How To Profit Promoting Obscure Technologies

If you're an engineer or of a scientific bent, this is a great niche for you.

It's: Oscilloscopes.

I've made over a thousand dollars promoting expensive oscilloscopes on my review site.

I like them because they are ultra-expensive (some cost thousands of dollars), there's lots of obscure terms to get long-tail organic traffic for, and very few people write about them because they are incredibly complex tools.

This is a great recipe for a niche site: a high-end product that needs a search marketer to help provide some disambiguation + enhanced user experience.

What is an oscilloscope?

Rather than try to explain what an oscillscope is, I'll defer to Wikipedia:

*If Google Trends doesn't load- just refresh the page.

Ranging in price from $250 to $25,000 (roughly), there's a lot of affiliate income to be made in this niche. Let's take a look at some of the search traffic for the term "oscilloscope".

Oscilloscope Keyword Research

As you can see, there's lots of search volume for primary and long-tail keywords. As well, Amazon is rife with similar searches- for both the scopes themselves, plus accessory equipment and brand terms like "Rigol". 

Leveling Up

It would be easy to create a junky oscilloscope affiliate site and make some money, but the real win here will be providing true value. How do you do that? Think outside the box.

For example, you could contact your local university's engineering department and see if they'd be willing to demonstrate some oscilloscopes for you. You could shoot video of these demonstrations and even pay the staff to do some write-ups for your site.

In fact, some of the top-ranking pages for oscilloscope keywords are YouTube videos- so publishing written and video content will be a powerful traffic acquisition strategy.

Check out this Bucknell college website- their oscilloscope page, while rich on information, looks like it's from 1995 (Source):

As a search marketer, when I see pages like this, I see a golden opportunity to provide solid information and enhanced user experience, while earning myself passive affiliate income.

Down the line you can even request oscilloscopes to review from Rigol and Tekton, perhaps donating them to an engineering university department in exchange for video and written content.

The Opportunity

Create an oscilloscope authority site that is monetized with affiliate links. It will provide instructional information alongside product reviews.

This content stands a fair chance of ranking very quickly if it's done well- and you can capitalize on YouTube search traffic by publishing explainer video content. 

While a somewhat small niche, this could be incredibly lucrative- you can go a bit broader into a more general category of ​scientific equipment, or build out this site and let it mature and earn over the long-term as part of your passive income site portfolio.

​​How to get traffic

This will be an SEO play- you'll be creating long-form, detailed content, both affiliate and informational, to help searchers understand how to use and how to buy one of these devices.

I recommend focusing on on-page SEO and producing YouTube videos- this dual-pronged approach will diversify your traffic acquisition and help you see some quick earnings wins.

You can even publish your video across different video-sharing platforms to get extra traffic from your content.

Backlinko is a great resource for on-page SEO:

On-Page SEO: Anatomy of a Perfectly Optimized Page (2016 Update)

When it comes to on-page SEO, I'm sure you've heard enough about meta tags and keyword density for one lifetime. If you're looking for some practical strategies that you can use on your site today, then you'll love this infographic. It's a simple checklist that will bring in more search engine traffic from every piece ...

I also recommend harvesting your content- essentially transforming written content into different media types, and publishing across social media platforms for enhanced reach.

Check out the graphic below for how it works:

This will get you trickles of referral traffic and increase your discoverability, which will help you earn links over time, which will help rank you in Google, and get you traffic that makes you money.

How to make money

Affiliate Marketing

Starting out, I'd use Amazon Associates to monetize.

You can discover niche stores in ShareASale and LinkShare that might offer different oscilloscopes with, perhaps, better commission rates than Amazon offers.

Amazon will convert better than any other physical product affiliate, for the most part- though you will get sales from niche oscilloscope stores, depending on how much you 'warm' your traffic up to purchasing that particular product.

Affiliate Programs

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• SainSmart
• United Technology Trade Corp
• eManualOnline.Com
• TOMTOP Technology
  

There are more- you just have to Google around a bit or search within an affiliate network.

Available Domains