Creating content takes a lot of effort. It involves an opportunity cost that is way higher than the money you invest into your affiliate marketing business – that’s because, with a non-profitable niche, it will take months before you realize that the business was set up for failure right from the onset.
That’s why it’s quintessential that you invest quality time into finding the perfect niche before you jump in headfirst.
Before getting to the main topic, let us briefly touch upon…
What is a niche in affiliate marketing?
A niche is defined as an industry vertical that captures the attention of a specific audience group.
Let’s break that down into 3 parts –
- Industry Vertical
- Specific Audience Group
- Capturing Attention
Industry Vertical
The best way to explain this concept is through an example. Let’s pick Health as an industry.
There are many ways that you can look at health. It can be – physical Ill-being, mental health, emotional health, etc.
Yet, it can also be – medical science, medical equipment, a specialty hospital, etc.
The list does not end! Health can also refer to family health, corporate health plans, health insurance, Ill, you get the drift. The list is endless.
This goes to show that in the Health Industry there are many verticals. Each such vertical qualifies as a niche.
Specific Audience Group
For each of the niches discussed above, there is a specific audience group that is tuned in.
For example, the family health insurance niche attracts a young couple looking for insurance that covers the whole family.
Similarly, someone dedicated to personal health will focus on content related to workouts or maybe Yoga.
Every audience group has a characteristic feature – some businesses see it in the form of a buyer persona, for example, a fitness niche has an 18-35 age group audience, a part of which has purchase potential, so the marketing efforts are aligned to their lifestyle.
However, a better way to identify the right audience is by recognizing the search intent. This way you group people into segments of ‘what they are looking for, instead of shoving them into age or gender based segments which can often mislead.
Capturing Attention
Once you have the industry vertical and the audience group, you need to find their pain points and recognize what they are passionate about.
The more aligned you are to their problems and motivation points, the better you will capture their attention and keep it.
Remember, with affiliate marketing, your prime focus should be on providing immense value to your audience. The money is the corollary of the value you provide.
Alright, once you have the above 3 elements down pat, you can be sure that you have identified a niche.
But does every niche make money? Of course not, and that’s why you’re here – to identify niches that make money, right? Okay, I won’t make you wait any further, let’s get to the meat of this blog post.
How to find a profitable niche for affiliate marketing?
To find a niche that generates revenue for your business, you must eliminate niches that do not have the potential to make money. It’s a game of elimination – not selection. So, we will start with a long list of niches and keep shortening it step-by-step until we are left with one niche that we choose for our business.
Here’s the 10 step formula to find a niche:
1. List down topics that you are passionate about.
At the initial level, we are talking about topics and not niches. Do not bother just yet with the 3 elements of a niche.
Just let your life experiences take over and list down 10 topics that you know you can create content around. This is my list:
Skincare
Succeeding in Your 20s
Mental Health
Workout Tips
Music Production
Space Saving Furniture
Moving Cities
College Life
Work From Home
Online Marketing
Your list can be way different than mine and can have a far different number of items. That’s okay! The intent is just to brainstorm ideas and put everything on the table.
If you are short on ideas, then look around your home and list down the products that you use regularly. You might find an old, unused TV set, you can then write topics around that – selling old TVs, rejecting electronic scrap, reusing electronic waste, etc.
Also, check your search history to notice the topics you have been Googling the most. For instance, you might be looking up topics around houseplants, so that becomes a topic.
You can get even more ideas by accounting for the recent events in your life. Did you move cities recently? If so, how did you transport your stuff? How did you find a new home? A lot of people search for similar content and that’s why this can be a good niche.
Alright, your list is ready? Good, let’s move to the next step.
2. Eliminate YMYL niches.
Starting a blog, unlike getting a job, requires no specific qualifications. You just get hosting, buy a domain, sign up on WordPress, and get started.
However, certain blog categories can have a deep impact on a person’s health, financial Ill-being, and safety. They are known as YMYL (Your Money Your Life) niches.
Google is extra cautious while serving results for those categories on the search pages. It demands extremely high standards of content quality along with a high degree of trustworthiness and authoritativeness.
This means any new blogger with no proven credentials will find it hard to rank for search terms pertinent to these niches.
So if you have mental health or personal finance on your list, you might want to strike them off until you have the credentials.
However, it’s worth noting that YMYL applies mainly to blogs as they get featured on Google searches. If you plan to start a business on YouTube, Instagram, Pinterest, or any other affiliate platform, YMYL is a fair game.
After removing YMYL niches from my list, this is what I’m left with:
SkincareSucceeding in Your 20s
Mental HealthWorkout Tips
Music Production
Space Saving Furniture
Moving Cities
College Life
Work From Home
Online Marketing
3. Shortlist niches that you are really interested in.
No matter which niche you choose, you still have the challenging task of creating content and lots of it.
If you REALLY do not like the niche then you will slack once the initial enthusiasm fades. Once fatigue sets in, the blog that was supposed to earn you passive income becomes a burden that you abandon eventually.
Plus, a lot of topics that you are interested in, or have basic knowledge about, may barely interest you once you delve deep. And delve deep you will because that’s what your audience expects – deep, informative, helpful content.
So from the updated list, strike off niches that you have a meh level of interest in.
In my case, I will strike out Moving cities because I only did it once, have very basic knowledge, and have no interest in learning more about it.
This is what the updated list looks like:
SkincareSucceeding in Your 20s
Mental HealthWorkout Tips
Music Production
Space Saving Furniture
Moving CitiesCollege Life
Work From Home
Online Marketing
4. Remove niches that do not align with your affiliate platform.
With Affiliate Marketing, the niche you choose depends on the type of content that you are comfortable with. For example, some folks love to be on camera while some prefer writing. The camera lovers will create pictorial content or videos, while writers might go the blogging route.
Your interests and comfort level determine the platform where you build an audience and sell affiliate products. Not all niches go with all platforms.
For example, if Lifestyle is your niche of preference, it’s much easier and faster to build a following on Instagram and YouTube, compared to a blog. Sure, you can use a website to host your eCommerce store, but to drive traffic there, you will rely on “visual” platforms.
Otherwise, if your niche is Coding, a blog might be a better option.
As a camera-shy person, blogging is the way for me. So, I will eliminate Workout tips and Music Production from my list. That’s because, as per my research, both niches have a strong audience base on YouTube. It’s easier to cover content pertinent to them through a camera rather than through words. This is what my list looks like now:
SkincareSucceeding in Your 20s
Mental Health
Workout Tips
Music ProductionSpace Saving Furniture
Moving CitiesCollege Life
Work From Home
Online Marketing
5. Niche down to reduce competition.
People realized the earning potential from the internet immediately after its inception. Back then, search engines were not as advanced as they are today, so a lot of people created low-quality content with black-hat SEO, and still made a lot of money.
This easy-to-score opportunity attracted many content creators to produce online material under different niches. Some of them maintained quality right from the beginning. Today, Google rewards them with high rankings due to their consistent value-adds.
But today, it’s not easy to break into the niches that the early starters occupied, especially for the YMYL niches where they have some sort of immunity from the competition.
The only solution for new affiliate marketers is to find a micro-niche. A micro-niche is a subcategory of a bugger niche. For instance, Kitchen Organization is a sub-niche under the umbrella of Home Decor. Outdoors Knife is a sub-niche under the Knives category; incidentally, it’s also a sub-niche under the shadow of Outdoor Survival.
Sub-niches have much less competition. Plus, they are more specific, making it easier to attract relevant audiences compared to a more generic channel.
Here are a few sub-niches that I identified:
SkincareSucceeding in Your 20s – Career in the 20s, Dating in the 20s, 20 Something Men, 20 Something Women.
Mental Health
Workout Tips
Music ProductionSpace Saving Furniture – This one’s already a sub-niche under the Furniture niche.
Moving CitiesCollege Life – College life-based in the city, Working part-time while in college.
Work From Home – WFH with kids, Time-management
Online Marketing – Performance marketing, SEO, Content Marketing, Email Marketing, Small Business Marketing, etc.
Even some sub-niches can be too competitive. For instance, SEO, Email Marketing, and Content Marketing niches are super-saturated, so I would niche them down further – Content Marketing for Small Businesses, Email Marketing for beginners, etc.
6. Cut down on sub-niches using Google Trends.
In this step, we will cover an important step to find a niche. I will show you how to select one among multiple similar niches using Google Trends. This free tool shows the search volume across Google search, videos, and images across a specific period in a selected country.
For example, Content Marketing and Email Marketing are somewhat similar topics. Let’s see how these two topics have performed over the past 5 years in the US.
As per Google Trends, Email Marketing far exceeds Content Marketing in terms of the search volume for Web Search.
However, when we take a look at the YouTube Search comparison, we see that the search frequency is too low for either sub-niches.
See how patchy the chart is, this indicates that people search about these topics on Google search, not as much on YouTube.
To elaborate this point further, I have replaced Content Marketing with the keyword Workout, lets see what the stats show for YouTube search:
A lot of people searched for Workout on YouTube and barely any looked up Email Marketing.
Anyway, going back to our previous example, Email Marketing is the winner.
If your sub-niche is based on a specific location, Google Trends can be of further help. On scrolling down the page, you can see which states in the US show the greatest interest in a particular topic.
You can even dig deeper to the City level by clicking on the Subregion drop-down.
Another important aspect to check while using Google Trends is the seasonality of your niche.
For example, if your niche revolves around purchasing gifts, Google Trends will show you that the search volume peaks in early May and then around Christmas.
This way, you will know when to expect a surge in traffic. Also, you might want to think of alternatives in the low season.
That’s how you use Google Trends to shortlist a niche.
And here’s my updated list without the niches that we struck out:
Career in the 20s
Space Saving Furniture
Working part-time while in college.
WFH with kids
Email Marketing for small businesses
Ideally, you must consider search volume, ticket value, and the sub-niche competition before you arrive at this list. But for ease of explanation, I have kept these topics for subsequent sections and short-listed niches purely based on Google Trends.
7. Strike off niches based on the ticket value.
In this step, I determine the average price of the products that I intend to sell under a specific niche.
As a new content creator, you do not have enough clout to influence people to make purchase decisions for an expensive product. You need to start promoting low-ticket, or in simple terms – less-expensive products.
However, if you sell too low-value products, you will barely make any money. Suppose, a product costs $25 and you get an 8% commission from Amazon, you make $2 per purchase. Simple math shows that you need 500 sales to make $1000 per month. And for these 500 sales, even at a high conversion rate of 5%, you still need 10,000 visitors!
But, if you sell products worth $100, at the same commission rate and conversion rate, you just need 2,500 visitors per month.
And guess what, creating content for either of the two niches takes the same effort! So why not choose the niche that has the potential to make more money? Plus, once you get good followership, people will trust you, and then you can start selling more expensive products.
The way to find the ticket value for your affiliate business is to identify products that you will sell. If you plan to sell physical products, Amazon is your best source. Hop on to Amazon and look for products that cost somewhere in the range of $100-$150.
Here’s what I see for Office Bags Men:
There are a lot of options available in the set ticket range. Also, these products have a decent number of purchases too.
Besides, I can also find products for work shoes, watches, and a bunch of other items.
For digital products, you need to rely on other Affiliate Networks like ClickBank, ShareASale, CJ Affiliate, etc. In fact, even physical products are available on these networks, and they offer a higher commission than Amazon.
But in the beginning, it’s advisable to sell through Amazon because that’s a website that your audience recognizes – they would be more comfortable buying from Amazon than other sites, especially on the recommendation of a new content creator.
Here’s my updated list of Niches based on my product analysis:
Career in the 20s
Space Saving Furniture
Working part-time while in college.WFH with kids
Email Marketing for small businesses
8. Check search volume for each niche.
Even though no tool estimates the search volume effectively, you need to get a rough idea before picking a niche.
A niche with a very low search volume will be seen by far fewer people than what you need to generate a sizable income.
A freemium tool that I use to find search volume is Ubersuggest. This is what the tool suggests for my niche – Space-saving furniture.
The niche keyword gets about 8K, but there are a few additional keywords, each with a good search volume.
However, it’s not the niche search volume that paints an accurate picture of potential visits to your website – it’s the blog ideas.
Let’s elaborate on that with an example:
Since I intend to start an affiliate business through blogging, I check the Google search results for space-saving furniture.
The first listing I see is of an Ad, and that takes up the first fold of the results page.
The next two search results are from established brands, and so are the results on the first page.
Overall, Google prefers to display visual results for the search term. This means that I need an online store to get organic traffic, plus I need a lot of domain authority.
Frankly, this doesn’t look like my cup of tea because it’s highly competitive and content alone can’t win the battle for me. I need a huge budget that I do not have. So I either change my niche platform and move to YouTube or change my niche.
Instead of looking at niche search volume, look for topic-based search volume. We will discuss that in the next step.
9. Research at least 30 topic ideas
As a content producer, you need to be a prolific publisher, otherwise, you become less relevant on the platform.
It doesn’t matter which platform you choose – Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest – every single one of them wants creators who publish content with high frequency. If you stick with the low volume gameplan, the platform’s algorithm will plummet your visibility and your revenue will suffer.
The only way to be prolific is through a content plan. You must know what you will publish on a particular day, and have content ready on time. That’s why I would recommend you to come up with at least 30 topic ideas to sustain your presence for at least 1 month.
30, however, is the bare minimum. I urge you to come up with 50 topic ideas before you dive in.
Here’s all you need to generate content ideas that have decent search volume and low competition.
Next, for each topic idea, list down the estimated search volume from Ubersuggest or the keywords everywhere tool. This way, you will know how much traffic to expect once you start ranking a few months later.
And if that search volume can’t generate your target revenue, you can identify even more topic ideas or change the niche altogether.
Sure this process may take hours, yet, this step is quintessential because if you skip it, you will learn only months later that you had set yourself up for failure.
Alright, based on my topic research and volume analysis, here’s what my updates list looks like:
Career in the 20s
Space Saving Furniture
Working part-time while in college.WFH with kids
Email Marketing for small businesses
10. Check Facebook Groups, Reddit, and Quora
The last step of the process is to check for audience engagement on public forums like Reddit and Quora. What’s the audience size for the niche topic? How receptive are the members to new content? How many comments does a post get on average? And where is the audience from?
This will give a rough idea of how much people are emotionally involved with this niche.
Also, even though Facebook is about dead for actual sales, it is still a good platform to gauge audience interest. If a niche has a lot many Facebook groups with an active participation quotient, that niche has a good chance of generating traction and revenue.
Finally, if I were to pick one niche, I would go with Career in the 20s.
That’s it, that’s how you find a niche that drives high affiliate revenue.
Do you have questions? Put them in the comments below.
