The Next Big Thing in Internet Marketing: Affiliate Ideas for 2011?

The six million dollar questions, what’s the next internet trend that’s going to get big?   What’s comes next after social media marketing and mobile apps?   Is there anymore innovation to come after the internet?

There are many online marketeers out there looking for the next big thing in  terms of new internet business ideas , concepts, new products / domains for affiliate marketing.

For the big players like  Facebook  – How dominant will facebook become?   Some experts are saying that facebook will replace email for the new generation.

The games market is likely to move online as devices become entrenched into every day life.  How long before you can play the best ps3 games on a tablet pc – see Nintendos new, recently launched changeable console and controller principle.  Mobile internet speed will get faster and faster and reach out to more data hungry applications making it easier to do more complex things.  And not forgetting Apple – they are a dominant force  in the mobile arena and will continue to make a huge impression in data, media sharing.

LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman stated at the recent Oxford discussion forum, “For Facebook, Last.fm and Flickr applications, using live data would become much more important. “Today you have everyone generating data.I think these massive amounts of data are perfect for new applications. There will be a lot of new applications come out of it. Obvious ones, like whom you should meet professionally, and some we don’t even thing about. There will be interesting mash ups liked LinkedIn and Twitter.”

So what’s left for the rest of us, looking to tap into this larger internet game.  Internet Marketing is all about for the most part exploiting the online market of those looking for the next big thing,  and those who are exploiting those that are looking for it.

As an affiliate marketeer, fundamentally it’s about getting targeted traffic to a website, and referring customers onto to other e-commerce sites.

What’s important is to look at the competition, buy up keyword rich domain names in certain niche areas , future and present.  Markets that are just emerging are the best place to hit, but it pays to go for something global and utilise a .com domain is possible.  You can look into certain fashion or technology trends and as soon as a new product or thing is announced, buy up a domain name. For example, when google started to develop android apps, you could have bought www.androidmobileapps.com domain and monetized this site accordingly.   It’s not going to be an overnight success – it can a good 1-2 years to start getting traffic and hard earned cash from a website.

Don’t be afraid to target other countries and obscure products either.  A friend of mine ran an affiliate site for mobile phones and did very well out of it.   One of the most important factors to consider is the average sale and commission value.  The percentage commission on a 3 year mobile phone contract and handset can be up to £50 with some networks.    Certain niches work well in a recession, like payday loans, so setting up a comparison site for payday loans at the start of 2009 would have been a good move.

It’s important to keep your ear to the ground, use your intuition, but don’t go in blind – make sure you do some research around the products and the online competition.