Finding Your Niche, Products and Keywords
Gathering the Essentials You’ll Need to Launch a Profitable Campaign
Launching a profitable affiliate marketing business all starts with finding the right niche. In this section, we’ll go over all of the necessary steps that you need to start making your affiliate blog and your feeder sites.
Niche research, keyword research and product research are absolutely essential to your success. These steps may take a while but they are necessary in order to have a strong foundation for your business.
Niche Research
Niche is a term used to describe a group of people who are very interested in the same thing. They are connected in some way based on their interests, conditions or circumstances.
While large companies focus their marketing efforts on large markets (McDonald’s markets to anyone who is hungry) as an affiliate marketer you want to drill down closer to find a small, passionate niche of a larger market.
Think small
Niche marketing requires that you think on a small scale. It’s better to target a market that has several thousand passionate people than one with hundreds of thousands of members. As an online marketer, you just don’t have the kind of resources that you’d need to market to large groups.
Finding a niche is as simple as thinking about popular topics and then drilling down. For example, gardening is a very popular topic. There are magazines and even television channels dedicated to gardening. However, it is a very large market and you’ll need to drill down to find your niche market.
Go beyond
Think about what kind of gardening people do. There’s herb gardening, vegetable gardening, flower gardening, organic gardening…the list goes on and on. Each of these specific types of gardening constitutes a niche.
You can even drill down further to find small sub-niches within these niches. For example, there is a relatively large market of people who are passionate about growing vegetables with heirloom seeds.
Brainstorming, please
You can probably brainstorm off the top of your head a few large markets and then with some Internet research drill them down into tiny niche markets. If you find yourself stuck for ideas, you can try a few different methods. First, you can visit sites like Google Zeitgeist or Squidoo Top Lenses in order to find search patterns and trends for different markets.
Magazines.com and Amazon.com are also two great resources for finding niches. You can bet if there is a magazine or a best selling book on the topic, you’re looking at a passionate niche. Browse through the best sellers and the most popular in different categories and jot down ideas.
Write down your ideas
As you visit these sites, you should write down niche ideas in a long list. Don’t evaluate them right now. Just get them written down and then you’ll have something to work with.
You can also get niche ideas from your own personal life. Are you passionate about a sport, a hobby or a topic? It could potentially be a great niche for you. Mine your own life and the life of your friends and family for niche ideas.
This doesn’t mean that you have to be passionate about the topic you are creating your site on. In fact, sometimes our passions don’t always create profits. But it doesn’t hurt to do a mental check of your life to see if any niche ideas pop up.
Time to evaluate
Once you’ve gathered a long list of niches, it’s time to evaluate them on a profitability basis. Not all niches have buyers and not all niches are conducive to affiliate programs. Scan through your list and ask yourself if people are going to be willing to pay for information or products related to the niche.
Remove any topics on which there is a lot of free information available (like children’s party games) or in which there is a resistance to spending money (like frugal living).
Affliate guide
Articles in this section:
- Finding the niche, products and keywords
- How to do keyword research
- How to research the competition
- Where to find affiliate products