When I first started out in internet marketing nearly two years ago, I only ever thought about selling digital products. I joined many different marketer’s mailing lists and all I ever saw was promotions for eBooks and software products. Of course I purchased my fair share (more than my fair share to be honest) of digital products online myself, and I loved the fact you could get access to them immediately.

The whole concept of being able to sell a digital product over and over again to many different people, and having it delivered to their inbox as soon as they made a payment, even if you were sleeping, fascinated me. Plus of course you don’t need to carry any physical inventory for your products, you can simply store them on your hard drive. You don’t even have to do that if you are promoting somebody else’s product as an affiliate, you just get your affiliate link and put it in a place that people are going to see it.

Up until the beginning of this year, I had mainly been working in the IM / make money online niche. I had done a fair amount of article marketing that promoted products in many different niches, but my main focus was in the IM niche.

But this year things have changed. I now look for any niche that has a market and related products to sell. I then build websites focused on these niches and promote products through them.

But I no longer just look for digital products to promote, I now spend a lot of my time researching markets and niches that I can sell physical products in.

Why?

Well let me give you an example of one of the main benefits of selling physical products.

When you do your keyword research for any product, you should always look at the commercial intent for any keyword phrase. This is to basically determine whether people that type in your keyword phrase are looking to buy something, or just looking to get some information. You obviously want to target the people who are looking to buy something, so it is imperative you choose your keywords accordingly.

If you use a keyword research tool such as Micro Niche Finder, then this already has a commercial intent function installed, so you can determine the best keywords with that. But if you don’t have Micro Niche Finder or something similar then you can use a free tool here:

http://adlab.msn.com/Online-Commercial-Intention/Default.aspx

Now say if you wanted to promote an eBook that tells you how to cure tennis elbow. You would think that if somebody typed in the phrase “cure for tennis elbow” they would be looking to find a cure, and spend money to get that information. Well I am sure that some are, but if you type that phrase into the tool here, you will see that it comes up with a 0.71 NON commercial intent.

That basically tells you that 71% of the people that typed in that keyword phrase weren’t looking to buy something, they were merely looking for information.

Let’s try entering another phrase – “how to get rid of tennis elbow”.

This delivers a result of 0.93 NON commercial intent. That is even less than the first one.
So what I am trying to demonstrate here is that for information products such as eBooks, you really need to dig deep to find the correct keywords to target people that are looking to buy something.

So let’s try this again with a physical product. I entered “Samsung LCD televisions” and look at the result I got.

It is showing a maximum 1, which means 100% for COMMERCIAL intent! That means that 100% of the people that typed in “Samsung LCD televisions” into the search engines are looking to buy a Samsung LCD television. They’re not trying to find out where Samsung TV’s originated from, or what components they use inside, they are flat out looking to find the best Samsung television they can, and get their credit card out and buy it there and then.

Let’s try another phrase for a physical product. I typed in “Flymo lawn mowers”.

This returned a result of 0.9, which means 90% of people that type in “flymo lawn mowers”, are looking to buy a flymo lawn mower.

You will get similar results for thousands of physical products so your choice is endless.

There are many different places that you can sell these kind of products as an affiliate. The big one obviously being Amazon. Another great thing about selling physical products is the conversion rates are much higher than with digital products, and refund rates are much lower. This is because companies like Amazon have such a strong and positive reputation, it eliminates most of the skepticism that potential buyers have when looking to by a product. Skepticism is very high when people are thinking to buy a digital information product, as they really don’t know what they are getting and whether it will really do what it tells you it is going to do.

Another great place to find companies to sign up as an affiliate and sell physical products is Commission Junction (CJ). They have many different companies throughout a huge range of markets and niches that you can sign up for.

The downside to selling physical products is the commission rates. They are no way near as high as those for digital products.

If you sell an eBook from Clickbank as an affiliate, you will receive anything from 50% to 75% commissions. But most physical product affiliate programs will only pay you 5% to 15%. You can find some that will pay higher, but this is the average range.

But this can be evened up by the fact that you can sell a lot higher priced physical products than you can digital products. Do you think it would be easier to sell a $500 digital product, which is surrounded with hype, and leaves most people wondering what is really on the ‘inside’. Or a $500 Samsung LCD television? I think the Samsung LCD television would be easier to sell every time. Then if you received 10% commissions, you will still receive $50 for the sale.

Here is a quick summary of the Pros and Cons for selling digital and physical products:

Digital Product Pros:

- High commission rates
- Instant delivery of purchased products
- Always a huge range of products to sell across many different niches
- No physical inventory to carry

Digital Product Cons:

- Harder to find real ‘buyers’ keywords to target
- Higher refund rates
- People more skeptical about buying a digital product

Physical Product Pros:

- Easy to find strong ‘buyers’ keywords
- Much higher conversion rates
- Less skepticism involved with physical product buyers
- Easier to sell higher priced physical products.
- Lower refund rates

Physical Product Cons:

- Lower commission rates
- Delivery of purchased products takes a few days

So if you have never looked into selling physical products as an affiliate, then I would really urge you to have a look at this as it can be a very profitable component of your online business and you are really missing out on some unbelievable opportunities if you just limit yourself to selling digital products.

Have a look at what these guys are doing here and what they teach in their product, the Consumer Wealth System. They show you how to make simple five page websites that take a couple of hours to set up, and each make about $150 to $250 a month selling physical products. Not a huge amount, but when you consider the little time it takes to make one of these sites, just think how easy it would be to make ten or twenty of them.

Click here to watch the Consumer Wealth System Video