Figuring out how to choose a niche for your blog can be an intimidating task. The internet consists ofover 3 billion users and thousands of products. For this reason, finding a niche suited for your blog may take some time and research.
This guide was created to help you find the perfect niche for your affiliate marketing blog. These are the same steps I used to find my own niche. You can use this guide for non-affiliate marketing websites as well, but the focus will be on affiliate marketing.
What is Affiliate Marketing?
Affiliate marketing can be a tricky concept for beginners to grasp, but it gets easier once you understand the basics. Think of advertisements and how publishers place them in magazines, newspapers, online websites, and television stations. Publishers do not have to worry about creating the products themselves. All they must do is generate traffic with their content and receive increased ad views and revenue.
You are the publisher when it comes to affiliate marketing. Your job will consist of placing affiliate links in your website. Your blog content is going to bring readers over to your site from search engines, social media, and other sources of traffic. Your chances of receiving affiliate clicks will increase depending on the amount of readers you attain.
What happens when someone clicks an affiliate link? Once an affiliate link is clicked, the user will be directed to a companies’ page away from your website. If the user decides to make a purchase, then you’ll receive a commission from that sale. This is a common way for websites to monetize their content. You may have even pressed an affiliate link yourself from another blog.
Successful affiliate marketers will help solve any problems a customer may have. This can be done with tutorials, blog posts, helpful suggestions, and links to affiliate products. Making money on affiliate links alone is rare. This is because Google frowns upon having too many links in your content. Nobody is going to be interested in a link directory that provides nothing useful.
What is a Niche?
A group of people trying to solve a problem is known as a market or niche. Think of people who are attempting to lose weight. What can help them solve their problem and accomplish their goals? Things that can help solve their problems include diet and workout plans, different types of foods, vitamins, and supplements. We call this the “weight loss” niche.
If you still don’t quite understand the meaning of the word niche, think of it as another word for a profitable hobby. For example, you may be interested in baseball. If you can make money with this interest via product promotion, then you can say you work in the “baseball niche.”
So basically, a niche is just another word for a particular product or types of products the user is trying to find. A few more examples of niches include computers, dog training, recipes, life coaching, making money online, and video games. The amount of niches you could come up with are endless.
How Do I Find a Profitable Niche?
Now that you understand affiliate marketing and niches, I am going to help you ensure that it is profitable. Almost all niches are profitable, but your chances of attaining success will depend on a few factors.
Broad vs Narrow Niche
A perfect niche will be neither too broad or too narrow. Problems with broad niches include competition and an overwhelming amount of content you’ll need to write. While plenty of material to write about sounds enticing, most people cannot handle a large niche on their own.
Broad Niche Example
“Making money” is a prime example of a broad niche. There’s a vast amount of information you can cover on this topic. Your content can range from getting a job at NASA to making money doing surveys. It could take years to cover all topics related to making money, and staying updated isn’t possible without a large team of writers. Not only that, you’ll be competing with Forbes, wikiHow, Lifehacker, and other large blogs. It is usually much easier to put your focus on a smaller niche and chip away at small audiences rather tackling big websites head-on. Better examples of niches include work at home jobs, affiliate marketing, AdSense marketing, making money with surveys, and product promotion.
Narrow Niche Example
Narrow niches will run out of content quickly. If your topic is too narrow, you’ll eventually find yourself struggling to create new content. This may bring short-term revenue, but the lack of content could later mean the downfall of your website.
Remember that it is possible to target smaller, untapped niches. There’s a wide range of lesser-known products available for promotion. It is not uncommon for people to be searching for these products in search engines. You can certainly make money if you are able to find a product with no competition that receives a handful of searches.
Find out Advantages and Disadvantages
Broad and narrow niches do have their advantages, but making a long-term profit with them will not be easy. The best niche is usually something in the middle. I recommend finding a primary niche with around 3-5+ smaller niches to include with it. This will ensure your content never runs dry and ensure that you can stay motivated long enough for your website to start seeing the traffic it deserves.
One last thing, don’t choose a niche based on its popularity alone. Find something that interests you. Don’t choose a boring niche that will result in you abandoning your website in under a month. Do something that you’ll enjoy for years to come. The best affiliate marketers can publish helpful content day in and day out.
Are There Products Available to Promote?
You can have all the traffic in the world and still make no money if you cannot find anything to promote. While almost any niche is profitable, a few exist that have little to no affiliate networks. If you feel you may be unable to generate a profit with your niche, try making it a little broader to include some additional affiliate products.
How do I find products to promote? A few popular affiliate networks include Amazon Associates, ClickBank, Cj Affiliate, and eBay Partner Network just to name a few. You should get familiar with these networks and search around for products related to your niche. It is usually as easy as typing in your niche or the name of a product you would like to promote. Some companies are even offering affiliate network opportunities directly on their websites. You can also type “affiliate programs + my niche here” in search engines to help find additional networks.
The Bottom Line
Once you know what you are looking for, choosing a niche becomes easy. The internet consists of a vast amount of interests, so finding your niche will only take a few hours of research at the most. I recommend against spending too much time searching for a niche. If you have an interest and know it has a chance at being profitable, then get started today!
