HOW TO PICK THE RIGHT NICHE - AFFILIATE MARKETING FOR BEGINNERS 2022

Have you ever seen a successful business before? If yes, then you should know that one of the reasons why they are successful is because they had a clear vision of who they would be serving when they first started out. It is important to note that an unfocused business.

Therefore, to build your business, you need to know who your customers are. That’s why it’s important to select the right niche.

WHAT IS A NICHE THEN?

A niche is a NEED.

Every human being has basic needs like...

· Food

· Clothing

· Water

· Shelter

· Belonging

· Love

...to name a few. (Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs is a great reference tool)

You can’t do any marketing for your chosen business model including affiliate marketing until you decide what niche you’re in because that tells you the needs you’ll help your customers fulfill.

Niches are a subset of categories and the difference between them is how specific they are.

Now in order make the right choice, we recommend you start from the category level to have a broad idea of the direction you would like to take your affiliate marketing business.

The Top Three Categories are Health, Wealth & Relationships.

Now, take a moment to consider how a niche reflects these needs:

Wealth – People need money to pay for shelter, to buy food and to pay for clothing. Without enough money, they don’t have their needs met, let alone their wants.

Health & Fitness – People need to get enough exercise and good food to stay strong and healthy. They also want to be slim and fit so they feel good about how they look in the mirror.

Romance & Dating – Humans are social beings who want relationships, love and family. We need a sense of belonging.

Now the big question is

How are you going to know what affiliate product to market if you don’t have a niche? Is it going to be a

Golf course or a way to make first income online? Who do you market this to?

Because, the target audience for the golf course will be absolutely different from the target audience for making income online.

Knowing your niche matters because choosing the wrong niche can sink your business before it begins. On the other hand, choosing the right niche can lay a solid foundation for a wildly successful business.

Are all niches created equal?

No. Some niches are more profitable than others. I highly recommend combining your interests and passions with profitability as much as possible.

Spend a little time doing niche research, would help you avoid months of work that would end up unproductive.

A HELPING HAND

If this is your first business, stick to proven niches. In our experience, these are some of the most profitable niches:

· Make Money Online / Business opportunity

· Bodybuilding

· Weight Loss

· Nutrition

· Dating

· Yoga

· Meditation

· Pets

· Survivalist

· Style

Of course these are not the only niche ideas; there are plenty more out there.

READ: Top 25 most popular affiliate marketing categories

HOW TO KNOW IF A NICHE IS GOOD AND WORTH YOUR TIME AND EFFORTS

Just before walking you through the 5 criteria we use and recommend to you to start out with when finding a niche, we already told you all niches are not equal therefore bear in mind to find niches that are

· Big Enough

· Strong Enough

· Passionate Enough &

· Has Money also.

This sounds good? Then let’s dive straight in……

Step 1: Choose Something Digital Friendly (If You Aren’t Selling Physical Products)

If you decide to promote physical product from places such as Amazon Associates etc. This might not be yours but if you find yourself interesting in promoting products which aren’t physical, then your niche will be more profitable if you choose a niche that allows you to create digital products like...

· eBooks

· Online courses

· Video courses

· Webinars

This would help your reach a wider audience and potential buyer since there would be any shipping barriers. Digital products are delivered instantly and ready to be used immediately.

Step 2: Ensure there’s Healthy Competition

Don’t get me wrong here especially if you are a complete beginner because despite what you may think, you want to have some healthy competition in your niche. This Competition literally means businesses are actually making money in the niche. Which in turn means there are people looking for information in that niche for you to take advantage of.

NB: One interesting way to assess competition in your niche is to go over to Udemy and create an instructor account. In the ‘tools’ section of your instructor account, there’s a tool called Marketplace Insights.

After clicking into that tool, you type in your niche, and Udemy returns a bunch of marketplace data for you based on the activity of its users.

Step 3: Asses the Size of the Audience

The larger the audience, the better off you’ll be. The more active that audience is, the better you’ll be.

Step 4: Check Search Engine Demand

If no one is searching for keywords in your niche, that’s a sign people aren’t interested in the topic.

This goes back to the first point we made in this article - niches are needs. When we have needs, we go the extra mile to find ways to fulfil those needs. That usually begins with a Google search.

If keywords in your niche are getting a lot of searches, that means there’s a need in the marketplace.

The best way to find out what keywords are popular is to use a keyword research tool. KWFinder is a paid research tool I use for researching keywords.

Other free alternatives are Ubersuggest tool by Neil Patel and Google Trends is always free.

Don’t waste your time on pursuing niches that have both low search volume and high difficulty.

Step 5: Think About the Long-Term Potential

Does your niche have staying power? Will you be able to keep customers coming back for many years to come?

For example, pregnancy is a high-need niche. This niche has a very large audience size and the best thing is pregnant women actively search for information on the search engines. However, pregnancy is also short-lived. You only have their attention for 9 months, which limits how much you can promote to them.

Evergreen niches, on the other hand, are always in demand. Take the exercise niche, for example. People who get into the habit of exercising do it several times a week and often turn it into a habit for the rest of their lives.

Their demand for fitness content is never going to go anywhere because they’re always looking for new fitness routines and ways to stay healthy over the years.

How To Generate Profitable Niche Ideas

As important as this part of the whole affiliate marketing stage is, people find it intimidating to settle on a good and profitable niche, which meets all the 5 steps listed above.

Like many others, unless you have something solid in mind from the beginning, you might be sitting there wondering where to start. After all, there are hundreds of niches and thousands of more narrow sub-niches.

The good news is that there are many resources out there that you can use. If you look at the most popular courses, books, magazines and videos on these websites, you can discover what people are interested in.

Again, Udemy is a good place to start here.

On their homepage, you can explore the categories section where they have a list of hundreds of different niches.

You can then plug those different niches and keywords into the research tools to learn more about them.

Another good place to do some research is on ClickBank, an affiliate marketplace. When you go to ClickBank, you’ll see a long list of niches on the side of your page.

When you click into one of the niches, you get a bunch of data on how the affiliate products are selling

The grav (gravity) is a score that represents how many affiliates have made sales on the product in the previous 12 weeks. A score of 20 or higher is often representative that a product is selling well, so you want niches that have a lot of products with a gravity of 20 or higher.

One final place to do research on niches is Amazon.

If you go to the books section (Kindle) inside of Amazon, you’ll find a big list of potential topics that you can use to research your interests.

If you go into a niche and find that there are very many books with 100+ plus reviews, it’s likely a slow niche that wouldn’t make a good business for you.

It’s important to take this section seriously because choosing a good niche is one of the most crucial steps you can take on your email marketing journey. When you have your niche in place, you will know who you are marketing to and what kind of value you need to offer them.

In other words, you’ll get to know your audience on a personal level, and that will help set you apart from your competition.

NICHING DOWN AND IT’S IMPORTANCE

Now that you have finally settled on which category and niche to start your affiliate marketing business with. I recommend you niche further a step or two downwards. The reason been that, they are big brands who have a lot of money and are spending to buy the competition. The best way to be in the game is to target a little more targeted people in the niche who would not be the main focus of the big brands.

Example; Instead of settling and trying to drive customers to a weight loss product. You can be a specific by targeting “Women over 50 years who would want to lose weight”. This would surely get your business up and moving in the shortest possible time.

In general, we recommend you start with a category (Health, Wealth or Relationships) and then niche down 1 – 2 steps down but still ensuring there is a healthy completion and search volume too.

2 SIMPLE AND FREE TOOLS TO HELP YOU DISCOVER EVEN MORE NICHE IDEAS

· Keyword Planner

This is a free keywords research tool inside your google ads accounts and this can be very useful in generating ideas and analyzing niches that have great such volume and how competitive for you to succeed through. You do not need to run any paid ads. All you need is to activate your google ads campaign dashboard and you are all good to go.

· Magazines.com

Shouldn’t this be surprising that at time of the world age where by almost everything has been digitalized, we are bringing up magazines as an option. But yes, it’s that true and this is very effective because some people still at in love with the old age method of having physical magazines delivered to their mail boxes. The interesting part is that looking at the cost of production, shipping and delivery among others it should entice you that this companies are still producing them because they have a huge market of people still patronizing it. The catch here is if the niche you have decided to work with does not have a magazine dedicated to a group of people then don’t waste any time on it because it literally means there are zero searching for information on that niche idea.

CONCLUDING

HOW TO FIND A NICHE THAT’S RIGHT FOR YOU

Don’t be distracted from doing just what every other person is doing. You are unique and so find what’s unique to you and that you can invest time in making it worthwhile.

Remember, you never need be an expert in your niche. Sometimes you don’t even need to be passionate about it yet we recommend you choose a niche you are at least interested in.

Start building your affiliate marketing business with these factors in mind too

· What topics are you interested in?

· What niche are you going to focus on?

· How do you plan of driving traffic to the offers?

READ: How to drive traffic to your affiliate offers – 7 Tops ways to get buyer traffic