Today, we are going to dive deep into how to choose a niche for affiliate marketing. This can be one of the biggest decisions that you make during your affiliate marketing journey.
But don’t be too worried about making the wrong decision that could throw a wrench in your plan for a website before you have even started!
We have prepared this step-by-step guide to make it simple for you to find a niche that you care about, and can make you sustainable money in the future.
Our 3 Keys to Finding the Right Niche
There is a lot of information on the internet about affiliate marketing, especially niche selection. This is great for self-starters and independent learning types, but we realize that it can lead to “analysis paralysis.”
This will have you thinking things like:
“How can I be sure I’m making the right choice?”
“What if I pick the wrong niche and never make any money?”
“What if I pick the right niche but still never make any money?”
This is completely normal, but I want you to keep these concepts in mind as you read through our guide. These are the most important aspects of niche selection.
- Ensuring your niche can be monetized.
- Finding a niche where you can be competitive.
- Choosing a niche that you care about, or at least could see yourself caring about.
We will refer back to these points throughout the guide. Let’s get started.
Finding Your Niche Ideas
The first big step you can take towards finding your niche is making a list of keywords that you can focus on. The great thing about this step is that you can do it at any time, without spending any money at all.
The goal here is to come up with a list of 10-20 niches, which will then be further refined.
Here’s a quick list that I have put together as an example. These are all interests that I have or products I am on the lookout for.
Some of these niche ideas are borrowed from the 1,452 Niche Ideas list that you can access on the BrandBuilders site.
This is a great resource for your first step in how to choose a niche for affiliate marketing. It will also give you a stronger definition of what a niche truly is so that you can better determine niches from your own hobbies and interests.
NOTE: If you’re ready to get straight to it, you can get one of our pre-made niche websites for sale. We apply our years of experience to finding strong niches for you, so you can focus on growing the site!
Exploring Niches with Quora
If you are looking for a more self-directed way to find your niche, a tool like Quora can be a great way to dig deeper into topics that you are already interested in.
Take the “scuba diving” niche, for example. This isn’t really a niche, more of a starting point.
It is probably extremely competitive. However, I can find niches within this topic that could work better for affiliate marketing by entering a simple search query.
Under the “scuba diving” search, Quora has shared several relevant and recent questions that real people have had about scuba diving.
Just from taking a look at this, I know I can look into “night scuba diving”, “scuba diving in Goa” and “beginner scuba diving equipment.” People have answered these questions, so there is clearly a demand for people to learn more about the topics.
Other Niche Idea Methods
If you are still struggling to find niches for your initial list, try looking through your “recently purchased” list on Amazon or the bookmarks section of your web browser.
Another good tip is to do as Brady from BrandBuilders mentions in his video on niche selection. It’s worth a watch and goes hand in hand with this article.
Brady recommends thinking about niche selection through the lens of the “language of need.”
Purchasing decisions are driven by the problems that people have. You want to be able to solve their problem with your content, and with the products or services that you can refer them to.
Think about times when you or someone you know has said, “I wish that there was a better solution for this.”
You can solve this problem and fill the need with your content!
Are You Passionate About Your Niche?
This can be a contentious topic in the affiliate marketing world, especially when it comes to answering the question of how to choose a niche for affiliate marketing.
Some will say that you can only succeed if you really care about your niche enough to have it on your mind for months while your site builds authority.
Others hold fast to the belief that sticking only to your passions can keep you from picking truly profitable niches, which handcuffs you at the start of your journey.
This will always be a debate, but I like an answer that lies somewhere in the middle.
You should choose a niche that you are passionate about, or have the capacity to be passionate about.
Here’s a good test you can use to make sure you are making the right decision about your niche: If you were at a bookstore, would you spend $20 on a book about this subject?
If the answer is yes, then also ask yourself, would you read that book to unwind after work? Would you want to keep learning about this subject even when you have been having articles written about it for months?
A niche that you are passionate about allows you to:
- Create well-informed content consistently
- Make it through the authority-building months where you aren’t earning money
- Think of creative new content methods to help solve people’s problems
If you choose a niche that you aren’t passionate about, you risk the following outcomes:
- You become frustrated with a topic that is hard to learn
- Your content quality suffers as you pump out more of it to try to boost your rating
- You lose confidence as an affiliate marketer
Remember, a huge part of affiliate marketing is content marketing.
A huge problem that this discipline has faced in recent years is content that is created for search engines, not people.
If you create good content that solves people’s problems, you have a much better chance of seeing success in affiliate marketing.
From our original list, I can remove several niches.
“Water filtration systems” can go, because although it has the opportunity to be profitable, there’s no way I would have the capacity to educate myself on it consistently. Because I enjoy cooking, even after a long day at work, I would much rather stick to my “mediterranean diet” and “growing herbs at home” niches.
Can You Make Money With Your Niche?
Now that you have your list of niches, it’s time to break this list down a bit further.
Before you talk about keyword research or competition in a niche, you need to be able to make sure of one thing: can you make money in the niche? Will it be a profitable niche in the long term?
There are a few basic questions that you can ask yourself to verify this.
Again, this doesn’t require any time-consuming research or expensive software. All it takes is a critical eye.
Is There a Product?
Niches with physical products are a great choice for anyone getting started in affiliate marketing. This is because the path to making money is clear, so you can use affiliate posts to refer visitors to places where they can buy.
Physical products often have less competitive keywords too, making them easier to monetize.
Profitable niches can also exist when you are selling services. A service like website hosting or password management for bloggers makes sense, as long as there isn’t too much competition.
Other methods of earning money like display ads or selling your own product like an e-book can be effective as well, but they are not worth worrying about when you are just getting started.
Testing Monetization With Amazon Associates
You can easily check to see if a niche is worth monetizing using Amazon. This works best if you are considering joining the Amazon Associates program, which is common for beginner affiliate marketers.
Try searching for products related to your niche. If you can find at least 30 products that are in your niche, you have probably found one that can be properly monetized.
If there are any fewer, your niche is likely too narrow and you will need to step back and try again with a different topic in mind.
Can I Sell My Own Product?
Asking yourself whether you can sell your own product is a great exercise for making sure you have found a profitable niche.
The point of this isn’t to start thinking about whether it’s feasible to start prototyping a “fogless shaving mirror” all on your own. It’s about asking whether there is room for small players.
If I were in the PC gaming niche, for example, it might be very difficult for me to sell a product. There are plenty of large players in the industry who are very effective at getting their product (PC video games) to consumers.
However, if I focused on PC gaming accessories, it’s much more realistic to imagine finding a way to sell gaming keyboard pads or other accessories.
Selling your own product is a late-stage strategy that some affiliate marketers use to earn even more money from their sites. Give it some thought now to make sure you are entering the right niche.
Researching Affiliates
For each niche, it should be fairly easy to determine how much commission affiliates will pay for each sale made.
Check out our list of the 36 Best Affiliate Programs for Making Money With Your Site to see how commissions vary for many niches.
It will be much easier to monetize a site with a higher commission rate. Keep in mind that affiliates like Amazon Associates typically operate with much lower commissions.
Try some quick calculations to make sure that a low commission rate can be offset by higher sales volume. As an example, you would have to refer 1000 sales of a $50 PC Gaming Keyboard Pad at a 1% commission to make $500 in a month.
Fast-Moving Niches
Another question that you can ask yourself has to do with how fast things change in your niche.
Some popular affiliate niches (especially in technology) see new products being introduced constantly. The smart home industry is a great example of this – there are new products and versions released at a breakneck pace.
This can be a good thing. It can mean that there are lots of products to review, and you will have no problem finding new keywords to focus on with your content.
However, this can also mean that your older content becomes ineffective rather quickly.
Finding a profitable niche in affiliate marketing will be much easier if your older posts can still do the leg work for you months down the road, so we recommend sticking to niches and products with longer life cycles.
Think about products that people typically hold onto for a few years at least, rather than something that can become obsolete quickly.
Competition
It is relatively simple to determine if a niche is worth going into by determining the Domain Authority of sites that are already operating.
First, you can make a Google search for some basic keywords in the niche. We can try this with “growing herbs at home.”
After scrolling past the ads and “people always ask” section, we can see that there are several sites we have heard of (like thespruce.com) and others we haven’t (harvesttotable.com).
Using a Domain Authority Tool
Now we can use the Ahrefs Website Authority Checker to find “low Domain Authority” sites.
Domain Ranking is a measure of how a site will rank on Google, and we will try to find sites that have a low DR (less than 25). If we can find a site on the first page with a low DR, then this niche is worth going into.
If not, ranking in this niche will be like trying to train for an Olympic hundred-meter dash. Let’s try plugging the harvesttotable.com into the Website Authority Checker.
This is a pretty high domain rating. After a few other searches, I find out that this the lowest DR on the search results page.
This is a very competitive niche. I would be much better off finding a different sub-niche.
I could focus on less popular herbs like marjoram, or growing herbs indoors or in apartments.
What is the Earnings Ceiling?
Keep in mind that the presence of some sites with a strong DR on the SERP isn’t a ba