David Fiske Affiliate Marketing & Web Development

There's literally millions of gaps in the affiliate marketing market. In fact that's true for every market in business. It's simply a case of identifying that gap and exploiting it to the best of your capabilities.

Here's some examples (real world and on the interweb) of people exploiting a gap in the market.
 
Starbucks started out selling coffee beans in 1971, switching to the coffee bar concept in 1984. According to the Black Coffee programme on The Business Channel, Starbucks made a point of selling the most expensive cup of coffee in town. Why? Because price emphasised that the quality was high.

They found a market and exploded it's potential. At the end of 2007, Starbucks has 15,756 stores around the globe.

The story of Taco Bell is a similar tale of how they created a nationwide chain of fast food stores from nothing.

Moving on to the virtual world, the biggest and best known examples of creating a market from nowhere has to be YouTube and MySpace.

MySpace was sold to News Corp for $580 million. The site has over 100 million accounts and according to Wikipedia, the site gets 230,000 new signups a day. Not bad for a market (social networking) that wasn't so prevalent years ago.

Social interaction on the web has always existed from day one with emails and forums. It just turned a bit more web 2.0 and exploded in popularity, MySpace being the proof of this. Videos are the next big thing, leading onto the success that is YouTube.

You may not know what to look for in a market but as time goes on and you have your fair share of failures and successes, you'll stumble across an idea that will set you on your way.