Finding Niches with Offer Vault

But one of the fastest ways to discover potentially lucrative niches is to simply use a service called: OfferVault.com.
Offervault is an aggregation service and an affiliate program search engine that displays offers from several affiliate networks (CPA networks). It’s actually a great time saving tool because you don’t have to login to each and every affiliate program to find a decent offer.
So, let’s have a quick look at how you can dig up some profitable niches that are offered independent of Amazon or eBay…

How to Leverage OfferVault

While you can create a free account with OfferVault, it’s not 100% necessary to take advantage of their service.
There are several areas you can use when digging up offers on OfferVault… but in this post we’ll focus on using ONE of them, the “Live Search Ticker Box”:

The “Live Searches” function of OfferVault shows you what other affiliates are looking for on Offervault… RIGHT NOW.
Quite often when people are typing in keywords into this search engine, it’s because: they’ve discovered a niche that has potential; or they’ve heard of some profitable offers / niches from other affiliates and are looking for suitable offers to promote.
Either way, this tool should not be taken for granted as it can show you some super profitable niches.
Note: this live search box is constantly updated, so you may want to visit it a couple of times a day (if you’re in the niche research mode). You could also ‘refresh / reload’ the page every now and then and it will pull up new searches…

What to Look For…

Generally speaking, you would want to look for something that appears to be a “product name” or some “out of the norm activity” keywords that can easily be translated to physical products…
Note: When I say “out of the norm”, I’m talking about keywords that doesn’t have anything to do with: iphone / ipad, cellphone, dating, forex, surveys, people lookup, betting, credit report, casino, credit cards etc. You also want to typically avoid real broad keywords (sports, travel, dating… you get the idea).
So, if you take a closer look at the live searches box you’ll see several keywords that you could dig into. One of the keywords caught my attention immediately:


So, let’s have a quick look at the keyword “Ab Circle Pro” by either clicking on the word (in the “live searches” box) or by typing in “Ab Circle Pro” into the OfferVault search box:


As you can see, there are several networks that carry this product (or similar product).
There are some things you want to ensure when looking at a keyword such as this.
The first is the “PAYOUT” column.
When looking at potential niches, and especially if you plan on using the CPA offer on your site, you would want to make sure that the payout is worthwhile.
I would recommend that you look for keywords with at least a $10.00 payout per lead / sale (with “Ab Circle Pro” this doesn’t seem to be a problem).
You may however notice that some CPA networks offer more money per sale than others as is the case with Ab Circle Pro (so ensure you pay attention to this when checking out each of the offers before putting them up on your site).
Second thing you want to make sure of is that the offer is actually related to the keyword you entered (I know it’s obvious, but…). This isn’t really a problem with most product based keywords, but if it’s a niche keyword like “fishing” you’d want to make sure the product is actually related to fishing.
Another thing to pay attention to is that the product is whether or not the offer has special instructions… some offers are only available in certain countries… (generally US), and some offers are for email campaigns only (for instance). You can discover what the special instruction are by clicking on the offer name field which will take you to the offer description page:

On this page, you will also see a “thumbnail” of the offer page…
It’s important that the offer page look “professional”… so be sure you take a look at it by clicking through to the actual offer page:

You can see this landing page is a “professional” looking landing page, which is a good thing for us.
Note: If there are several of the same product in the offer vault search results, you may want to have a look at each of these offers to have a look at their terms and also their respective landing pages.
Once you’ve done this, it’s time for the next step…

Is it worth it?

Before jumping on the product, you want to make sure people are actually searching for the product. So, for this I go to the Google External Keyword Tool (again).
Once there you want to login to your Adwords account (it’s not necessary but I recommend you set an account up… it’s free), enter the keyword into the search box and CHECK the radio box that says “Only show ideas closely related to my search terms”, like this:

Hit search.
Once the the keyword tool retrieves the keywords, you need to sort these by selecting “Exact Match” in the “Match Types” selection box (in the navigation area to the right of the search results):

This will give you the keywords in brackets, like this: [keyword] and give you a better indication of search volume numbers for this keyword.
Once selected, you will see the following results:

As you can see, this keyword has 100,000 searches per month in global monthly searches, and 22,000 searches in local monthly searches. TONS of traffic for this product…
I honestly don’t really have a low-end criteria for a keyword, although it’s nice to see it be over 5,000 searches per month in “Exact Match” (since you will be competing against other affiliates for traffic).
Because this particular keyword “ab circle pro” has so much traffic, you would want to find some ‘long tail keywords’… for this I would probably start looking at keywords like: ab circle pro results, ab circle pro workouts, ab circle pro machine etc.
These keywords will be much easier to rank for…
Since I don’t recommend using “Exact Match” domain names you may want to find alternative keywords. You can do this by running the keywords in the Google External Keyword Tool WITHOUT checking the radio box for “Only show ideas closely related to my search terms”… or use a more generic domain names like “ab machine results”:

This particular phrase has all of the major domain extensions available (because it doesn’t get any exact match searches it has been overlooked by people). So you could use on-page optimization and optimize for keywords like:

• ab circle pro results
• ab circle pro machine
• ab circle results
• ab circle machine

…and still be able to rank for the keywords relatively easily.
I hope this post gave you some additional ideas on how you can find potentially lucrative keywords and niches without resorting to offers from eBay and Amazon.

Resources
I thought this article was extremely well presented by Steven Resell at Super Simple Blogging.