So let's take your interest in sports a step further and define it as particular interest in spectator sports; baseball, football, soccer and hockey.

How about sports trading cards? They're small to store as inventory and inexpensive to ship, which makes them a good mail order product.

A quick peek at Overture reveals that searches in April 2003 for 'baseball cards' exceeded 42,000, 'sport cards' had 10,338 queries and 'sports memorabilia' was searched for 10,649 times.

Come up with a list of highly targeted keywords and you'll soon reach that lofty number of 800,000 .... but all of whom have a specific focus, and a PROVEN interest in your product.

Set yourself apart even further.

Rather than competing directly with ten or twenty advertisers at Overture who also sell trading cards, you could write a report or small ebook called "Collectors Secrets Revealed: How to Make a Fortune with Sports Trading Cards". Not only would you sell report from your own site, you could also joint venture with some of those other advertisers and have them promote your report on their sites. Everybody wins!

After ball is rolling on your sports card trading site, it's time to build another niche site in a non-competing topic. And then another. The key to success for small online businesses is to build a number of highly targeted sites across a diverse array of topics. Therefore, if one topic experiences a seasonal or market-induced drop in traffic, others will continue to generate income.

Yes, niche marketing method requires somewhat more effort than building one site with a hundred banners, but it's also method that makes a profit. Either way takes work - you might as well make your work profitable.

As a result, instead of advertising an offer that probably would have flopped, I ended up selling several pieces of software that week and got myself a nice check in mail.

3. Spread The Word.

Get an ad into your own e-zine, rotate that ad for a few issues and see how it does, and then when you've got a winning responsive ad, try some other e-zines that would be a good match for product that you're advertising.

Here's one that really works well for me. Send out a solo mailing to your opt-in ezine list.

There are two key elements as to why this works so well. If you've been building a good subscriber list, they're more inclined to listen to what you have to say than some stranger that they run across somewhere on web. For me there is an additional factor here. My list tends to be more receptive to solo ads because I don't send them a lot of solo mailings in first place. So, they're less inclined to say "Oh no not another one - Delete!"

The second reason, and this is perhaps more important one - I personalize it. This doesn't mean that I address everyone by their name, (although that would really helpful but my list server is kind of behind times :-) ). What I mean, is that e-mail reads less of an ad and is more conversational in tone. "Advertorial" is correct term for this type of an ad I believe.

It comes off far more believable than most of ads out there. Instead of pushing against a brick wall and saying "Here's a big long ad - read it and buy what I'm flogging", I'm dropping in for a friendly chat with a neat suggestion or answer to your problem, want, or need. It works great!

There you have it - Three easy steps to help boost your affiliate earnings. Implement them and you'll be on road to seeing better results.

= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = Pencil Dude aka Robin Forbes is Proud Publisher of Pencil Dude's Picks http://pencildude.com/ and is on road to affiliate success.

Check out simple tools and resources that he uses to make his ezine profitable: http://pencildude.net/ = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =

Pencil Dude aka Robin Forbes is the Proud Publisher of Pencil Dude's Picks http://pencildude.com/ and is on the road to affiliate success.