Affiliate marketing has become popular with the idea of making sales commissions through appropriate marketing efforts. The concept of passive income is so attractive that the industry has become an industry of over $10 billion today.
Many affiliates earn $1 million a year and beyond by creating well-structured affiliate businesses. On the contrary, some affiliate marketing specialists don’t even earn a penny due to a lack of planning or simply because they have failed to find profitable affiliate marketing niches.
In this article, you will learn the definition of niches, the advantages of choosing one, their characteristics, and also how to find profitable niches in affiliate marketing with a detailed analysis of a niche.
Steps to finding a profitable niche in affiliate marketing
What is a niche market?
Before explaining what a niche is or how to find one, let’s talk about the affiliate marketing strategy. Affiliation marketing is not about promoting a large number of products. Even a few products can generate great income if you find profitable niches and adopt an effective affiliate marketing strategy.
If you want to build trust that may result in sales, building credibility in your niche is an ideal method. And that’s exactly why this guide “How to find a profitable niche” can make a difference for you.
So without further ado, let’s start!
Niche market: Definition
The niche is a contextual word in affiliate marketing. Although it has several meanings, in the terminology of affiliate marketing, a niche is a narrow subject in a significant industry, in other words, a niche is a small part of a large market.
People often mention niche marketing as the process of promoting a specific part of an industry. As an affiliate marketing specialist, you already know that you have to promote a product to earn an income.
The very idea of affiliate marketing is based on credibility, information, and added value for website visitors. If you are promoting too many different types of products, customers may have an impression of tautology, which mainly affects your credibility.
So if you want to establish yourself as a reliable source of information and become a real promoter, there is no other solution than to choose a niche.
Why do you have to select profitable affiliate marketing niches?
Now that you know what a niche is, and the reasons why you should select one, let’s discuss the concept of a profitable niche.
A profitable niche is just a niche that allows you to sell products faster and earn more membership income.
I know what you may be thinking. It’s easier said than done. Although I agree that it is more difficult than it seems, it is easier than you think.
Which niche brings the best results?
Niche with weak competition
It is no secret that the best affiliates spend hours finding a niche with weak competition. The weak competition is what makes the absolute difference between the sites which are well classified and those which are badly classified in the SERP (results pages of the search engines).
So it’s simple: the less competition, the less investment there is. If you can find a profitable niche, you will save time and money, and you will need less effort to succeed.
Niche where you can make more sales
Although you may get more visits due to weak competition, you may be worried about whether you will get enough sales or not.
Can a profitable niche produce more sales?
The answer to the above question is a bit complicated. Making a sale depends on several other factors such as price, utility, shipping costs, etc.
However, no niche can be described as profitable if it does not have the potential to produce sales consistently. A niche can generate more sales for three reasons.
- The number of products in the niche.
- The presence of information on the niche.
- The importance of niche products in the life of the target population.
This is how it works. When there is a gap in the market, a niche can produce an extraordinary sales volume.
How to assess a profitable niche?
The demand
Since the beginning of the human race, necessity has prompted people to invent and discover. It always leads people to create various products. However, demand plays a different role in affiliate marketing.
You may very well find a niche that is not too competitive, but what is the point of marketing something that will not sell much? Since your business will depend entirely on small payments received from hundreds of sales, many people need to be interested in the product.
Demand is therefore a fundamental characteristic of a profitable niche.
Problems
The best marketers often create their marketing strategy by focusing on solving the problems of the target audience. A common expression associated with marketing is :
A small development could help to better understand.
People often seek a solution to a problem they face. The above sentence probably comes from someone who was looking for a solution to the physical problems caused by a bad mattress.
For marketing specialists, it is unwise to mention a few sales arguments regarding the recommended mattress. Rather, they should try to explain how / why the mattress can solve this problem. This is how marketing specialists attract, hire and delight people and influence their purchasing decisions.
To come back to the problems, if your niche concerns discrete products which do not solve any problem for the public, you risk not being able to reach your target audience.
Problems connect potential buyers to marketers. If it is not a question of solving a problem, even an uncompetitive niche will become useless. Unless passion is present, you cannot qualify a niche as profitable.
Passion
In addition to the problems, passion can push people to make a decision. It can push people to look for things that were not in the plans.
Let me tell you a real experience of how a passion niche drives people incredibly.
I have an adventurous friend, and he wanted to camp in the forest to live a night in the wild. To satisfy this passion, he ended up buying camping equipment for more than € 2,000.
I know it sounds a bit excessive. But if it is a passion, no one will look at how much it spends.
Therefore, a passion niche can be incredibly profitable.
Passion niches can be found in the category of hobbies, travel, art, fashion, etc. However, even the gym can be a passion for people who care about their health. Do your homework if you choose a passion niche.
Evergreen
Even job holders are entitled to moments of relaxation. Passive income through a niche is a great idea, but it’s not a smart idea if it doesn’t allow you to stay relaxed all year round.
As I mentioned before, a niche cannot be profitable if it does not generate a stable amount of income each month. A profitable niche is typically an evergreen niche that will never completely lose its demand.
You may be tempted to promote a trendy product. Fashionable products often generate rapid membership income. The problem with this type of product is that it is often a profitable product once. There is no growth potential, and you may not receive any profit after a while.
For example, during the coronavirus epidemic, masks and kits sold like hotcakes! Once the remedy is known, most people will throw away these products, and demand for these products may drop significantly.
On the other hand, an evergreen niche will receive customers throughout the year – for example, household furniture.
Whether in winter or summer, new models are released, people will need furniture to decorate their homes, making it a stable market that generates affiliate income.
Commission rate
A high commission rate is not only what drives you to promote a product, but it is a factor that plays an essential role in the profitability of your overall business.
Affiliate marketing specialists like to promote products that bring in an appropriate commission amount. This is absolutely understandable because more commission generally means more profit for each sale.
In 2015, Amazon Partner was considered the best affiliate network due to its excellent commission policy. However, they lowered commission rates for most of their product categories in 2017 and 2020. Many affiliates have expressed dissatisfaction with this because their earnings have been reduced due to Amazon’s decision.
Recurring commissions
Recurring commission-based income has made affiliate marketing specialists discover an excellent dimension of affiliate marketing.
Although not a mandatory feature of a profitable niche, it added the possibility of obtaining a permanent source of membership income.
Remember that most promotions of subscription products offer recurring commissions.
So here’s how it works:
When you promote a subscription-based product, the merchant (product creator) considers you an affiliate of its product. For each subscription received through your marketing, it will pay you part of the payment, which will allow you to win a commission each month (or every week, day, year … regardless of the subscription offer for their product).
Here is a practical example of affiliate marketing based on recurring commissions:
KW Finder is a popular marketing tool. If you join their affiliate program and promote their products, they will pay you up to 40% commission on each subscription obtained through your marketing efforts, and they will continue to pay you every month!
Most web hosts offer recurring commissions.
It would therefore be wise to choose a niche that offers promotion of products with a recurring commission.
Steps to find a profitable niche in affiliate marketing
Now that you know what the characteristics are to look for in a profitable niche, hunting can begin. Here are the steps to find profitable niches in affiliate marketing.
Consider your own interests and passions.
When it comes to finding niches, it makes sense to start with the things that interest you personally. In all likelihood, you are already spending money on these things and therefore understand the mood of customers. All you have to do is determine if they can be used as an online activity.
To use a famous phrase, “Choose a job you love and you won’t have to work a single day in your life.”. Several people have successfully transformed their hobbies into profitable niche activities.
Make a list of all your interests in a notepad and examine it carefully. You will be amazed by the number of potential niches that this highlights. Determine how well you know the niches of the market you want to enter.
You don’t have to be an expert, you just need to know a little more than your target audience. Ideally, if you need to create the content, you should feel capable of doing it after doing research. Avoid getting into a technical niche that you don’t fully understand, otherwise, it will be difficult for you to publish articles regularly.
Another option, of course, is to recruit independent writers specializing in a niche to write the content of your niche site. In this case, you do not need to know much about the niche, but you must take into account the associated costs before adopting this approach.
Often you will notice several websites centered on the same niche, such as travel. However, such a niche is too broad for affiliate marketing. Fortunately, you can take this huge niche and visit the Quora website. Internet users can ask questions about any subject and receive detailed answers from the community.
Type the subject of your large niche in Quora’s search field and press the Enter key. You will get a list of questions from other Quora users on this niche. These questions reveal narrow niches within the large category on which you have researched. This should give you a host of good ideas on where to focus your efforts on affiliate marketing.
Identify the possibilities of monetization in the niche in question
It is always a good idea to choose a niche that offers several monetization options, in order to be able to establish several income flows.
This spreads the risk and allows you to stay in business if one of your membership accounts is closed.
Start by assessing competition and note the monetization methods it uses. Do a Google search on your main subject, then examine the first ten to fifteen websites that appear in the results. Ideally, you want these sites to be monetized with sponsored content, Google announcements, Amazon products and their own subscriptions, etc.
Then visit Amazon to find out what affiliates can promote in this niche.
Click on the appropriate category in the left panel to display the products that are suitable for your audience. These products must be high-quality items that you do not hesitate to recommend.
Also look for related products on other affiliate networks, such as ClickBank, Awin, and 1TPE. You must verify that there is a wide variety of products to promote in the niche.
ClickBank, in particular, is an excellent website to check due to its large number of users. To start looking for a niche subject, click the marketplace icon at the top of the screen.
You can start by doing a search on your industry in the field of research provided for this purpose. This will allow you to discover interesting sub-niches.
However, also study the menu on the left of the page, as it already contains lists of selected topics.
Once you have searched for your industry in the search field, or selected your category, the results are displayed.
Product information is displayed to the right of the page, and search results can be filtered to the left side of the page.
Each product that appears here is a product that you can potentially promote as an affiliate.
It is best to use the “Gravity” filter to sort the results.
This indicates how many affiliates have won commissions by promoting these products recently. Take a close look at the products listed to determine if any of them seem suitable for your audience.
Try to choose products with a high severity score and an average income per decent sale. This is an effective way to analyze a potential niche for affiliate marketing and to identify products that may appeal to Internet users.
Assess the competition and the volume of research for the target niche.
As already said, it is better to avoid niches where competition is weak, as this generally means that the profit potential is limited. It is important not to confuse niche analysis with the search for keywords, which is an easy mistake to make. When looking for keywords, you want to find sentences with low to medium competition, as you are trying to get a good ranking for these words. On the other hand, with niche analysis, your goal is to determine if the niche itself can save you money.
KWFinder is a good place to start your search. Type the general keyword of your niche in this tool (1) and it will do two things. First, it displays dozens of other keywords related to your niche that can help your analysis (2). Then, it indicates the difficulty of the keyword (3), the cost per click (4), and the search volume for the specified keyword (5).
The difficulty of the keyword (KD) indicates how difficult it is to rank for a keyword, depending on the authority of the current websites that occupy the first ten search results. The cost per click (CPC) indicates how much money, on average, marketing specialists are willing to pay for a click on a keyword. The search volume indicates how many times Internet users are looking for a keyword on Google.
Ideally, you should search for keywords in your niche with a CPC of $ 0.40 or more, and a minimum search volume of 2000. This shows that the subject is popular enough to generate substantial returns and that marketing specialists are happy to pay a decent amount to post their announcements for these search terms.
If many of the main keywords in your niche have a high CPC, you can be sure there are benefits to be made in this area. Marketing specialists who pay a few euros per click without a guaranteed sale must make a lot of money. Of course, getting a high ranking for these keywords in Google’s organic search results is another challenge.
Evaluate available traffic sources
The importance of this step cannot be overstated. You need to determine if your niche has a diverse range of traffic sources, as this is essential for the stability of your online business. The best way to do this is to examine the main websites in the niche you offer, to see where their traffic comes from.
The extension of Google Chrome SimilarWeb is a useful tool for searching for traffic sources from different websites. Note whether the main websites exclusively attract traffic from search engines or whether social media users also find them.
If the percentage of visitors from social media is high, note which networks they come from. In some niches, for example, the best websites receive a large part of their visitors from Instagram and Pinterest. These are usually visual websites, with many published images.
Indeed, research indicates that only thirty-one percent of blogging items are discovered via search engines. The rest is discovered by sponsorship, mailing mailing mailing lists and social networks, etc.
Do a Facebook search to find Facebook groups focused on the interests of your audience. After searching for the keyword in your niche, click the Groups icon to display the associated communities. If your niche has active groups, you can attract visitors to your website by joining these groups and publishing content. Nothing prevents you from creating your own Facebook group and developing it.
Behind Google, YouTube is the second-largest search engine in the world, so it makes sense to check if your prospects are active there. It takes time to develop a YouTube channel, but many topics and keywords with high traffic are at hand.
If you do not use this platform immediately, you should keep it in mind, at least for the future. Discussion sites like Reddit and forums can also be good traffic channels. Check if conversations related to your niche are taking place on these sites. If so, this is another potential source of traffic. Your top priority, however, should be to determine how you can build a list of subscribers passionate about email to send visitors to your website on request.
These are all key issues to be addressed, as a niche site of affiliation with limited sources of traffic generally has limited growth potential. In all probability, traffic in search engines will be your main traffic channel, but you also need to identify other options for developing sustainable, low-risk activity. Good affiliates do not depend on a single source of traffic.
Find the weaknesses of the market that you can exploit
To take advantage of the niche you are engaging in, you must provide superior quality content to the other websites in your niche. To do this, you need to determine the weaknesses of the content produced by your competitors and find ways to improve it. First, read the content published by the best websites in your niche and note the problems it poses.
Then think about how you could improve it. For example, you could include more videos, GIFs, or images to differentiate content from that of your competitors. You could also deepen the content by including case studies and detailed examples.
In addition, there may be urgent questions on a subject that the best websites do not mention. A good method to identify these omissions is to read blog comments on these sites. Negative book reviews related to a niche on Amazon can also shed light on the type of content your audience wants to read.
Check the sales of sites belonging to the same niche
The number of successful businesses or websites in a niche is a fairly reliable indicator of the merit of this niche. If e-commerce sites, blogs, and other websites in your niche are regularly purchased, this indicates that there is profit potential.
To find out, go to Flippa, a huge marketplace for websites, then search for the main keyword of your niche.
Determine your USP (Unique Selling Proposal: The Single Wind Proposal)
Before making your final decision on the niche on which you are going to base your affiliation site, there is one last thing to consider.
What will be your original angle?
How are you going to stand out from the countless other niche sites online?
How can you make people remember you?
In niches where competition is strong, this question is particularly relevant.
Try to design a relevant story that arouses the interest of visitors to your website.
You can also differentiate your website by making it more eye-catching, or by acquiring authority status in a subcategory of your niche.
Either way, you have to stand out from the crowd by developing a unique identity. The niche you choose to occupy should naturally lend itself to this process. In this way, your audience will be more inclined to buy the products you promote.
