I was VERY lucky and the first product I promoted made me over $2000 in the first month. I thought this was great and couldn't believe how easy it was.

To this day I still make a few hundred a month from that product, but it has become WAY more competitive even in the 26 months  I have being doing affiliate marketing. 

The clicks are becoming more expensive and google makes you up the bid price at the drop of a hat. 

I knew there must be a better way to effectively target affiliate programs that had little or practically NO competition.

I had read Niche Marketing On Crack and liked the way it targeted brand names or products with little competition. I had some good success looking for products to promote and had made some great sales.

But I wanted an easier way to find the programs to promote.

What I wanted was a keyword tool that could check most of the major and a lot of the smaller affiliate networks for a list of brand or website names. 

Once the software had this list, I then wanted to take this keyword and find out if...

a/ People were searching for any of the keywords in any decent numbers?

b/ Were there many pages competing for the term in the search engines?

See, I wanted to go after the free traffic. Don't get me wrong often some of the nuggets of gold could also be promoted through pay per click programs like AdWords and almost always profitably. They were never 'google slapped' as the keywords were that targeted. 

I got the program written initially so it would go and check three of the smaller networks. It checked around 2000 brand names and website urls in total.

'One of the programs I found to promote had and estimated 25,000 SEARCHES A DAY...2 competing AdWords and only 90,000 pages in TOTAL in google...it now makes over $4000 a month'

The program returned about 30 results that were of GREAT interests to me.   

One of the programs I found to promote had and estimated 25,000 SEARCHES A DAY. There was only two Google AdWords for this product (the merchant) and one other affiliate. I knew it must be ok to bid on the keyword as another affiliate had done so  - but checked to see and sure enough the affiliate program had no keyword restrictions.

I quickly build a one page website and ran a google AdWords campaign with the only keyword the brand name just to test the water (My long term plan is always to go after the free traffic).

Initial results after a couple of days were good. That campaign is now bringing me in over $4000 a month between pay per click and natural traffic. I'm not getting that much natural traffic at the moment as I haven't really built many backlinks to the page yet. I know with a bit of SEO I will be on the first page of google as there are under 90,000 pages competing in total for this term.