Affiliate Musketeer

The key principal behind choosing my products for this affiliate website is that the product itself must require no intimate product knowledge.  This means that I won’t need to understand and read up on the latest gizmos and gadgets, technical documents or know the ins and outs of the products I intend to promote from the viewpoint of a subject matter expert.  Take the LED TV, for example, to be able to write compelling, regular content for this product, I would need to know a great deal of technical knowledge to be able to impart that knoweldge over to my users who are probably doing more research than I am anyway!

My conclusion here is that for this type of affiliate site to work, I’d need to have a real, genuine interest in the subject matter so that learning more about it didn’t feel like drudgery and ‘work’.  This sounds like waaay too much work for an affiliate like me so I set my starting point somewhere else…Box moving.  That’s what I wanted to do.  For those unfamiliar, ‘moving boxes’ is a term regularly used to describe low touch buying and selling of goods and products.  There are some products in life which just work.  They don’t need great explanations, technical reviews, tv advertisements or anything like that. 

Take the humble G String, for example.  You don’t need a degree in technical knowledge to get this product.  You don’t need to read up on the latest trends to figure out what works and you certainly don’t need to put too much effort into explaining how absolutely awesome they are.  It’s a low touch product.  It has a specific function and serves a specific need – or maybe a few of them ;-o) but you get the gist.

Having a low touch product as the core of your affiliate website means that you can stay on top of things with minimum effort and time and even the more laborious tasks like writing fresh content for low touch products can be quite simple.  I can spin out 200-400 words about a pink dotted g string in no time at all and the good thing about it, is that it doesn’t really matter what I write, as soon as users see the picture they’re either going to get it or not. At least that’s what I think, anyway and that’s the underlying core principal behind the products chosen for my new affiliate website.

Choosing My Product

After making my mind up to focus on low-touch products, I then moved onto the next factor in my decision – volume.  How did I research volume?  Simple.  I asked myself the question, ‘what product would every household in this street own?’  Take a moment and ask yourself the same question; I bet there’s a few things that instantly come to mind and I bet one of the first is TV…I know, I’ve been there.  But then start thinking about what else will every household in this street own?  Beds, mattresses, mugs, mirrors, tables, chairs, forks, knives, batteries etc etc.

In my case, I decided to focus on one room to make it easier and I chose the kitchen.  I then went through the list of all the things in my kitchen that I considered ‘low touch’ and were things that I could imagine people searching for on the internet.  Eventually I came up with a few interesting options.  Waste bins, laundry baskets, ironing boards and bar stools.  I settled on, wait for it, drum roll… kitchen bar stools.  You either like them or you don’t but either way, I wouldn’t really need to put a lot of research time into figuring out complicated technical specs or keep up to date with the market too much.  Gas lever height adjustment, leather seats, chrome plated fittings and a general ability to waffle about them for 300-400 words was about all I needed to know.

The next step was to find out how much search volume on the search engines was happening for my product and you can read about How I Researched Keywords for my Affiliate Website in the next section.