Selecting the perfect niche for your affiliate marketing business from the sheer number of options might sound like a daunting task, and randomly picking one because it’s ‘hot today’ is not the right strategy to build a sustainable affiliate marketing business.
In this blog, you’ll find a step-by-step guide on how to study and evaluate all the niches that stand out for you, identify the most suitable niche and begin building your affiliate business around it.
What is a niche?
A niche can be defined as a topic or a category that is relevant for a particular group of people among others; Personal Development – Weight Loss – Hair & Skin Care – Cooking – Spirituality – Online entrepreneurship – Parenting – Web Design – Travel & Lifestyle – Marriage Counselling – Photography – Interior design – Pet Health and Training… And pretty much any other topic that caters to a specific interest and a specific need.
Why is it important to select a niche?
The importance of selecting a niche is that unless you’re selling oxygen, your business won’t be interesting to everyone. Instead of trying to appeal to a broad and scattered online audience, a well-defined niche allows you to narrow your focus and concentrate on the right group of people.
Selecting the perfect niche means you can understand the value you’re providing through your affiliate marketing business, understands your audience’s challenges and offer them high-quality affiliate products in the form of valuable solutions.
Is it more profitable to select more than one niche?
Selecting multiple niches means that you will divide all your business efforts. That is if the niches are too different from each other.
You won’t be able to mix them together under one business and one brand. So you will be building two different affiliate marketing businesses at the same time. Two websites maybe and two Social Media channels, because you will be targeting two different groups of people (two different target markets).
What works best is to select one primary niche, and build your entire business around it. The niche you select could be broad enough that it can be divided into sub-niches. Like Self-Development or Health & Fitness.
When you build a business around self-development as your primary niche, you can mention Mental Health, Time Management and Morning Rituals for example. These sub-niches fall under one category which is Self-Development.
Same as Yoga, Healthy Diets and Exercise Programs that you can use as sub-niches if you own a Health & Fitness based business.
This way, you can promote different products under different sub-niches and promote them together using the same business platform/s.
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This course is designed for anyone wanting to select a niche for their new business, and learn how to use keyword research tools to evaluate their choice, understand their target market, learn what their audience searches for online, and how to build a business that attracts them.
It’s made for absolute beginners and those who never used keyword research tools before or have any online business background, so you do not have to worry about spending long hours selecting the niche that is most suitable for you and your business.
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Should you select the most profitable niche?
While it’s absolutely essential that the niche you select is profitable, it’s also really important to select a niche that you’re genuinely interested in.
It’s true that many businesses are built by people who don’t have anything in common with their customers, but the affiliate marketing business you’re building as an independent entrepreneur relies on you creating the promotional content by yourself, and that requires a solid understanding of your audience, their problems and their product needs.
When you select a niche you’re interested in, content creation becomes a joyful task, and you’ll thrive in growing your business.
If you speak passionately and honestly about something, you are more likely to establish authority and trust, which in return will help you build long-lasting relationships with your audience and generate more sales.
Criteria For Profitable Niches.
QUALITY PRODUCTS.
The more quality products there are to select from the better. Before you decide on a niche, you should be able to research and find at least three different high-quality products with affiliate programs.
If the niche you select is ideal for you but there are no good products with affiliate programs available, then you know you have to look elsewhere.
ACTIVE ONLINE.
Make sure to select a niche that interests a group of people who are active online, and able to find your content whether on a website or social channels and purchase the products you’re promoting through online purchasing.
QUANTITY.
There should be enough people searching for information within your niche or market (meaning you’re not limited to a very small group of people).
BE THE EXPERT.
You understand your niche, have a passion for it and can relate to it in a way that allows you to constantly improve your knowledge around it and create content comfortably and professionally.
COMPETITION.
Don’t try to reinvent the wheel with your affiliate marketing business. Although you do need to find a niche that will allow you to grow, a little competition isn’t necessarily a bad thing and may just be an indication that demand for the product is high.
Keyword Research.
Let’s start by answering the question; Why do you need keywords to select the perfect niche for your affiliate marketing business?
Keywords are the words you type on search engines when you search for something online. The keywords you need to define for your niche and business are the words that are commonly searched for on the internet. When you create content to promote products you’re an affiliate for, you use these keywords to help your audience find your content when they search on Google, YouTube, and any other search engine.
Every niche will have primary short-tail keywords (self-development, digital business, healthy food, etc). These are typically the most obvious ones and are very directly related to the niche in question. Checking the search volume for these keywords (using keyword research tools) is a great way to see just how popular the niche is.
When thousands of people are looking for the keywords you select, it means there is high demand for them. Don’t be intimidated by the high numbers. This just means that there is a market and a need for you to build a business.
Keyword Research Tools.
There are many available tools that will help you identify the keywords that you should focus on.
UberSuggest offers daily-limited free access.
Google Ads offers a great keyword research tool (you don’t need to run any ads, but if you create an account and then pause the campaigns, you will get access to their Google Keyword Planner for free). Here, you can type in search terms and see how many searches exist. Keyword tools will also suggest variants of keywords and give you ideas for long-tail keywords that you can add to your target keyword list.
Keyword research tools will also provide you with an indicator of how competitive your keyword is based on how many other businesses are trying to rank for them. Besides the two tools mentioned earlier, there are more costly tools like Ahrefs.com or moz.com that will give you access to more features that are needed for advanced keyword research.
These are just some of the tools available. There will be plenty out there that I’ve never even heard of. I recommend you to Google “keyword planner” or “keyword research tools” and check out if you find something that stands out for you. If you need ideas for keywords, a good suggestion is to simply go to Google and type in some main keywords. Usually, Google will suggest other searches, giving you a hint of where you could go from there.
Keyword Research & Your Affiliate Marketing Business.
The importance of keyword research for affiliate marketing is born from the fact that the business model itself relies on creating content that promotes products or services within a specific niche. You want your content to show up when people are searching for the keywords you select. You also want your content to be as relevant for them as possible so they end up purchasing the products you’re promoting. This is as relevant for Social Media as it is for websites.
Keyword Research & Your Primary Niche.
By utilising a keyword research tool, you can identify the perfect niche for your affiliate marketing business. Ideally, the niche you select should be the one with the highest demand and the lowest competition.
To cover keyword research for niche selection, we will use Weight Loss, and Digital Marketing as niche examples to be evaluated and compared, and use the Ahrefs keyword research tool.
Note: It doesn’t matter which niches you are interested in, or which tool you end up using, the research process remains the same.
Niche example #1 – Weight Loss.
The tool shows under Volume that there are more than a thousand searches for weight loss in Denmark during the last thirty days, and under Global volume almost half a million searches globally. It also shows the Keyword Difficulty (competition) being super hard (92).
*Difficulty means how hard it is to get your website to rank on the first ten search results on Google.
Niche example #2 – Digital Marketing.
There are more people searching for this keyword in Denmark (Volume 1.7K), and the Global volume is slightly higher than Mental Health. The tool also shows that it is much easier to rank for this keyword than to rank for Weight Loss Keyword Difficulty showing (2), indicating a low competition.
Based on this research example, Digital Marketing seems like the better niche to select. It has a lot of searches which means there is a high demand for it, and doesn’t have a high competitive score.
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- Understand the fundamentals of affiliate marketing as a business model and build a strategy that enables you to grow a sustainable business independently.
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