advantages and disadvantages.

High Competition / Guaranteed Profitability

By their nature, offers and markets with a great deal of competition (other affiliate marketers) are making money for the people promoting them. This includes some of the most saturated markets like dating, web hosting, ringtones, and the like. When you do market research on offers like these, it is painfully obvious that they are profitable… for a lot of people. You definitely don’t need to worry about them being dud markets.

On the other hand, while they do have guaranteed potential, they also have fierce competition. You probably won’t be able to get your foot in the door with 15-30 minutes of work. If plan on doing a direct-to-merchant campaign and throwing up a few hundred keywords in a market like this, you probably will get zero traffic from the PPC engines… unless you bid like a moron.

Instead, you will need to develop an elaborate promotion plan complete with landing pages, tracking systems, tightly grouped keyword sets, and super targeted ads. However, if you possess the experience, have a plan to differentiate yourself, and are willing to put in the work, you can surely find success.

Low Competition / Hit or Miss Profitability

In direct contrast with high competition markets, conveniently enough, are low competition markets. These are the kinds of niches you should be going after with a brute force approach. They are the low hanging fruits. In most cases, the question wont be whether or not the PPC engines will send you traffic, it will be whether or not the offers you are promoting will convert.

And that is the biggest advantage to a brute force method. You are taking the time to weed through all of the markets that most affiliate marketers ignore. Sure, most of them are going to be duds, but that’s OK because you aren’t going to be spending an entire day (or week) on any given market until you know it is profitable.

These types of offers are not typically found on CPA networks like AzoogleAds, Copeac, and NeverblueAds. These networks only have a couple hundred unique things to promote. To find the really offbeat niches, particularly physical products, you need to go with a larger affiliate network such as CJ, LinkShare, ClickBank, and ShareASale.

Don’t Test For Profitability In Markets You Already Know Are Profitable

Yes, I just repeated the title of this post, but it really summarizes my entire point. The purpose of brute force affiliate marketing, or any market testing for that matter, is to uncover profitable niches. There’s absolutely no reason to use it with niches that you can clearly see are profitable based on the number of other affiliate marketers in the game.

With markets like this, you can skip the entire “testing for profitability” phase and move right on to building and optimizing a quality affiliate marketing campaign.