If you’re tired of the grind when competing against other affiliates in highly competitive, high profit niches, consider your other options as a savvy marketer.

Contrary to what you might think, the affiliate universe extends beyond the big affiliate networks like CJ, Linkshare, ShareASale, and the hundreds of CPA networks out there.

Consider the alternatives:

• Scenario #1: Focus on generating local business leads: A tip – a business who’s savvy enough to use the Google Local Business Center is raising their hands up to say “We understand that the internet can help market my business”. They’re also saying “we’re open to online business promotion ideas” because getting listed is an active opt-in process. Someone in that company has the initiative to submit their business details. If you present your business case well, occurrences like “Turning $200 into $4,000” will be commonplace.
• Scenario #2: Find under-served pockets of high demand: If you keep your eyes open, look at market trends on the television, in the movies, in the supermarkets, in schools, in the office, even in Church, you’ll pick up hints of market trends that are either bubbling to the surface, or are massively under-served, or better still, all of the above. Google Trends is a good starting point to do your research. Once you’ve found a handful of niches, head to the search engines and look for “(keyword) affiliate program” or “(keyword) affiliates”. Besides “affiliates”, the terms “partners”, “associates” and sometimes “distributors” or “representatives” are also used.

What’s shocking is finding niches with huge spikes in consumer demand and massive search volumes. Surveying ads published within the Google search network and content network ad preview tool, it’s not uncommon to find niches with:

• Lots of advertisers for “head” keywords (possibly 2-3 pages of advertisers)
• Barely 1 or 2 advertisers for keyphrases containing 2 or more keywords
• Zero or minimal advertisers for common typos/misspellings

Although no one can guarantee that you have a winning niche on your hands, I’d wager than you have better than average odds of making this work.

Caveat: With merchant-direct programs, there’s a risk of poor tracking, payment default and other issues, especially if you come in and generate 5- or 6-figures in sales within a short period of time. The workaround this is to operate in at least 3-5 niches and distribute your efforts and manage your risk intelligently.

Provided the search volume is decent (relative to your market analysis), I’ve found niches with at least 1 million combined searches each month, with large numbers of uninformed/naive advertisers, and minimal competition for long tail and more qualified traffic. (A good sign of niche viability).

Note: the assumption is that you have done your due diligence to ensure that there is market demand, and the consumers have a budget to satisfy that demand. And that demand is more than just one sale a month…

If all the pieces are in place, then you can go ahead to test the viability of the market with either a direct linking campaign (since there’re probably 0-2 advertisers for many keyphrases) or a thin affiliate site.

If your profits are double what you’re spending in advertising cost (ie 100% ROI), you should not blog about it, tweet about it, just keep quiet. Instead, focus on scaling your campaign.

I know a number of underground marketers who have weird, offbeat niches that they’re dominated for a couple of years. Depending on the definitions you’re using, you might consider these guys are “niche marketers” even though they’re monetizing primarily through affiliate programs.

Given that I just checked their competitors just before writing this piece, and compared it to their competition 3 years ago. The verdict is that there has been barely any change.

I’d say that they’re well positioned to ride their cash cows for some time to come.