9 Steps to Finding a Profitable Niche for Affiliate Marketing

“When you speak to everyone, you speak to no one”      

Not sure who said that but it’s 100% true when it comes to affiliate marketing.

The internet is an overcrowded place full of failed marketers targeting “everyone” and promoting unrelated stuff like dog food, baby diapers, and bicycle accessories on the same site just to make a quick buck (which they never do).

This approach might’ve worked 10 years ago but things have changed now.

To build a long-term and sustainable affiliate marketing business, you must carefully choose a niche, understand the needs of your audience, and become their most trusted source of knowledge.

Narrowing down your focus and going niche, instead of targeting everyone, is the only way forward.

But how exactly do you find a profitable niche for your affiliate site?

How do the most successful marketers do it?

Do they have a process for finding such niches or is it all based on gut feeling?

In this post, we’ll share our proven process to find hundreds of profitable niches so that you can start replicating it right away.

Sound interesting?

Keep reading!

WHAT EXACTLY IS A NICHE?

Before we move forward, let me tell you exactly what a niche is.

The word has different meanings in different contexts, but in internet marketing terminology, a niche is simply a more focused and narrow market within a larger industry.

Niche marketing, often used interchangeably with affiliate marketing, is the practice of creating content and promoting products that are tailored to the needs of a certain niche market.

Here are the key indicators of a profitable affiliate marketing niches.

Let me quickly explain each of them.

It’s specific and well-defined (with growth potential)

A profitable niche is narrow, well-defined, and targeted towards a very specific audience. 

For example, weight loss is not a niche, it’s a huge multi-million dollar industry with lots of sub-niches in it.

A niche would be “post-pregnancy weight loss” or “weight loss for heart patients”

Are you getting my point?

The broader topic of weight loss can be addressed from numerous angles. 

Every angle is a sub-niche. 

But you don’t want to zoom in so much into a niche that you’re left with no room to grow and expand your business, for example, “post-pregnancy weight loss for first-time mothers in New York after a cesarean”

That leaves no room to expand.

Think long term.

Start with a narrow focus but a big vision.

Your long-term goal should be to grow your site into other closely related niches so that you can drive traffic for a much wider range of keywords and open up a wide range of monetization opportunities.

However, the right approach for this is to start with a focused niche and build authority in it by publishing high-quality content and earning links from relevant sites.

Once it starts ranking for high traffic keywords in one niche and becomes an authority in it, expanding into other related niches becomes much easier.

It’s like a snowball effect because you’re leveraging the authority you’ve built in one niche to expand into other related niches.

That’s the route most successful sites take to graduate from say $100K per year to $1M+ per year

Making Sense of Cents, a popular six-figure per month blog in the personal finance niche is a great example.

It started as a simple personal finance blog that shared tips on saving money, paying off debt, and other closely related topics.

But as it started ranking for money related keywords, the blog started covering topics like making money with a side hustle, freelancing tips, and eventually topics like affiliate marketing, SEO and even buying and selling websites.

Today, the blog covers all the traditional internet marketing topics along with its core topic of personal finance.

And because of the authority it built in the early years, it ranks for hundreds of high traffic keywords and gets backlinks from numerous websites.

NerdFitness is another great example.

The site started in 2008 as a personal journal of the owner who was struggling to live a healthy life.

All of his initial content was strictly about weight loss

Today, however, the site has grown into a community of thousands of people who’re passionate about healthy living and covers a wide range of topics like weight loss, healthy diet, motivation, mental health, fitness training, and many other related topics.

It couldn’t have grown into such a big site had it started targeting all these topics from day 1.

In short, a profitable niche is specific and well-defined but always has room for expansion into other related topics.

It targets passions and problems

A profitable niche is based on problems and passions. 

Why?

Because people mostly spend money to get rid of a problem/fulfill a need or to pursue a passion.

These are the niches where the price tag is irrelevant.

Examples of problem niches include healthcare (all angles), money matters, addiction, etc. 

Passion niches revolve around topics like travel, romance, hobbies (for example, survival niche, hiking), etc.

These are all broad industries but you can dig down and approach them from different angles to address specific problems and passions.

The bigger the problem or the more passionate people are about a topic the more they’ll be willing to pay.

It’s all about identifying the right problems and solving them in a profitable manner.

Always keep this quote by Michael Kouly, renowned author, entrepreneur, and Harvard professor, in mind while choosing a niche (it’s relevant for businesses of all sizes)

This is where newbies, in particular, commit a big mistake.

Instead of problems and passions, their niche selection is based on products.

For example, a complete site about GetResponse or a blog dedicated to golf accessories.

That’s a totally wrong approach because it limits you to that product range only.

Plus, such sites usually publish product-focused content only instead of targeting the problems of their audience and linking them with relevant products.

The right approach is to mix things up.

Let me explain.

There are different types of content you need to create in order to target prospects in different stages of the marketing funnel.

The content marketing funnel is usually divided into three stages and target groups of your audience.

• Top of the Funnel (ToFU) – This stage targets people who have a problem but are unaware of the solution (your product)
• Middle of the Funnel (MoFU) – This stage targets people who have a problem and are aware of different solutions (including your product) but are exploring different options
• Bottom of the Funnel (BoFU) – This stage targets people who have a problem, know that your product can solve it, and are looking to buy

Product reviews and comparisons fall in the ToFu/MoFU stage of the content funnel.

They’re effective in educating visitors, helping them pick the best solution for their problem, and sending them down the funnel to complete the transaction.

This funnel stage is made up of your money pages that’ll refer visitors to the product’s sales page on the seller’s site (BoFu).

BoFu content gets the least traffic from search engines because it ranks for keywords where people are actively searching for a product, for example, “ClickFunnels coupon code”, “Buy GetResponse”, “BlueHost Discounts” etc.

Most newbie affiliates publish only BoFu content and get little to no traffic.

The right approach is to link BoFu content with MoFu and ToFU content.

ToFu content comprises mostly of informational posts that target general topics instead of a specific product.

ToFU content targets high traffic keywords and helps you drive loads of traffic to your site. 

For example, if you’re promoting GetResponse, an email automation software, as an affiliate, your ToFu content would target broader topics like “Email Marketing Tips”, “Benefits of Email Marketing for affiliates”, “Increasing Email Conversion Rates”, “Building an Email List”, “Ways to Drive Traffic” etc.

MoFu content is slightly more targeted since it targets people who know your product but haven’t yet decided whether they want to buy or not.

At this stage, you’ll publish case studies, product comparisons, etc. 

For a GetResponse affiliate, the typical topics would be like “How To Build Landing Pages With GetResponse”, “Creating an AutoResponder With GetResponse”, “GetResponse vs. MailChimp vs. AWeber” etc. 

How do you link all this together?

You publish BoFU content for the products you’re promoting so that you can send traffic to it and turn it into customers…

You then publish a combination of ToFU and MoFU content and link it to your BoFU content.

This will help you funnel traffic from search engines, convert them into prospects, and finally turn them into customers.

You’ll also use ToFU and MoFU content to acquire backlinks, build your email list and social media profiles.

ToFU fills the MoFU stage.

And MoFU funnels traffic to the BoFU stage to make the sale.

If you don’t adopt this holistic content approach and only publish product reviews, comparisons, and other hard selling content, you’ll struggle to grow your site and drive traffic to it.

It’s profitable and competitive

You don’t want to invest time and resources in a niche where there’s no money.

Thankfully, it’s pretty easy to evaluate the profitability of a niche and determine whether you can build a sustainable business in it or not.

Firstly, head over to Google Search and enter some of your main topic keywords.

Our objective here is to get a general idea of the keywords that people are using to search for our topic.

For example, I’ve searched for the niche topic “weight loss for women”

Now scroll down the search page to find related keywords to this topic.

All of these are potential topics for your niche that people are actively searching for.

Now copy these keywords and head over to Google Keyword Planner to see if there’s enough search volume for your target niche.

Click on “Get Search Volume”

Paste the keywords you found in Google related searches and click “Get Started”

This will give you the search volume and CPC value for all the keywords

As you can see, the overall niche and its related topics have lots of monthly searches.

If you enter this niche, you’ll be creating content about most of these keywords since they’re closely related.

The CPC value (right next to Vol) in the screenshot shows the cost per click that advertisers are ready to pay for this keyword in Google Ads. 

It has nothing to do directly with affiliate marketing.

It’s not a ranking indicator or a measure of keyword’s value. It’s only the price that advertisers are willing to pay for it.

But it does give us an idea of a keyword’s profitability.

If a keyword has a high CPC value, it’s an indication that the advertisers are making a lot of money by ranking for it.

For example, for the keyword “weight loss for women over 40” the CPC value is $4.01.

Any marketer or company would only pay $4 per click for a keyword if they’re making significantly more money in return (by selling products or services or promoting affiliate products)

So this is a pretty good indication that this niche is profitable.

But to further verify the profitability of a niche, head over to any popular affiliate marketing platform and see how popular are the products related to this niche.

I prefer checking this on OfferVault since it fetches affiliate offers from hundreds of different networks.

Go to OfferVault Affiliate Offers section where you’ll find different categories in which you can find products related to your niche. Or you could simply search for your niche keyword to see what comes up.

Searching for “weight loss for women” shows a long list of weight loss products targeted towards women.

As you can see, there are lots of products with high payouts in this niche.

Overall, these are clear signs that the niche is quite profitable and you won’t have any trouble monetizing it with affiliate offers.

It’s evergreen

You don’t want to build a seasonal business that only makes you money once or twice a month every year.

Or if it’s a fad – fidget spinners for example

And you certainly don’t want to be in a niche, no matter how profitable, that becomes irrelevant forever in a few months.

To build a sustainable business, you want to invest your resources in an evergreen niche that has demand throughout the year.

The easiest way to find this is by using Google Trends.

Search for your topic and see what the search trend shows.

As you can see, the 5-year trend has a few ups and downs but the demand for the topic is pretty consistent.

Which means this is an evergreen topic that you can invest your resources in.

On the other hand, here’s an example of a seasonal topic.

The search interest for this topic goes up during the winter season and is completely non-existent for the rest of the year.

The 5-year pattern of this topic shows it’s not an evergreen niche.

4 STEPS TO FINDING THE BEST NICHE FOR AFFILIATE MARKETING

Now that you know what a profitable niche looks like, let’s see how you can find such niches to start your own business.

Just keep the 4 qualities, that we’ve just discussed, in mind while reading the rest of this post.

Brainstorm niche ideas using the hiss framework

One of the easiest ways to find a niche that’s relevant to your interests is profitable, and has consistent demand is by following the HISS framework.

What’s HISS?

• Hobbies
• Interests
• Search
• Social

Use each of these criteria to look for relevant niches.

1. List your hobbies

First up, pick up a piece of paper and list down all your hobbies.

It could be anything like gardening, baseball, fishing, stamp collection, listening to rock music or whatever else you like doing.

List down as many as you can remember.

For example, here are some of the most popular hobbies among American dads:

You don’t need to be an expert in a hobby. If you enjoy it, list it down.

2. List your interests

Next, list down your top interests.

How are interests different from hobbies?

Interests are topics that you’re generally knowledgeable about.

They can also be your hobbies but it’s not always the case.

For example, you might be interested in tax laws and have more knowledge about them than the average person but it’s not your hobby.

Think of the topics that people know you by or the discussions that you actively participate in whenever you’re with friends or colleagues.

Topics that you can talk about for hours without needing much research.

They can be topics like politics, history, conspiracy theories, etc. 

List them down with your hobbies.

3. Find related topics and queries

Now evaluate each of them from a business perspective.

Is there enough interest in them on search engines and social media?

Let’s pick a hobby, for example, Home DIY and see what comes up in search and social.

Search the topic in Google Trends (but this time for a different reason).

Scroll down the page to find the broader topics and search queries related to Home DIY

You can sort these topics using the “Rising” and “Top” filters.

If you look closely, many of these topics are sub-niches of the broader Home DIY hobby.

For example, if you sort the “Related Queries” using the “Top” filter, you’ll find several interesting sub-niches you can talk about.

The first two are brand keywords so we’ll stay away from them.

But Home DIY ideas and Home Decor are niche ideas you can further explore.

4. Get ideas from social media

Since Home DIY is a visual niche in which people search for images to get ideas for different home settings, Pinterest is another place where we can look for more niche ideas related to this hobby.

Let’s see what comes up when I search for Home DIY on Pinterest.

You can see a few suggestions that further qualify my search, for example, Home DIY on a Budget or Home DIY remodeling.

But let’s just stick to our original search for now and see what comes up

The search for Home DIY returns hundreds of images related to this hobby.

But if you see in the screenshot above, there are different tags under the search bar for our main keyword. 

Each of those tags further qualifies the search results and helps users find exactly the kind of Home DIY images they’re looking for.

For example, one of the tags is “Apartment”. When you click on it, you’ll only see images with DIY ideas for apartments only.

These are ready to use niche ideas for you if Home DIY is one of your hobbies.

Instead of generally covering the topic Home DIY, you can start a niche site that is targeted towards people who’re looking for Home DIY ideas for apartments or people with a limited budget.

And this is just one example.

By running this exercise for all of your hobbies and interests you can come up with dozens of refined niche ideas where you can start targeted affiliate sites.

Shortlist the ones that are closest to your interests and move to the next step.

FIND OUT HOW OTHERS ARE MAKING MONEY FROM IT

The next step is to find out whether there are sites making money in this niche or not, and the methods that are working for them.

Go to Ahrefs Content Explorer and search for your niche topic, for example, “DIY garden ideas” which is a sub-niche of Home DIY.

The content explorer shows you the most frequently shared content on this topic.

From this list, open the first 2-3 results and see how they’ve monetized their sites.

For example, here’s how the top ranking article is monetized.

The site is monetized using Google Adsense and links to relevant products on Amazon.

No digital products on it.

Let’s see another result.

This is a detailed DIY tutorial that shares step by step guidelines and mentions several tools that you need to use.

Every time it mentions a tool, it’s linked to a product on Amazon.

So Amazon Associates is the primary monetization method for this site as well.

In fact, this appears to be the case for most sites in the DIY niche. The majority uses Amazon Associates for monetization while a few others also use Google Adsense.

Which makes sense because they’re mostly promoting physical products.

Make note of this because this is going to be your primary monetization method as well.

Although I would recommend checking OfferVault and other affiliate sites in the niche to see if you can find any relevant products to add to the mix.

Or if there’s any scope of selling (video) courses in the long run.

Why do I say that?

Because even if you’re building an affiliate marketing business, it’s imperative to diversify your income sources.

You never know when an affiliate program changes its policies or becomes less attractive for any reason.

Plus, once you have traffic flowing to your site, why not use it to maximize your earning potential by adding more revenue sources?

Darren Rowse, the founder of Problogger, runs one of the oldest and most popular marketing blogs in the world.

In one of his articles, he shared how he initially monetized Problogger with Google Adsense and Amazon Associates only.

However, as the site grew, he started diversifying his income streams by adding new monetization methods like info products (eBooks, training, etc.), speaking, multiple affiliate programs, exclusive premium content memberships, and several other modes.

Here’s an image showing the various methods Problogger currently uses to make money.

Info products, in particular, are goldmines right now.

People are looking to learn new things all the time. Somethings that you consider as basic knowledge might be advanced information for someone else.

Once you have an audience, see if you can create a digital product like an eBook, a guide, or a video course to sell.

I can share countless stats with you about the explosive growth info products are experiencing, but let me just share a couple of Tweets by the CEO of Gumroad (a platform to sell info products)

Gumroad in June 2019:

Volume processed: $5.8M (up 45% y/y)
Revenue: $404K (up 55% y/y)
Gross profit: $152K (38% margin)

81 creators made over $10,000
789 creators made over $1,000
9,682 creators made something!

But numbers can only be so helpful without context, so…

— Sahil Lavingia (@shl) July 10, 2019

Just look at those stats.

The platform processed more than $5.8M in one month. Nearly 1,000 everyday people made more than $1,000 selling info products (out of which 81 made $10K+)

But here’s the next Tweet is even more eye-opening.

Last month one creator made more money from Gumroad than Gumroad did! 👏🏽👏🏽👏🏽

— Sahil Lavingia (@shl) July 16, 2019

Gumroad made $404K in June 2019.

But one seller made more than that by using the platform to sell info products.

Imagine making thousands of dollars with affiliate marketing, plus additional income from info products.

And the best part about info products?

You create them once and earn for years without having to share your profits with anyone.

We recently published this mammoth guide that discusses info product creation plus 10 other hugely profitable monetization methods in super detail.

Be sure to read it.

LOOK FOR SUCCESSFUL ACQUISITIONS OR PREVIOUSLY SOLD SITES

A pretty good indicator of whether a niche is worth your time or not is the number of profitable sites or businesses in it.

If people are actively buying blogs, eCommerce stores, and other online businesses in your niche, it means there’s a lot of money to be made.

To find this, head over to Flippa, one of the largest website marketplaces, and search for your niche topic, for example, “weight loss”

To get an idea of how much different sites are earning, use the “Monthly profit” filter and set the minimum profit to $1000 per month

This will give you the list of sites listed on Flippa for auction, along with their revenue details, traffic statistics, and other important information.

Empire Flippers is another great place to search for online businesses on sale.

Search for your niche on its marketplace and sort the results by “Sold” to view all the recently sold websites and businesses.

Without disclosing the URL of the sold sites, Empire Flippers gives you their monthly profit and selling price.

Plus, if you click on a listing, it gives you much more detail about the business, for example, its target niche, monthly traffic, traffic sources, income, and income sources, etc.

Going over these results will tell you exactly how much different sites are making in your niche and how quickly you can replicate their success.

EVALUATE YOUR UNDERSTANDING OF THE NICHE

Okay, this part is simple but important.

Before jumping into a niche, you must evaluate your current understanding of its basic concepts and practices.

It’s already your hobby but do you know enough about it to run a site?

You don’t need to be an expert in a niche to make money (please remember that).

You just need to know more than your target audience, that’s it.

You can always research the topic using other people’s content (without copying it of course).

Ask yourself the following questions:

• Do you know why people care about this niche?
• What motivates them to spend money in it?
• Do you know their major problems or needs?
• Can you list the top problems/needs?
• Can you create content that addresses those needs (with research)?

If your answer is “Yes” to all those questions, you’re good enough to jump in.

But even if you can’t create content yourself but do have a good idea about the niche, you can always hire writers who know about it to write for you.

However, if you’re completely clueless about a niche, it’s better to stay away from it at least for  your first few sites.

ANALYZE COMPETITORS TO FIND GAPS IN THE MARKET

This is where the real fun starts.

To make money in a niche, you must find untapped opportunities or improvement areas that others are ignoring.

Your objective here is simple.

You need to identify ways to become better than the existing businesses in your niche.

There’s always room for improvement, you just need to look close enough.

For example, if most sites in your niche are publishing product reviews only, you can easily create a more useful site by adopting a holistic content approach and publishing a balanced mix of different content types like How-To articles, tutorials, reviews, info-articles, case studies, videos, podcasts, etc.

If your competitors aren’t actively building their email lists (which many affiliate sites don’t) you could place a lead magnet on your site to attract subscribers to your list and make more money from them.

If your potential competitors aren’t making use of social media sites, you could get ahead by creating Facebook Groups or accounts on Pinterest and Twitter to engage your prospects.

Look from all angles and try to identify gaps that you can fill.

If you find enough of them, you’ll get ahead of your competitors pretty fast.

EVALUATE SEARCH TRAFFIC AND RANKING POTENTIAL

You’ll (usually) need a lot of traffic to establish a successful affiliate marketing business.

And the bulk of your traffic will need to come from Google Search.

This is why evaluating the search traffic and the ranking potential for the top keywords in your niche is crucial before fully committing to it.

To find this, go to Ahrefs Keyword Explorer and search for your main topic keyword. On the results page, click on “All keyword ideas” in the left panel on your screen

This will give you all the keywords related to your topic along with their search volumes and click rates.

Google Keyword Planner can also do this for you.

But it can’t do what I’m going to do next.

In Ahrefs, you can see the SERP link next to every keyword. Click on it to see the top-ranking pages and results for that keyword.

You can see the number of backlinks, referring domains, and the traffic volume of the top 10 results for the keyword “home decor ideas”

Using this list, you can analyze the content quality of each of the top-ranking sites.

For example, apart from the first 2 results, the remaining sites have a pretty low referring domain count.

Which means you can eventually outrank them if you can get more backlinks from higher authority sites.

You’d also have to determine the link velocity of the top-ranking domains.

Not sure what that is?

Link velocity refers to the speed with which a site is getting backlinks. A natural backlink profile grows slowly and gradually. Like the one in the screenshot below.

While building backlinks to your site, you must consider the speed with which your competitors have acquired links.

Because that’ll determine the general trend in your niche.

If your link velocity is significantly higher than the pages that are currently ranking for your keyword, it could signal alarm bells for Google and might get you in trouble with its algorithms since it would seem unnatural.

Here’s how to find the right link velocity for your link building campaign.

Go to Ahrefs, and enter the URL of the top-ranking page for your keyword in Ahrefs Site Explorer Tool:

In the main dashboard, look at the Referring Domains graph.

It shows you the growth of unique backlinks to this page over the last 12 months.

Note down the number of backlinks the site has gained in the last 3 months.

For example, 15 in April, 12 in May, and 17 in June.

Find the average referring domains the page is getting every month by adding these numbers and dividing it by 3. (15+12+17)/3 = 14.6

This means the top-ranking page has an average link velocity of 14 to 15 unique backlinks every month.

So your ideal link velocity should be 10-20% higher (depending on your risk tolerance) which means you should be aiming to build 17 to 18 unique backlinks to your content every month in order to outrank this page.

Do this exercise for the top 3-5 ranking pages for your target keyword and get an average link velocity to target.

For example, if you find that the average number of unique backlinks of the top 5 results for your target keyword is 55, you’ll need to get more links to outrank them. 

At the rate of 17 to 18 backlink per month (which is our ideal link velocity), you should have the required backlinks in 3 months.

However, you also need to consider other things like

• Average word count of the top ranking page.
• Number of images used
• External links
• On-page SEO factors (titles, headings etc.)
• Page speed and performance

Note down all those things in a spreadsheet so that you can analyze them later.

To outrank the top ranking site for this particular keyword, you’ll need to create better and more in-depth content with more visuals, more backlinks, and better on-page SEO.

Can you do that?

Depends on your capacity.

You can also get an idea of a keyword’s ranking difficulty using Ahrefs. Here’s what we found for this particular keyword.

Ahrefs estimates that you’ll need at least 45 high authority backlinks, along with better content and On-page SEO, to rank in the top 10 for this keyword.

But this is just an estimate.

Use this process to evaluate other high traffic keywords in your niche.

If your research reveals you can rank for them in the top 10 with a little effort, it’s a pretty good niche to enter.

IDENTIFY OTHER POSSIBLE TRAFFIC CHANNELS

Google Search is the primary traffic source for most affiliate sites.

But it’s not the only way to attract visitors.

There are many high authority sites that have pretty diverse traffic profiles. For example, look at the traffic profile of NicheHacks, a leading site in the affiliate marketing space.

Around 56% of its traffic comes from other sources like direct traffic, social media, and email lists.

A diverse traffic profile means you’re never fully dependant on one source and can survive even if Google penalizes you or drops your rankings for any reason.

So, how do you look for traffic diversification possibilities?

Run a quick search on Facebook to see if there are any Facebook Groups around the core needs of your target audience.

Search for your niche topic and click on the Groups tab to find all the relevant groups and communities.

If there are active groups in your niche, like in this one, you can easily drive traffic by sharing your content in them and by growing your own group.

Next, see if your audience is active on YouTube, the second largest search engine in the world.

Growing a YouTube channel takes time but many high traffic keywords and topics are still up for grabs on YouTube because creating video content is harder.

Even if you don’t immediately take advantage of this traffic source, do keep it in your future plans.

Next, look for Q&A sites and forums like Quora, Reddit, and other niche-specific forums.

See if you can find discussions related to your niche.

If you can, it’s another possible traffic channel.

Above all, see how you can grow an email list of engaged subscribers so that you can drive traffic to your site at will.

Identifying all these sources is important because you never want your business to completely rely on one traffic source.

Search will always be your number one traffic channel but you must identify other modes as well to build a sustainable low-risk business.

FIND YOUR UNIQUE ANGLE OR SELLING POINT

By now you should have a pretty good idea of whether a niche is suitable for you or not.

But there’s one last thing you need to consider before diving deep into a niche.

To get people’s attention, provide them value, and generate regular sales, you’ll need to be different from your competitors.

I’m not talking about re-inventing the wheel.

But you need to have a unique angle that makes you stand out from your competitors and makes you memorable to your audience.

There are several ways of doing this.

Firstly, you can attach a strong personal story with your business.

Two blogs on the same topic can look completely different because of their background stories.

For example, there are thousand of blogs in the “Make Money Online” niche but MyWifeQuiteHerJob is more memorable than most of the others because of its background story.

SmartBlogger is another leading blog in the MMO niche with a powerful story behind it. As a result, people follow it.

Try to come up with a memorable story or an angle that can make your site stand out.

Another way to stand out is by designing a more attractive website, creating more detailed content, or by becoming an expert in a sub-niche of your topic.

For example, BestReviews is one of the world’s leading affiliate sites that makes millions by reviewing products.

What’s unique about them?

Every product they review is tried and tested by experts in their own labs.

As a result, their reviews are much more credible than an average affiliate site that publishes copy/paste reviews without any research.

One way or the other, you have to find a unique angle that develops your distinct identity. Otherwise, it’ll be hard to differentiate yourself.

Are you ready to choose your niche?

If you’ve read this far, you already know more about niche selection than most people on the planet.

All you need to do now is to put this information to action, brainstorm new niche ideas, and evaluate them based on the parameters I’ve discussed in this post.

Trust me, niche selection is no rocket science.

So don’t overthink this part.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) – Choosing an Affiliate Marketing Niche

What is a niche?

A niche is a sub-section or a narrow market within a larger industry. For example, email marketing for doctors, weight loss for heart patients, etc.

What is the definition of niche marketing?

Niche Marketing is a marketing methodology in which you market very specific products and solutions that are tailored to the needs of a well-defined niche.

What are the examples of niches?

Weight loss is a big industry, post-pregnancy weight loss is a niche.

Food & Recipes is a big industry, recipes for vegans is a niche.

Toys is a big industry, toys for children with autism is a niche.

What is a successful niche selection based on?

The right marketing niche is Specific, Evergreen, Profitable, and targets Passions & Problems.

What is affiliate marketing?

Affiliate Marketing is the process of promoting products, owned by someone else, to a well-defined audience and earning a commission on every sale.

What is a niche site?

A site that focuses on the needs and problems of a well-defined niche audience.

What is an affiliate site?

A website that makes money by promoting affiliate products to its audience.

What are the most profitable affiliate marketing niches?

Affiliate marketing is a proven business model that works in any niche.

However, any niches in the following categories usually work well

• Health & Wellness
• Romance & Dating
• Wealth & Money

What is an evergreen niche?

A niche that is in demand throughout the year for several years.

How can I create a successful niche marketing strategy?

A successful niche marketing strategy is based on identifying the needs of your target audience, solving their problems/needs with high-quality content, and promoting relevant and useful products that can make their lives easier.

What is the difference between a niche site and an authority site?

A niche site is focused on a very specific segment of a larger market and usually publishes content with a sales focus. An authority site addresses a larger market with more authoritative and informational content, focuses on building a brand, growing an audience, and making money from diversified sources.

What are the best ways to grow a niche site?

Create high-quality content that is optimized for search engines and promote genuinely useful products that solve the problems of your audience. With time, expand the site’s scope to include other closely related niches.

How do I find a growing niche?

By viewing the search trends for the niche on Google Trends and by analyzing the search volume of its main search keywords.

How do I find affiliate marketing niches?

You can find affiliate marketing niche ideas by listing down your hobbies and interests, learning from other successful sites, and analyzing the products listed on Amazon.

How to pronounce niche?

Some people pronounce niche as ‘neesh’ and some as ‘nitch’ – both are correct.

Have any questions? I’d love to respond to them in the comments section.