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How to find the best niche in affiliate marketing
There are dozens of niches where you can earn in affiliate marketing – from popular ones such as travel or dating, to unusual ones like ICO. Choosing the best affiliate-marketing niche is not only difficult for a novice, but also for professionals. We prepared a detailed guide on how to find affiliate-marketing niches that correspond with your interests and skills, and are also profitable.
What is an affiliate niche
An affiliate niche is a narrow branch of industry, tailored to a particular audience. For example, traveling is an industry that includes tons of niches – flights, luxury hotels, car rental, backpacking, etc.
Why choose a niche and not industry? It is hard to target a wide audience, and niche brands build strong communities much faster. For instance, too many blogs focus on traveling in general, but just a few marketers write about, say, ecotourism in Europe. Narrow your topic, and you are likely to reduce the level of competition.
The screen below shows the relationship between different niche types and their profitability.
Finding a profitable niche is time-consuming, as you need to consider many factors. To begin, take a look at the most promising affiliate marketing ideas for this year such as traveling with pets, best holiday ideas for honeymooners, buddy vacations for men or for women, gastro and medical tourism, spiritual and adventure tours, to name a few.
How to find the best affiliate niche
To succeed in affiliate marketing, you need to find the right balance between your interests, knowledge and skills, market trends and niche profitability.
Many marketers start off by chasing highly lucrative niches because of their earning potential. On the other hand, it won’t be easy to deliver content on topics you don’t feel passionate about. To put it simply, the scope of skills is also meaningful since your website should be authoritative and trustworthy. That’s why one should find a balance between profit and interest.
Research the market
After determining the scope of interests, research affiliate-marketing niches of your preference. Find the top one hundred websites with the highest rank and analyze them (traffic, links, content, internal optimization, affiliate products that they promote, etc.).
Try to make a list of the advantages and drawbacks of these sites. If you’re going to work in the same niche, you should know your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses. So, if some of your rivals lack an effective email list, create a killer lead magnet and place the relevant form on your own website.
Also, pay attention to available monetization strategies. For example, Problogger makes money with Google AdSense, Amazon Associates affiliate program and other channels, as you can see in the picture below.
Certainly, analyzing websites manually will take a lot of time. To save effort, it’s better to use dedicated platforms such as Similarweb. You’ll see different metrics in a single interface, as in the example below. There, you can select a category and even choose a niche for affiliate marketing within this category or the location you’re going to target.
It’s also great to monitor websites that have recently been sold. Their number is a good indicator of profit. Services such as Flippa or Empire Flippers will help you research the market.
Check the level of monetization
Since not all attractive niches bring tons of benefits, it’s better to check for successful sales. How many products do the websites in this niches sell and are the expenses worth it? Pay attention to various metrics such as conversion rate, ROI and more.
Some programs on the internet are helpful to identify website profitability. One such platform is Clickbank. It helps you understand the niche gravity, potential earnings and more. The screen below shows how Clickbank actually works.
Analyze keywords
Keyword research helps evaluate traffic and ranking prospects. If you’re aiming to take advantage of affiliate marketing products to sell, you need a lot of relevant traffic.
The best and “cleanest” way to get it is through search engines, and keyword research might be just the right approach. To that end, use the best tool for attracting visitors from search, Google Keyword Planner. It’s free to use but requires you to create a Google Ads account and set up a campaign there. Note that there’s no need to actually launch it and spend money.
Here are the steps to take in order to research the niche:
- Create a list of keywords. You can either look for new keys or analyze the existing ones. In the latter case, the tool displays the number of clicks and impressions you can count on for the keywords in question.
If you target a particular location, it’s important to sort the results out on the base of the geography, language and search networks that are in the scope of your business interests. - Look through monthly searches of the keywords. The service also helps identify the average monthly searches and the competition of the keywords.
It’s possible to filter keywords to get a list of medium or low-competitive ones, but the additional analytics are desired since the tool displays competition for Google Ads only. - Pay attention to the suggested bids. The bids reflect the competitiveness for ad impressions. Their range depends on geographical location, language, network targeting criteria, etc. You should check the estimated pricing within your niche to see the entire competitive search landscape.
- Consider the price for each keyword. The most important metric here is cost-per-click (CPC). The next screen shows the average CPC for some popular niches.
Check affiliate opportunities
When an interesting and profitable niche is revealed, it’s time to find affiliate programs and select the most relevant ones according to your skills, passion and offers’ profitability. What should you consider?
- Requirements for an affiliate’s traffic source
- Terms and conditions of the offer
- Affiliate commission and payment threshold (how much you’d make before getting the payout)
- Cookie lifetime (it can last from the session up to 365 days, and even more)
- Available payout methods (PayPal, bank transfer, etc.)
Note: Legitimate offers never ask for an up-front payment, and it’s free to join most affiliate programs. Also, read reviews to see affiliate achievements, the platform’s reputation and possible issues (poor support, delayed payments, etc.).
Start selling
Even the deepest research cannot ensure instant income and that’s why it’s necessary to test even the best niche for affiliate marketing in order to have an objective view.
- Build a simple website without significant artistic work.
- Sign up for an affiliate program and place affiliate material, such as widgets or a link on your website.
- Generate good quality traffic to your page – organic from search engines or a paid one.
How should you analyze your campaign results? The most important metric here is the conversion ratio. It shows how many visitors proceed to the purchase. Calculate how much it costs for you to attract visitors and generate sales, and see if that makes sense to continue. Don’t give up if results didn’t satisfy you. It may be time to put in a little effort and elaborate on the design or make other improvements.
Find the best affiliate niche
The best way to find a niche for affiliate marketing is to try to find one. Spend as little time and money as possible to try to find newer, faster and cheaper ways to do things. Explore the best affiliate marketing blogs to learn about someone else’s experience so you don’t repeat their same mistakes. However, additional success in affiliate marketing depends on a well-built strategy and its correct implementation.
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