Using Torrents To Guide Affiliate Product Selection

For many of you reading this, torrent sites do not feature in your day to day activities. Torrent sites are file sharing sites and to my surprise are quite numerous on the web

In the UK and US sharing copyrighted content that is not yours is illegal and lets face it grossly unethical

But these sites are useful when you are trying to decide whether or not to promote a product as an affiliate marketer

A little background

I bought an affiliate marketing ebook and was pretty excited about it. The content was great and the tips when I applied them resulted in increased income to me

So of course I joined the affiliate program and promoted it on one of my sites and to my affiliate marketing email list

And I got a ton of clicks but very few conversion

Hmmm! What gives?

So I did a web search for the product name plus words like 'scam', 'problems' etc

I thought perhaps the product had got some bad press or something

On one of these searches, I think it was the problems search, I came across a torrent site where the ebook was being shared

And the penny dropped

Why would anyone buy a product from my affiliate link when they can get it for free??

So now before promoting a product as an affiliate, be it marketing tutorials or a movie, I do a Google search for the product name + torrent to see what comes up.

If there's a ton of torrent sites "sharing" the product, I tend to avoid putting too much effort into promoting it.

Not because of a lack of faith in the product but because I probably will not get great conversions