So you’re thinking of starting an online affiliate buisness and want to know what is the best niche for affiliate marketing. Maybe you’ve seen an ad on Facebook or YouTube, or maybe even purchased an affiliate marketing course from one of those Gurus. Or, perhaps you’ve been in affiliate marketing awhile and are still looking for that profitable niche. Choosing your affiliate marketing niche is extremely important and very personal.
This is often one of the most difficult parts of starting your affiliate marketing business, deciding what market you will focus on. It can seem overwhelming, I know, so many people doing the same things, how do you carve out a piece of the pie for yourself? The best advice is to pick something you’re interested in and know a lot about. Your hobbies, passions or professional expertise. Then build a website or online presence around that passion.
At a Glance:
Finding the best niche for affiliate marketing will be largely a personal decision. It is best to start by listing you own hobbies, interests, passions and skills to evalute them as potential affiliate markets. It is much easier, and you are more likely to stick with it, if you build your affiliate marketing business around something that you are actually interested in and or passionate about. There is money to be made in any niche if you are determined and willing to put in the work. Try to be specific without getting too narrow in your choice.
Now you may be one of those people who has many hobbies and interests, so you don’t know which one to choose or which one will make the most money. And, these are legitimate questions. After all, you are trying to make money with affiliate marketing. The truth is, any niche or topic can make money. Choose something you have a genuine interest in and build your business around that.
As a beginner, your goal should not be becoming a millionaire right away. Your goal is simply to learn and understand the affiliate marketing process and make some money while you learn. Let’s be honest, you will make some mistakes. Not all of your ideas will pan out, But that’s OK. Learn from the mistakes and adapt and move on.
I know I’ve made plenty of mistakes, and still make a few now and then even today ;). But I learn from my mistakes and try to avoid making the same ones again. You only fail if you quit. Write that down. Highlight it, memorize it and commit it to heart. Affiliate marketing, unlike what you may have seen in those ads and infomercials, is hard work just like any other legitimate business.
If you stay committed to you goals and determined t succeed, nobody can stop you. There will be bad days and you will find yourself ready to chuck it all and call it quits, but don’t you dare. Refocus and keep moving forward towards your goals. You may pick a niche that doesn’t pay as well as you’d hoped. That’s OK too, you just pick another one and start building it.
Once you have success, you can repeat the process with other niches and build multiple income producing online businesses. But first, what exactly is a niche, and how to decide which one is best for you? But first, what the heck is a niche anyway?
What Is the Definition of Niche?
For our purposes of affiliate marketing and online business, niche is best defined as follows:
- a specialized segment of the market for a particular kind of product or service.”he believes he has found a niche in the market”
- adjective – denoting products, services, or interests that appeal to a small, specialized section of the population.
A niche is a small specialized area or market, so in business niche is used to describe a “small area” of the market. In the car market, an example of niche would be “Italian Luxury Cars”. A very small part of the over all car market. Your potential customers will be a very specific group of people, not only interested it, but able to afford Italian Luxury Cars.
When you make your first affiliate website, don’t choose something like:
- cars
- electronics
- technology
- health & fitness
- weight loss
- traveling
Those topics are too broad. There’s too much subject area for you to cover as a single writer building a website. Giant websites like Buzzfeed that have a full staff of writers that can handle broad topics, but as a soloprenuer, you could never generate enough content to rank in Google for such a broad topic.
Also, broad websites don’t speak to a specific audience so they are harder to rank and grow. For example, health and fitness is not a niche. That’s an industry and a very broad topic. Some example niches within the health and fitness industry would be:.
- Weight loss for men over 50
- weight loss for diabetics
- weight loss for kids
- weight loss with keto diet
- weight loss for vegans
- protein powder reviews
- vegan bodybuilding
- nootropic supplement reviews
- home gym exercises
- stay in shape for busy professionals
- celebrity diet reviews
- myth-busting fad diets
- anti-aging
- natural remedies for common illnesses
- yoga for kids
- first time marathon preparation
The main thing to understand from this is that the niche audiences are different. Someone who wants to train for a marathon is not looking to lose weight. Men over 50 have much different dietary needs than women under 30. A person interested in natural remedies probably doesn’t care about yoga for kids. You will be marketing affiliate products to a very specific group of people with very specific wants, needs and interests. Which helps you focus you website content and offers.
How To Pick the Best Niche For Affiliate Marketing
Is There a Formula For A Successful Niche?
Actually there’s no specific formula for how to pick the perfect niche. And, that’s a good thing because It means that ANY niche idea can work if you put in the time and effort to build your website and market to your niche audience. I recommend you spend a few minutes, or a day or two to consider what niche your first affiliate website will focus on.
Don’t worry about all the GURUS and their fancy research methods for selecting a niche at this point. Focus on picking something you enjoy researching and writing about. If you pick a topic you don’t care about, you chances of getting bored, discouraged and quitting increases.
If you pick a topic that your interested in or passionate about, you’re more likely to stick with it and, at the very least, enjoy the business-building process as you research and publish articles on your blog website.
For example, one time I started a website about Beach Fishing. I love the beach and surf fishing and have been doing it for over 50 years now. It is something I am interested in, passionate about, and enjoy researching and writing articles about. So, for me, it’s not even like work. And, there are a ton of other people, who share my interest, that I can promote affiliate products and offers to.
When choosing a niche for affiliate marketing think about you hobbies, interests, passions and skills. Things like the following:
- What kind of things do you like reading about?
- Who would you like to have conversations with on your website?
- Which type of person would you enjoy helping?
- What products are you interested in reading about or even buying?
When you care about what you write, it’s easier to make content that interests readers and builds trust and authority with them. And, as a new writer, it’s much easier to write about stuff your interested in and know a lot about. Do you have a niche in mind? Would you like me to check to see if I think it’s a good one? Leave a comment in the comment section below, and I’ll be glad to help you out! Remember, your first website doesn’t have to be perfect or even a great success. You can always create more.
Is Your Niche A Profitable One?
The short answer is YES. If you are truly interested in the niche, most likely there are thousands of other people that are interested in the same topic. No matter how off the wall you think it is, there are plenty of other people just like you that are interested in that “off the wall” topic.
You don’t even have to “sell” or promote anything on your website to make money. Companies like Google Adsense, Ezoic and Mediavine will pay you to place display ads on your site. With display ads, you just need views, so your only job is to get traffic to your website. More about that in another article.
Besides the method of making money through display ads, consider for a moment how many products there are on Amazon. You can order literally anything from Amazon. From Beans to Diamond Rings everything is sold on Amazon. And, they have an affiliate program where you can get paid to promote products on Amazon.
Amazon is just one of many affiliate programs available. There are hundreds of thousands of affiliate programs and millions of products within those programs. The opportunities to make money promoting affiliate products are endless. That being said, I know lots of people still want some basic ideas to start off with.
Can You Make Money In Any Niche?
Absolutely, you can make money with a website about any niche. If you build a website and you aren’t making money, then you’re most likely doing something wrong. No problem, you just make some adjustments to your strategy and keep moving forward.
Would you like to see some “proof” that anything can make money? Check out some of these websites I found in Google that are making money online right now. Now, not all of these are affiliate websites but it shows you that you can pick almost any topic and still make money online. All you need is traffic to your website and you can make money.
Teddy Bears website:
Medieval Gear Website:
Falconry Website:
Keto Bread Website
What’s the worst-case scenario, you pick out a niche topic that’s hard to monetize or is too broad, or even too narrow. The cool think about affiliate marketing is you can adjust. Add something related to your website and go from there. Or, if you want, build a new site around a different niche entirely.
That’s one of the reasons affiliate marketing is a great business model for beginners is, that no matter how bad you idea is, you can change, edit, update and adjust as you grow your online business. The important thing is to get over the fear of failure and get started with your best idea now. You can always change and improve it later.
Broad Niche Topic Versus Specific Niche Market
As we’ve been discussing, a common problem beginners have when picking a niche for their affiliate marketing business is either choosing a topic that is too “narrow” or too “broad”. And, most often it’s too broad that is the problem.
One way to determine if you have chosen too broad of a topic, is to think about whether you can divide the topic further into more specific groups of people. For my example, let’s look at fishing. Fishing is way too broad a topic. But, you can very easily divide fishing into more narrow topics that can be differentiated from each other.
Examples of topics that are too broad:
- electronics
- technology
- weight loss
- dogs
- mental health
- becoming happy
- how to start a business
- Surf fishing
- Bass fishing
- Catfishing
- Mountain Trout Fishing
- Offshore Bottom Fishing
As you can see from the examples on the left, there are specific groups of fisherman interested in these topics. And, there are millions of potential customers in each group along with tons of affiliate products you could promote to each.
Someone who wants to know the best fly rod for fishing a mountain stream for rainbow trout is a completely different person than someone who wants to know how to catch red snapper off the coast of Florida. Think about how each different audience has different interests, wants and needs, and how you can speak to that specific group (niche) of people.
Sometimes, though not nearly as often, beginning affiliate marketers can go too narrow when picking a potential niche. This can become a problem, because eventually you will run out of stuff to write about and promote. Some examples of topics that are too narrow and focused to be a “niche market”.
The problem with these examples is that you’ll most likely get bored quickly while building your website and give it up. Think about it, are there really that many types of matches you can use to light your cigars? There’s a few corn bread recipes out there, but can you create hundreds of recipes? When building your niche website, keep in mind that you will need to create articles (content) that your audience is searching for and needing answers too. If you run out of ideas, it will be hard to grow your business.
Can a Niche be Too Narrow?
- Corn bread recipes
- travel mug reviews
- how to make bird houses
- how to grow pecan trees
- best matches for cigars
- how to choose the right eye liner
Once your website is up and running, your day to day tasks will be mostly doing research and writing content for your website. And, you can make good money just writing for your website every day.
So, it’s important that while you’re picking the niche for your affiliate site, that you think about potential things, problems, or products to write about for the months and years ahead. Spend some time writing down article ideas. Can you think of a lot? If not, expand your topic a bit. For example, we figured out that, we just can’t think of enough corn bread recipes. But, what about a different bread recipe every month? You could definitely do that. You could build a great affiliate marketing business around Bread recipes. That would make a great niche website.
There’s no “perfect” niche. As I said before, any niche can make money as long as you commit to put in the work, time and commitment to it. Make a list of topics that interest you. Your hobbies, interests, passions and skills. Think about what you would talk to other people with the same interest.
The process of brainstorming potential niche topics is an important exercise that can go along way in helping you feel confident in choosing your niche and then taking necessary action to build your website and write good content your audience wants to read.
Over time, as you grow and gain experience, you will discover new topics for your business The potential niche ideas out there is limitless. Some you can’t even imagine right now, but down the road you will discover many more that you can build a business around.
Research Affiliate Products to Find Niche Ideas
One of the most common worries of new affiliates is picking a niche and they don’t make any money. Or that they don’t know if the niche they pick has any affiliate products to promote.
You can check out affiliate offers in your niche as part of your research. Simply do a Google search for “your niche topic” affiliate programs.
Not only will you see if there are products and services you can promote, but you will get other ideas for niches and what you can write about to attract buyers (traffic) to your website.
You’ll find out that as you progress and your site grows and begins to generate traffic, that you will find many more affiliate opportunities. Some companies will actually start to contact you about promoting their products.
I started out writing about surf fishing, as my site grew, a fishing app company asked if I would promote their app. A boat emergency service company contacted me to promote their services to my readers. You’ll soon realize that finding products to promote is pretty easy.
In 2 seconds I multiple potential companies to work with. Another option is to go to Amazon and search stuff related to your niche idea. If Amazon doesn’t have an affiliate program in your state or country, you can go to Walmart or Target, both have popular affiliate programs.
Go to Google and type “My Niche + Affiliate Program”
You can see in the screenshot below that surf fishing items on Amazon range from $18 to $1300, and there’s plenty of options to choose from.
Now you can write articles reviewing these products in your niche and you don’t have to buy them. More on that in another article, but trust me, it’s possible to do it in an ethical way, so don’t worry about having to buy 1,000’s of dollars of products to test and research for your business. It won’t be necessary. But if you already own some of them, so much the better.
Once you’ve determined that your niche idea has plenty of products and affiliate programs to promote, you can be confident that if you build a website with good informative content that you will make money from it.
Niche? I Just Want to Make Money
A legitimate affiliate marketing training program will recommend you start with something you have a genuine interest in, are passionate about, or have some specialized talent or skill in for building your first website. They do not focus on the money, because flashing dollar signs and promises of big, or quick, or easy money are the worst enemies for a beginner. When you come across a program making these “money” promises, it’s a good bet that you’ve found a SCAM and best you stay away.
Chasing money is how so many end up doing unethical things like promoting junk products just because they are expensive and pay high commissions. In the long run, this will hurt your brand and image, people will lose trust in you and avoid you and your website. You want to build trust as a good and reliable source of quality honest information. If you do that, you can build a business that generates incomes for many years to come.
That being said, I’m willing to admit that you can develop and interest for a niche topic over time as you research and learn about it. And, that is perfectly fine as long as you concentrate on producing quality content for your audience. Learn about the topic, become an expert on it or at least an expert on where to find expert information about the niche.
The potential money can be very motivating, and if you commit to doing the research and building an honest and trustworthy website with informative content. Your interest will grow, your expertise will as well, and you will make good money in an ethical manner. So, if you don’t have a strong interest in any niche right now, don’t worry, you can still make money.
Finding A Profitable Niche Without Passion for it
If you can’t think of anything you’re interested in, or just having trouble deciding, I have some suggestions. When doing research for a new website, I like to check the current trends on Google, social media and major shopping websites. It’s not the best method, but it’s a good place to start.
Checking the Amazon Best Sellers works really well to see what’s selling. Look at the top sellers and think about what “niche” of people are buying them and what similar or related products might be available. You can search Twitter for trending hashtags to see what topics are trending on social media. If people are interested in a topic, there’s a good chance there are products and services being marketed around the topic.
You can check Google Trends to see what people are searching for over time and see if their interest is increasing or decreasing. Keto diet interest looks to be declining.
Work from home on the other hand seems to be in an uptrend. Probably due to the pandemic and so many people unable to work or already working from home. You could build a website about working from home and write about work at home jobs, starting a work from home business, affiliate marketing, blogging and on and on.
I know we’ve covered a lot, but what do you think? Do you have a niche in mind that you want to start with, or do you need to do some more research first? If you need some help, just leave me a comment in the comment section below and I will be glad to help you find your niche.
You really can learn affiliate marketing and make a lot of money with it. If you want to learn how to make money with affiliate marketing, all the information is out there, and you can learn it for FREE. Sounds crazy, but yes, you can hop on the internet and learn how to build a six figure online business completely free. Just click on the image to right and you can get started with your FREE 10-day affiliate marketing training.
And that’s pretty much why I’m here. I want to help you learn how to build a profitable affiliate website. I’ve been doing this several years now, so I know I can help you become a successful affiliate marketer. Currently I have 3 different websites up and running making me money. You can see them below by my picture. Feel free to check them out.
You are probably wondering “How long does it take to see results?” That will vary depending entirely on you and how determined you are to succeed. A good rule of thumb is about six months before you start seeing income. And, if you are willing to put in a couple hours a day and grind out content for 1 to 2 years, you could have a full time six figure income.
I’m not a Guru, I don’t have any “secrets” to sell you. All I have to offer is good, solid, proven methods for building long term profitable affiliate marketing websites. And, I will be happy and honored to provide my assistance and experience to help you learn and grow your own affiliate business.
Invest The Time to Learn Affiliate Marketing
You are your most important asset and if you seriously want to change your life by making money online, you’re going to have to change how you think of “work”. Work should not be a chore. You should look forward to it because it’s an investment in yourself and your future. All business, including online business, takes work and lots of it.
So, you want to be you’re own boss, well it’s going to be different. It’s not like your regular job where you can just clock out at 5 and forget about it. Working for yourself, especially in the early stages of building a new business, is a lot of work and a lot of hours. But, if you are willing to put in the work now, you can reap the rewards for many years to come.
| For More Info on Affiliate Marketing |
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| Read: 35 Frequently Asked Questions on Affiliate Marketing |
So, congratulations, now you’re the boss. Roll up your sleeves and put in the time and effort to be successful. You will probably work for 3-6 months on your affiliate website before you see any money at all! So you need to be prepared financially and mentally and i you can’t handle that, you probably shouldn’t jump into this business model.
If you can handle the work and have the determination and patience to build your business, then eventually down the road you absolutely can “make money while you sleep” or “work from anywhere” type. The sky’s the limit when it comes to affiliate websites. The missing ingredient is YOU. I hope you found this article helpful. If you have any ideas, questions, suggestions or concerns just leave a comment below and I will get back to you ASAP.
I’m Looking forward to working with you,
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Rex
P.S. If you want to see how I learned to build my online business, check out Wealthy Affiliate it’s COMPLETELY FREE to get started. No catch, no obligation, no bait and switch. I will personally be in touch with you upon joining to offer my support and guidance to help you get up and running online.
P.P.S. If you have any questions or are unsure of anything, I am here and I promise I will get back to you on all of your questions and comments. Just leave them below in the comment section. Follow me on Twitter: @onlinebenjamin1, Instagram: dotcomdinero, YouTube: Online Benjamins and Facebook: Online Benjamins
Hi,
Thanks for stopping by and congratulations for taking the first steps to building your own online business. I’ve been in business both offline and online since 1997. I would consider it an honor to help you build your business. Father of 3, life long outdoorsman with an education in Genetics and Economics. This site is about cutting through the BS and finding the real opportunities in the online world. I look forward to working with you.
