Thanks. You addressed something I was specifically wondering about: whether these opportunities tend to be in b2b markets that most people don't know much about. I suspect that these relatively esoteric markets do indeed tend to be the best, because the customers are easier to target and it's worth it for them to pay high-enough prices that you don't need to make too many sales.
I once talked with a woman in a Palo Alto coffeehouse who was running her one-person business right there (she was there just about every day). She sold a tiny program she had written that did something involving physical chemistry. I think she only had one or two customers that she licensed it to, but that was all she needed.
Our site is a consumer entertainment site at the $10-20 price point. However, I would consider our particular market to be relatively unknown, especially in the larger world of internet affiliate marketing.
Affiliate marketing in general is probably a good approach if you have deep knowledge of some area and an idea of how to generate traffic. SEO can be quite difficult, but if you know enough about your topic--let's say you're a multi-day hiker and you're running a blog with product reviews--you should be able to generate enough actual, usable content to get some revenue flowing.
I once talked with a woman in a Palo Alto coffeehouse who was running her one-person business right there (she was there just about every day). She sold a tiny program she had written that did something involving physical chemistry. I think she only had one or two customers that she licensed it to, but that was all she needed.