By luck (I suppose) I found 1 product last year worth promoting with ppc, with that I mean 1/120. Now I found a way to drive 150-200 targetted hops/day but except for the 1 mentioned I can't seem to find any other converting sites. I must've tested over 10! How do you guys go about selecting a product?
dont start off diving in head first with ppc, try some article marketing first to see if it converts before wasting any money on a dead end
Not too high, not too low gravity, positive gravity momentum (sales are increasing), not too competitive niche - these are typically good indicators.
Not to disagree with anyone who has posted ahead of me but people put way too much emphasis on gravity. At least when it comes to ppc. High gravity means a few things. 1. the publisher has found a good way to market to affiliates. 2. The product more than likely has a converting sales page. (at least products with longevity) 3. There is a lot of competition. However, low gravity does not mean that a page does not convert. If Swerd would have released E4E and not announced it on DP among other methods, his product would not be a 400+ gravity product. Also, if 4 other people had beaten him to the punch and already gathered up all the affiliates he would not have a 400+ gravity. Now that does not change the profitability of his product. But if it had a gravity of 9 many people would not even give it a chance. When doing market place searches, you should sort by popularity and not gravity. Sometimes they line up and some times they do not. Meaning a product with much lower gravity is ahead of products with higher gravity. That tells us that they are SELLING more than the higher gravity product. It is just less affiliates are promoting it. My favorite niches are the ones where the top gravity is considered low or middle of the pack but they rank descent in the popular search for their category. That is how I decided to do the eczema guide. The top eczema product was around 16 but in top 30 of health/remedies. That meant that it sold well but there wasn't a lot of ppc competition. I failed to follow my own guidelines when developing a yeast product. It already had 2 products over 75 gravity (one at 140+). You can look at the 2 products now and see which one is performing the best. Beat Eczema (top 15 in category) Yeast (64th). Both of these convert just as well as the other but because of the yeast market leaders there are few affilates to promote and PPC is very competitive and expensive. This means that it is difficult to make the campaign profitable on a broad scale. If finding a profitable product was easy, then everyone would be making a ton of money. Of course gravities would shoot up along with ppc activity and cpc and then no one would be making money (except for the BUM marketers) Now all of this does not mean that you can't be profitable with a high gravity competitive product/niche. However, it does make it a lot more difficult. There are a lot of products that you can just throw up a basic landing page and do well with ppc. Sorry didn't mean to ramble.....
I'm afraid that there are no simple rules like gravity thresholds etc. It's trial and error. And trial and error in case of PPC means money lost before you can start earning it. Sometimes it's quite a bit of money. If it was easy it wouldn't pay much.
That's a tough question, but domainiac gave an excellent explanation (+rep) about how you should go with selecting a product. Gravity is a good factor, but there are much more things to look for, such as the payout, the referred % and, of course, the sales page. You can enter pretty much every niche and make money there, but you need the right keywords/landing page/content, etc
I totally agree, gravity means nothing there are people making a killing of low gravity products, since they're almost the only ones promoting them, but making more than 10 sales per day Remember that gravity represents the number of affiliates promoting it, so there might be some product out there worth promoting that currently have 2, 3, 5, or 8 of gravity but maybe the people promoting there are 2,3, or 4 super affiliates making more than 20 sales per day