Picking Your Niche

“How do I find the affiliate niche that’s right for me?” is a question a lot of affiliate marketers ask, especially the first-timers. The truth is that there is no single magic answer for this – it all depends on who YOU are and what YOU like to do and are good at (and if anyone tries to tell you otherwise, they are telling stories out of school).

To determine which niche to get into, there are two basic guidelines: “go with what you know” and “start small.”
• Go with what you know. Make a list of your interests. It does not matter what it is, as long as you enjoy it – whether it’s books, cars, music, movies, or 18th century Glockenspiels (well, okay, maybe save that last one for another time). When choosing a niche, it is important that you choose an area that you are actually interested in. It will make the process more fun and it will also make it easier, especially if you are a newbie. Having prior knowledge of a subject will help you figure out how to sell its related products. Selling books when you hate reading is not going to do you any favors, and this will eventually show itself in your affiliate commissions, whether you realize it now or not. Having a passion for your niche is important.

Now look at that list, and make another list – this time, it should be products you would buy, related to those interests, if you could. If it’s movies, perhaps you would buy piles of DVDs and the biggest TV you could find. If it’s music, perhaps you would buy tons of CDs and great stereo equipment. You get the idea – what kind of products are out there that are related to your passion? Write them down.

• Start small: A first-timer trying to jump right into the game with a huge site oriented in any of the more competitive areas of affiliate marketing is going to need a lot of luck in order to make a great success of it. By starting small instead, you can hone your skills and better figure out what works for you and what doesn’t before you try to get into the fast lane. So what does that mean, exactly? It means that your first foray into affiliate marketing should likely not be, for example, a large shopping directory featuring tons of different products, a site for Internet service provider comparisons, or an online casino site.

Sure, you may have a passion for Internet roulette, but these are highly competitive areas to get into, and you will find that while it is certainly possible to rake in the cash with a site like that, you’re going to be wrestling for traffic with a lot of other affiliates out there that are doing the same thing…and chances are that many of those people are going to be a lot better at it than you are, especially as a beginner. To effectively get into huge markets like those, you will need a ton of research and a ton of patience, even after you have been an affiliate marketer for quite some time. Not doing as well as you assume you should with a site like that can end up discouraging, and that’s something you don’t want. Save yourself that particular stress, and resolve to start out small in order to figure out what you’re doing, learn all you can, and build up your skill-set before you wade into the more competitive markets.

So now you have two lists, and you know the importance of starting small, so it is time to narrow down your lists and refine things to reach a conclusion about which niche is the niche for you. If your interest is books, that’s great – but trying to focus just on “books” will be a huge task, and it’s not a good idea unless you are secretly Amazon.com. Instead, perhaps narrow it down to a specific kind of books, such as poetry,
biographies, horror novels, or literary fiction. You could also narrow it down to a certain type of author, or a time period, or a country – just make sure that you narrow it down, because if your scope is too large, then you are not starting small.

So, for the sake of example, let’s say you have chosen “literary fiction” as your narrowed-down focus. Now it’s time to make use of your first tool, the search term suggestion tool. KeywordDiscovery has a great free one that is very easy to use, so we’ll go with that for our purposes. Pop on over there and enter “literary fiction” into the search box. The tool is going to return a huge list of search terms people use with “literary fiction” involved. This lets you see what people are after when they are looking up anything to do with that niche. Not all of the items on there are going to be useful for you, but scan the list and see what jumps out at you, and you will find your niche. In the list returned for “literary fiction” at the time of this writing (bear in mind that, depending on when you are reading this, the list may have vastly changed, since people are always Googling around), the search terms that jump out at me are “best literary fiction” and “cadmus award – literary prize – fiction writers.”

What could I do with those? Well, I could build a site that lists or reviews the best literary fiction, including Cadmus Award-winning fiction, and links out to where people can buy those books. And, boom, I’ve found my niche. Your mileage will vary, of course. If you are into movies, then sign up with Express Revenue, build a site that recommends movies to rent from Netflix, offer your affiliate link, and boom, there’s your niche. Take a look again at that list you wrote of products you would buy related to your niche. Have a look at the affiliate networks you’ve joined to find those products (or similar products) that you can add to your list of things to promote. If you’re going the movie route, consider DVD players and televisions, and even the smaller items like cables, speakers, and universal remote controls.

Just remember – go with what you know and start small. Make sure that what you choose to work with is not something you’ve just chosen because you think it sounds good, but something that you actually enjoy spending time with. Good affiliate marketing takes time to implement and keep going, and if you don’t like your niche, you won’t be as likely to put that time in, and your efforts will go nowhere. Even if you’re just borderline or neutral on the subject, you may find you end up disliking it after having to stare at it on your computer screen day
after day (especially if it doesn’t make you as much money as you thought it would). Once you’ve picked your niche your ready to move onto the next topic.