If you’re wondering how to choose a niche for affiliate marketing, you’ve probably just started out as an affiliate. Your choice of niche is one of the most important decisions you’ll make. Depending on your approach, you could be creating content on a YouTube channel, or blogging, for example. Whatever you decide to do, if you’re choosing a niche for affiliate marketing it means you’ll be creating content in that niche.
Over time, as your content grows in volume, it will attract an audience which you can monetise with affiliate products. Ultimately you will want multiple sources of traffic coming to digest your content. As visitors land on your site, you can offer them value through your content, and by building an email list of subscribers. You can offer value through content and through your email list, promoting products which are of value to your visitors.
The two key elements in this business model are traffic and products. If you don’t get traffic, you don’t make any money. Mismatch your product with your visitors and you won’t make any money. If your visitors don’t want your products, or they aren’t valuable, you don’t make any money!
So the key ingredients for successfully creating a profitable affiliate business through a niche are:
- Getting traffic – not getting traffic is often the main reason affiliates quit
- Offering value – if your content isn’t valuable, people won’t like, share and link to it. Your online presence won’t grow.
- Connecting people with valuable products which they want or need
How To Choose A Niche For Affiliate Marketing
Since getting people to your content is so important, it makes sense to start out looking at the content you will be creating. Your niche is important because you’ll need to be creating content for a long period of time to get traction with an affiliate business. In a competitive niche, you’ll need to do more work for the same or similar amount of traffic. But in a competitive niche it can also be easier to monetise with a greater choice of affiliate products. A less competitive niche may be easier to get traffic for, but may be harder to monetise. A unusual niche can present difficulties when looking for good products to promote from it. Therefore, even with a large volume of traffic, it can be an obstacle monetising your niche.
While most people will say choose a niche you love, this is only partly true. You also need to choose a niche you can monetise if you want to make any money from affiliate marketing. A good way to choose your niche is to start out with an interest you have, something you know about or something you want to learn about. You don’t need to be an expert in your niche because you can learn about it and share what you learn in your content. If you choose a niche you’re uninterested in, it is very difficult to keep up the necessary motivation to keep creating content over the longer term.
Choose a topic you have a passion, knowledge or interest in and you can keep up the work over a much longer time period. This gives you an edge over the competition.
How To Choose A Niche For Affiliate Marketing
Imagine you’re trapped in a world where every day you go to work on your blog. Each day you craft a new piece of content to publish. This task never ends! This could of course by a v’log too, (a video blog), if that’s your bag!
This pattern of working goes on for months and years!
It’s this kind of commitment and dedication which will give you an income from an affiliate niche. Unfortunately, gone are the days where you can throw up a website with little effort, and see a tonne of free traffic. It can be done, but it’s much more difficult today than it was only 10 years ago. There’s so much competition now, you need to carve out your niche by creating a lot of content. See also how to create a niche affiliate marketing website.
If you enjoy a certain topic, and are actively pursuing it with an interest (regardless of income), it could be a good match for the niche you want to choose for your affiliate business. If you’re only thinking of how much money you can make from a certain topic, and choose it on that basis, it’s much more difficult to maintain your enthusiasm over the longer term.
How To Choose A Niche For Affiliate Marketing – A Word Of Warning
One of the niches I choose was mushroom harvesting! I know I know; it sounds as dull and uninteresting as it was. (Apologies to the mushroom fanatics). The reason I choose this topic was one entirely based on competition and search volume (more on this later). I knew I could rank my site on Google and get free traffic. So I built the site and dutifully started researching the topic. Several months later (and several articles later), I came to a point where I no longer cared anything for the topic. I needed to research every single blog post, which was massively time consuming and laborious.
Also, there’s only so much you can write on the subject. It’s incredibly finite! I did get traffic but later discovered that it was also a difficult topic to monetise. Just think about a product related to mushroom harvesting! I gave up on the site and it soon fell down the search rankings. Someone more relevant and inspired to create content on a non stop basis took over the top listing. My site fell away and I eventually dropped it.
It was a disappointing venture, but I had learned a lesson! Don’t choose a topic just because you think it’ll be easy!
How To Choose A Niche For Affiliate Marketing – Competition & Keyword Research
I chose the mushroom harvesting niche based on competition, not based on anything I was interested in. It was a big mistake. However, it’s also worth noting your competition when choosing a niche. If a niche is very competitive, you have a far tougher job getting eyes on your content from the search engines. Affiliate marketing, for example is a hugely competitive niche, despite being one which is easily monetised.
Mushroom harvesting, on the other hand, was easy to rank for, but difficult to monetise.
For this website, I chose the keywords “affiliate marketing mentors” in order to tap into a niche within a niche. The affiliate marketing niche is so competitive, I simply didn’t have much chance of ranking my website for the keywords “affiliate marketing”. But after a search for “affiliate marketing mentor” on Google’s keyword planner, I saw that there was enough monthly searches for the term, while not being too competitive in terms of competing content.
As you can see from the above images, the term “affiliate marketing mentor” gets 210 monthly searches. The phrase in a Google search shows nearly 6 and a half million competing pages. Anything less than 10 million is generally worth considering for a niche website (as my general rule of thumb). See also keyword research for niche sites.
A Niche Within A Niche – Sub Niches or Micro Niches
A sub or micro niche is a niche within a niche. Micro niches are a good idea in a saturated field because they have less competition than the main niche.
A sub niche can be a good idea particularly if you’re choosing a competitive topic. Another sub niche of affiliate marketing, for example, might be “affiliate marketing for seniors”. If you’re going into the fitness niche, you might choose something which is less mainstream than the usual “lose weight fast”, but rather aim at a specific audience such as “weight loss for over 50’s”.
If your topic is psychology, you might find a sub niche targeting a particular subset of psychology such as “mental health for seniors”, for example. See also best micro niche for blogging.
Choosing A Product To Promote
Some affiliates recommend choosing a product to promote first, before you choose your niche. If you find a product particularly helpful, you’re going to be much better at becoming an advocate for that product.
If you’re not interested in the products you promote as an affiliate, it can be so much the more difficult recommending it to your audience. In addition, your lack of interest in your products will come across in your copy or videos. So, if you’re struggling to come up with an idea for your affiliate niche, another way to approach it is to look at the different products you would like to purchase yourself!
If you choose a single product to promote, the content you provide should connect your audience to it in a congruent way. So for example if your content is about ice hockey, for example, you’ll be promoting an ice hockey related product. If your content is about camper vans, you’ll want to promote camper van accessories, (or the vans themselves) so that your audience matches your affiliate offerings.
Without a good, congruent connection between your content and your affiliate products, it’s going to be much more difficult selling products to your audience. So if you can find products and services that you can get excited about, your content generation activities will be more interesting and fruitful.
Types Of Products & Monetisation
Your choice of product to promote is another important part of building your niche. With the wrong kind of product, a product mismatched with your niche, or a product which nobody wants, even with a lot of traffic and great content, you can struggle to make money from an affiliate site.
Having a topic you love isn’t the full story with affiliate marketing because you also need to make it pay. So choosing the right affiliate products is vital if you want to make sales. You should be proud of the products you promote and have invested in them yourself. Selling products you know nothing about is much more difficult than selling products you love.
It’s also worth noting that there’s a variation in level of commission you can earn depending on the products you choose. Physical products will typically pay much less than digital products for example. Amazon pays it’s affiliates from from 3%-10% (for most if their products). See also Amazon affiliate marketing commission. Digital products on the other hand pay much more, from 30-40% in most cases.
Clickbank is widely known to be a good place for digital products, although there’s an awful lot of bad products you can find there too! See also what is better than Clickbank.
Subscription Products & Recurring Commissions
Some products offer recurring commissions and this is one of the best ways to make affiliate marketing more profitable. When you’re building a niche website (or channel), it can take some time before you get enough visitors to start making regular affiliate sales from it. But if you’re using subscription products which pay a recurring commission, each sale will add up to your monthly income.
It’s therefore easier to start generating a good amount of income from your affiliate efforts if you use subscription affiliate programs. Even if you only make $10 a month from a subscription sale, it gives you a recurring income. With the right choice of product, and by selling value driven products which satisfy a genuine need, commissions can come in for years if a customer maintains their membership of a subscription product.
High Ticket Products
High ticket products carry a larger than average price tag and therefore pay much larger than average commissions. With a good high ticket product to sell from your site, you don’t need as many sales in order to become profitable. Some high ticket products will pay out over $10,000 per sale! That’s a huge boost for any affiliate business.
Although many will see such a product as something which will be more difficult to sell, people do buy these products. Once you have a niche which is working for you, you’ll want to make the most out of the traffic you generate. So it’s useful to think about your choice of products before you get started and choose a niche.
The work you do can be the same for a small income or a large one, depending on the products you choose to promote. If you choose a niche which is harder to monetise, and has no subscription or high ticket products available in it, it can be more difficult making it pay.
Evergreen Niches
An evergreen niche is profitable all year round. Whereas a niche which is seasonal will have spirts of interest which change over the year. My mushroom harvesting site, for example wasn’t evergreen and since September is the best time for harvesting mushrooms, it’s around this month which will see most interest in the topic!
It’s therefore worth looking for an evergreen niche which can be profitable all year round, since this decision will serve you for years to come if your site is profitable.
Here’s a few of the most popular and profitable niche topics which are evergreen :
- Health And Fitness
- Wealth and Money
- Love & Relationships/Dating
- Hobbies
- Luxury
- Sports
- Pets
Researching Profitable Sites
A good research tool is to look at a site called Flippa.com. This is a site where affiliates sell their websites. You can also buy ready built affiliate websites but the site can also be used to help you research your topic.
Use the search bar at the top of the page to type in whatever topic you’re thinking of for your niche. You can see how sites make money through the various monetisation strategies available.
Summary
Hopefully you now have a better idea about how to choose a niche for affiliate marketing. You can also sell your site using Flippa.com once it’s been built. Ideally choose a topic which you can get excited by, or at least have an interest in. If you focus on something you align with, it’s so much easier to build the necessary amount of content needed to stand out in your field.
Building a niche in any field is going to take some time and hard work. This is so much harder if you choose a topic you don’t really care about.
Another way to choose your topic is through looking at the products you want to promote. Find products which you align with and they can lead you to deciding on your niche.
To learn more about the various affiliate products you can promote through a niche website, access a free video series here.