One of the questions I often get asked is: "how do you know which niche is going to be profitable"?

There's nothing worse than spending a couple of months building a site and then struggle to make it pay off.

Affiliate marketing is about trial and error. You won't always hit the target with your first shot (but you might get lucky!) but you certainly don't want to spend six months of your life building something that won't generate any revenue.

Here's one of the sites I made and I'll tell you why it doesn't work so you don't make the same mistake.

Poker is a fantastic market for affiliates. You get players to sign up under your links and then you earn a percentage, usually 25%, of the rake. So if you sign up some good winning players you build up a good income stream. Paradoxically, losing players who keep donking off their chips are not much good to you as they don't generate enough rake to make you a profit. You'd think losing players were good for you but it's the other way around.

So why not build a poker strategy site that shows people how to become a winning player and have some nice bonuses on offer to tempt them to sign up?

Why would this approach not work?

What I've done here is pick a niche within a niche. Trying to make a generic poker site to compete with the big boys is just too much work for one person. To compete with someone like pokerlistings.com would mean investing thousands of man hours just to get the site right - and then you've got to play catch up with the link building. It's just never going to happen, they've been established too long and have too much of a head start to contemplate duplicating their success.

But by picking a niche within a niche you give yourself an opportunity to narrow down the subject matter and make a site that dominates the market in your small niche. For sixhanded poker this site pretty much does that.

The site has a dmoz listing, picks up a trickle of fresh links from forums and other poker sites as the content is so good and gets great google rankings for it's keywords. It's always there or thereabouts for "sit and go strategy"

In fact the content is so good and the site such a traffic puller that this dickhead even made a pathetic attempt to copy it. Leave him be, original copy wins every time.

So why doesn't it do the job? Normally a site that has such good content and traffic would be expected to be a good earner.

The answer lies in the keywords targeted. When I decided to build a poker site I joined the affiliate forum and asked the questions you should ask before going into a new market you don't know much about. All the basic stuff like what approach works etc.

The feedback I got was that article strategy sites work well and so that's what I built. Only better than everyone else in this niche.

For weeks I tweaked the poker rooms review pages but the downloads were not converting to depositing players. What was wrong?

The answer is that people looking for help with their poker game already have a poker account. DOH!

They are looking for help with their game. They are not looking for a new poker room to join.

I listened to other affiliates and did what they told me. But I found out through my own effort that their advice was misguided. How many more poor souls are going to start building poker strategy sites and struggle to make them pay off?

To be successful as an affiliate you have to be prepared to try and fail many times. You are never going to hit the bullseye every single time. However in trying and failing you learn so much faster than not giving it a go.

Now of course the site isn't a write off and it's useful for other things like link juice and introducing you to new affiliate managers so it's not all wasted effort and the site can be turned around by aggressively targeting the "money" terms like "titan poker bonus".

The good thing about making site mistakes is that they still live long after you've built them and they only get better with age so you can always go back to them at a later stage in your career. Whatever you do don't keep flogging a dead horse. Move on and try something else.

General Marketing - Affiliate Marketing