Understanding how to find your affiliate marketing niche is key. Because defining your online market determines your profitability.
Hence, discovering your affiliate niche is crucial in your journey to make a living on the Internet.
At the same time, choosing your affiliate market is always individual due to our varying preferences and strengths.
If you are already an advanced online marketer, you have a good chance to be successful in a competitive niche. While as a newcomer, you are likely better off in a highly specific market with fewer competitors.
Either way, it makes a lot of sense to approach your online marketing topic as a natural extension of your journaling or daily writing.
Let’s call this market your natural niche. Because this niche is what you concern yourself with frequently. And a result, you are a natural expert in this field.
Or if it makes perfect sense, up and onward we go:
And, of course, you can finetune, extend, or change your topics as you go along. In fact, most affiliate marketers will adjust course in their journey to hyper-profitability.
After all, this freedom to explore is one of the many goodies of the affiliate marketing model.
So, here is the process of how to find your affiliate marketing niche:
Choosing the Best Affiliate Niche – For You
As stated earlier, you want to select a market with healthy demand that is not too competitive.
To gain basic insights into any market’s competitive situation on the Internet, we look at keyword supply and demand on the search engines. The perfect affiliate niche would have plenty of people searching for it, while only a few websites cater to that demand.
Online tools like the Google Keyword Planner, WordTracker, SEMRush, and SpyFu are great places for keyword research.
The Google Keyword Planner is commonplace to kick off your keyword research. Log in with a Google Account and get first insights into your keyword’s competitive environment for free. However, this is Google’s too to get you to spend money on their Adwords Advertisement tool. So, you only get the full juice once you set up a campaign.
Wordtracker is an industry veteran who started back in 1998 out of London when the Internet was still a very different place from what it is today. I used Wordtracker back in the early 2000s in my e-Commerce classes at university to illustrate keyword research.
To my knowledge is was Wordtracker that first introduced the Keyword Effectiveness Index (KEI). The KEI is a ratio of demand and supply of a certain keyword and, thus, a great indicator of how feasible it will be to rank well for that keyword.
These days, with the market for keyword research being a crowded place, Wortracker remains a reasonable choice at economical pricing.
Overall Competition in Your Affiliate Niche
So, keyword research allows you to gauge the overall competition in your niche.
But if the competition is low in your niche, this does not automatically indicate a profitable market. In fact, if there is no competition at all, there is likely no viable market.
To further hone in on the sweet spot for your niche, use the PPC bids in Google Adwords. The higher the amount people are willing to bid for a keyword, the higher the interest in the topic.
Competition of Websites in Your Market
Look at the websites that come up in search engines for the keywords of your niche.
If there are major brand websites on top of the results, you are looking at a highly competitive market.
In case there are small blogs and deep webpages of smaller websites among the first ten results, there is a good opportunity to rank high quickly.
Level of Website Optimization in Your Niche
Also, look at the overall quality of high ranking websites and check the number of backlinks.
The less optimized and the fewer backlinks there are, the easier it will be to set foot into that market.
You will find that some markets are much less sophisticated in their web presence than competitive markets like the travel or hosting industry.
Understanding Audience and Consumer in Your Affiliate Niche
Being in touch with the consumer behavior of your niche is crucial. If you are on your home turf, understanding the audience will come more easily.
What questions and problems do people in your niche have? What are the semantics and the terminology that consumers use to talk about products in your market?
As an affiliate marketer, you will need to tune into the lingo of your niche.
If you are looking at a profitable market but find it hard to relate to its consumers, perhaps it’s better to keep looking.
Affiliate Offers in Your Niche
Once you think that you have found a good niche, you need to identify profitable products you can promote.
Potentially, you could promote any product. However, I would recommend only promoting products that you know well enough and can vouch for. This is your reputation, and you are in the business of providing value to people.
You could individually search for products you like and see if they offer an affiliate program, you can join. Many reputable products do not just accept anybody as an affiliate but rather look for high traffic websites to promote their products.
However, it is easier to search for products in affiliate networks that aggregate multiple sellers. The strongest argument for finding products in affiliate networks is that they operate as intermediaries and safeguard fairness between the affiliate and the merchant.
Also, established affiliate networks offer more in-depth statistics and educational resources. For example, affiliate networks usually tell you how well a merchant product in their affiliate network converts. So you can calculate your revenue based on the traffic you send to the merchant from your affiliate links.
And from an administrative point of view, it is much easier to track all your products from a single dashboard than multiple merchant websites.
Well-known successful affiliate networks include ShareASale, Clickbank, and CJ Affiliate.
The End is the Beginning
Once you have identified suitable products, the journey begins. The journey of content creation.
To Summarize – Here is How to Find Your Affiliate Marketing Niche
- Start with your “Natural Niche” and progress from there.
- Conduct keyword research to gauge overall competition in your affiliate niche
- Look at click values for keywords in your market.
- Scrutinize high ranking websites in your niche to understand market players and level of website optimization.
- Find trustworthy high-quality products with high conversions that are in line with your brand.
