One of the most common mistakes that new affiliate marketers make is not choosing a niche to focus on.
Choosing a profitable niche is the most important decision you must make before you can start your affiliate marketing business and make passive income online.
Before you invest your time, money, and effort in driving traffic to your squeeze page or creating content, you need to know if there is a demand for products and information in your niche.
In this post, I am going to share with you, what is a niche and how to find an affiliate marketing niche and make passive income.
What is a Niche?
A niche is a specific market, interest, problem, or goal that people share.
You can make money online by creating content around those interests and then make money by promoting products and services to people interested in the niche.
These products and services can be someone else’s (promote as an affiliate) or your own.
For example, “weight loss” is a huge market with millions of people interested in the topic.
How to Find an Affiliate Marketing Niche
If you ask 10 people what niche you should focus on, there is a good possibility that 5 of them will tell you to follow your passion and the other 5 will tell you to follow the money.
I would say follow them both. Here is what I mean.
If you decide just to follow the money, without any passion for the things you do, it is very easy to get discouraged when things do not go well, one day you will wake up and quit.
If you just follow your passion without making sure that people are willing to pay for what you a passionate about, you will make a very small amount of money or nothing, the best way to do this is to combine both of them, I am going to explain how below.
My two steps in finding a profitable niche
- Find out your topics of interest
- Find out if people are paying money for information or products on those topics
That is simple but I am going to elaborate more below.
Find out your topics of interest
In order to find out the topic that can potentially be your niche you need to start with yourself, you need to think about your problems, interest, and hobbies, now think about their problems, interest, hobbies about your friends, around you, take a piece of paper and write them down, every single one of them.
Think about those topics, write down those you know the answers to, or if you want to learn more, also figure out what topics you can not stop talking about. I mean they come up even if the topic on the table is not related.
Here are questions to ask yourself as you go through this brainstorming process …
What niches are you a customer of?
What are your biggest passions and interests in life?
What are your hobbies?
If you could have a dream business, what would it be?
Do you have any previous work experience that could potentially turn into a business?
Write down anything that comes to mind. We’re going to narrow down the list in just a moment.
Find out if people are paying money for information or products on those topics
So now you have many topics that are interesting for you, all you need to do is to validate that they can make you money, here is how you do it.
In order to find out what people are paying money to buy things online, we will use the two largest retail stores in the world, Amazon, and Clickbank.
Amazon
Amazon is the biggest brand name in the world, accounting for nearly 40% of all US e-commerce sales.
It’s also a great place to find profitable affiliate niches.
Step 1
Head over to Amazon and click on the “All” button on the left-hand side of the search bar.
Step 2
Go to the best seller tab or click the link below
https://www.amazon.com/Best-Sellers/zgbs
you will see the categories that are selling at the moment, so take a different paper and write down what seems to be interesting to you.
ClickBank
Amazon is a great place to find a profitable niche with plenty of physical products, but the most lucrative affiliate offers are for digital products and services.
The best place to look for a niche with lots of digital products is ClickBank.
Here are my two steps on how to validate products on Clickbank.
Step 1
Head over to ClickBank and navigate to the Affiliate Marketplace. You can use the direct link: https://accounts.clickbank.com/marketplace.htm
Click on the search icon.
On the drop menu where it says popularity change it to Gravity.
You will get the list of the products that are selling at this moment, in each product you will see the list of topics after the word cat, for example above the topic will be Health and fitness and the subtopic will be dietary supplements.
Step 2
List down all categories on the first and second page, you should have at least 20 of them.
Now you have a list of your hobbies, talents, and interest in one paper and a list of the products/topics that are selling online, it is time to match them out.
From each piece of paper find the topics that appear in both of them, and list them down, these will be the most profitable niches for you, just pick one of them and focus on that.
This is the niche you should be focused on and products in this niche are what you should be promoting if you plan to succeed at affiliate marketing.
If you do not find at least one that appears in both papers start the procedure again.
This can be explained with a simple Venn diagram below.
Where P is your personal interests, M, is where the money is and N is the niche you should pick.
After picking the niche now you can start building your online business around that niche, build a funnel, build a website, create content, and make some sales.
Conclusion
That is how you find a profitable affiliate marketing niche. I do recommend that you start and focus on one niche only.
It is also better to pick a sub-niche as this is more specific and targeted compared to a general topic. This makes it a lot easier to target your market and promote your website.
If you have any questions just leave them in the comment section below or contact me via a contact form on this blog and I will get back to you with an answer.
