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One key to your success will be choosing the right niche, or area you want to write about when you start your niche site setup. If you want to build a website primarily supported by Amazon but choose a niche with no products on Amazon then you have stopped yourself before starting.
Instead, you need to take into effect what your interest is in the site and what are the monetization options that will help you get there. This will give you a good idea as to what your focus needs to be to cross them both.
The next part is very key also and this is evaluating the niche you choose to find out what the level of competition is, you don’t want to start out competing with places like Time, Fidelity, or other highly reputable sites.
This leads many people to want the highest price items possible to “maximize” their income, but they may lose out to a site focused on smaller, faster-selling items as the volume is equally important.
What Are Affiliate Niche Sites?
Well, you may ask, what is an affiliate niche site purpose and why should I take the time to build a blog focused on a niche specifically versus something like a family or interest blog?
Affiliate niche sites are far more focused and the purpose is to bring in people who are focused on the topic the niche site is about, they aren’t interested in what you had for dinner but more about the topic you cover entirely.
Many people will make a purchase this year based on the information these same niche sites provide them, whether it is reviews or just information on a need they would like to have filled, building these sites can give you a way to reach people.
6 Primary Ways to Choose Your Niche for an Affiliate Site
Let us dig into the best way to find the niche site that will work for you, we have six different ways you can look at niches to find the perfect opportunity for yourself and start to build your online business.
Examine Hobbies As Targets
One of the BEST sources for you to find a good niche is by looking at hobbies, a large chunk of hobbies are something people can perform all year for a large majority, here is an awesome list on Wikipedia.
The benefits of hobbies are that people start and are beginners and then will slowly transform into amateurs and then into competency. This gives you many areas of focus for your site as you can target beginners only or more technical aspects.
Additionally people can be very open to spending money on hobbies and their pursuits which leaves you more open to being able to get them into items and info products or more.
Examine Amazon and Other Online Shops
The next way to look is a more product oriented approach which lies in looking at the actual online stores like Amazon and Walmart to look at what is in demand, there are tools which can help you see more details in some cases.
The benefit to looking at Amazon is you can dig into any specific category and look to see what they show as sub-categorization. This can help you when looking to build out your article and post structure.
Check for Big Affiliate Programs
Many will focus on only Amazon as it is a nice low barrier to entry, and for your first affiliate niche website it is probably a good starting point. Due to this though there is a LOT of competition over many of the common goods.
For experienced niche bloggers, you can do yourself a large favor by moving outside of Amazon and extending to AvantLink, AWIN, Impact Radius, and other programs that have larger payouts but it will be more challenging to get the sale.
It can pay off greatly if you can find affiliates for $1000 products that are a necessary evil for people and they will tend to be some of the least competitive niches in many ways because they aren’t simple.
Look for Low Competition Emerging Niches
There are always new and exciting products and categories each and every month, you can use tools that are free like Google Trends and Exploding Topics to see new trending products and searches.
If you can get yourself in early and build as the wave of excitement comes you can somewhat ride the rise to become an authority in a much faster time than it would normally take under typical standards.
Find Deep Topics To “Niche Down”
Take for example something like “dogs” while this may seem like a good niche it is GIGANTIC and will be a fight to rank overall for “dog” in general and instead you may want to niche down on a specific breed.
When you niche down like this you can be able to better rank as all the content is on a specific pet and will help you retain users since they won’t see posts that won’t pertain to their specific post.
What you should do here is to make sure you keep your domain niched up so that while you can stay within one type of dog, when you run out of content on that breed you could choose to add a new breed and continue adding into the same site.
Validate Niche Selection
Once you have a list of your niche ideas you will want to start a system of vetting them for how viable they could or can be over time as you want your time investment paid back to you.
Below are some of the major things I focus on when I am looking at choosing my next niche site and I would say as a starting point it will lead you in the right direction to choose wisely.
Check Niche Size and Search Volume
When you are looking to choose a niche you want to do a once over on the SERPs to see if it looks like there is a lot of search volume, typically this will be when you search for money keywords like “best of” or “top 10” or “review” style posts.
Additionally you could use tools like Google Trends to see whether the searches are constant all year long or whether you have a more defined “season” and will expect a tail off at a specific time.
Exploring Competition
In close proximity to the search volume above is understanding what competition exists in the niche, is it one or two huge monolithic sites or a huge array of very small sites that are just highly focused?
If the site you want to make is in a niche with a lot of competition you will have to re-align your gauges and understand that to win it you may have to make much more content and possibly more links and time itself to grow into it.
Analyze Monetization Methods or Potential
How are you believing you will be able to make money from the niche you are thinking about choosing? There are a tremendous range of viable options to help make an income from your niche website we list out a few more common methods below.
Affiliate Links
This is the most common method used by affiliate niche sites, this is using affiliate marketing options like Amazon, Walmart, Avantlink, Impact Radius, and many more.
The benefit to these is that all you need to do is guide a person to a product and if they should click on your link and make the purchase you get credit for a specific amount of the sales, typically 1-10%.
Ads
Ads are a consistent part of the internet and while many people may frown on them they provide a way for website owners to keep income coming in, especially during the off season.
There are many types of ad offers that range from paying out based on the user clicking on them to impressions that are shown on screen, while clicks pay more they happen FAR less frequently
Information Products
A long time internet staple back at least a decade if not longer, these are the offers you tend to see in the sidebar or within a post or popup for a set price that you can download in PDF or other e-reader formats.
These can provide a nice extra income source as it is typically a single piece of work and when crafted right won’t require massive revisions to sell, can become a hassle as you will need to manage returns and questions or complaints.
Membership Courses
This is the creme of the crop, a course can provide consistent income for years for you and your niche website, you can choose to have visitors sign up by year or by month giving you a forecast to upcoming income.
A membership course though is a task as it means working constantly on building and revamping content, you need to keep updates coming as this helps keep subscribers paying so it can become a tiring process.
Drop Shipping
This method is used when you build a shop on your website or through a service like Shopify, these will help you to list products online and then when sold you tell the manufacturer where to send the product to.
In this style of product sale you never have to have inventory on hand to send to buyers but you do pay for the good so you must have a decent level of capital available to make the first orders while waiting on payments.
Validate Your Interest
One of the big keys to your success is your real interest in the niche you are thinking about deciding on. Ask yourself, will I love writing about this niche in a year or when I am 100+ posts in?
For most of your typical niche sites, you won’t be hitting full stride until your second year and possibly 200+ posts in. If you aren’t sure you can maintain then maybe it isn’t the right time to choose this niche, I promise you from experience, belief itself won’t carry long term.
Final Thoughts on Choosing a Niche
Hopefully this has given you some food for thought and a plan to look at any new niche you were thinking about starting. I always see people who start niche sites and then end up quitting or getting bored 10+ posts in.
Websites don’t tend to take off with 10 posts as you just don’t have the ability to get internal and external links to as many posts, many of these sites people tend to delete and call it quits and I don’t want you to make this same call.
