Affiliate marketing can turn into a very competitive game really quickly. A common occurrence is as follows: Many people scour affiliate networks looking for the 'next big thing,' and thousands of affiliates start promoting the same offer.

What happens? The market gets saturated and highly competitive immediately. Earl Nightingale stated, "Whatever the majority is doing, do the opposite, and you will probably never make another mistake in your life." This especially holds true to affiliate marketing.

Here are some tips and tricks to avoid following the crowd:

Don't go for the 'next big thing,' dig a little deeper in those affiliate networks and find the hidden gems. I say hidden gems because that's exactly what they are - they are untapped gold mines waiting to be discovered.

While others are digging in the exact same spot, you can go off into less explored territories and cash in big time. Here is what to look for:

Low gravity products in Clickbank that have a minimal marketing force behind them but are still of high-quality. To do this, simply look at the product's gravity: If it's extremely low compared to other products in the niche, this is a good indicator. You can create a hoplink for the product and then purchase it through your link (to save money) and review the product. If its killer and the market is hot, this could be your gem.

Often affiliate marketers all swarm to the same marketing strategies like moths to light. What happens is they bid up the costs of adwords and end up spending way too much money. Or, they try to target all the same keywords in article marketing, and their efforts get lost in search engines.

A better method would be to do this: Quickly do a look at what the current marketers are doing, see what words they are bidding on and find the less competitive ones (you can do this by looking at paid results in Goolge search). Use the less targeted words. Do this same strategy for choosing keywords to target in article marketing (you can do this by looking at results using the Google keyword tool and a Google search with your keywords in quotes).

Or, even better, find marketing strategies that are not being utilized in the niche. Local newspaper classified ads, for example, can be highly effective and are often over-looked by online marketers.

This strategy is slightly harder because markets get tapped very quickly online. However, a good way to do this is to monitor affiliate networks, google trends, google keywords, fads in magazines or pop culture, and then tap these markets as they arise. If you get in early, you can beat the affiliate tsunami that is soon to follow.

These are 3 methods to help you stay above the 'affiliate game'Any one of these methods applied properly can make you a lot of money.