I’ve probably created 50 affiliate marketing websites by now in different niches. Here are a few of my best tips on how to choose a niche from what I’ve learned so far.
New Niche Website
When starting out with affiliate marketing, you might get stuck on planning and considering what niche to choose. Another possibility is that you pay no attention to what niche you are choosing, only to discover a year down the line that you get no sales and maybe no traffic.
I’ve done both. Some affiliate marketing site niches have been planner good and some very poorly. For instance, when after my initial success with affiliate marketing, I thought I could create a new website related to online shopping with high keyword difficulties. Then spent a lot of time and money only to get no results. My execution was probably not the best so that’s part of the reason, but I also believe that the high difficulty to rank in Google for the terms was part of it.
Choosing a Niche
When choosing a niche, I would say that you should consider a couple of factors:
- What do you want to write content about?
- What do you want to research and learn more about?
- How difficult will it be to rank for the keywords?
- How much potential does the niche have for expansion later, if you get initial success?
- How good are the affiliate programs in the niche?
Your Interests x Niche Potential
The first and second point in the list addresses your interests and will be different for everyone. I think coming up with a few ideas based on those two points are a good start.
I would then move on to do keyword research to look at what people search for in Google. Keyword research will give you the information you need for the next two points in the above list. You should be able to get an idea of how difficult it will be to rank for the keywords in the search engines and how many monthly searches there are for the keywords each month.
Future Potential
Doing a bit more investigation into related keywords will also give you an idea of how broad the niche is and how much potential there is to keep on writing and ranking new content over time.
Once you get several web pages ranking in Google and getting decent traffic, you probably want to keep on making new content for that website. I’ve made the mistake of making new websites almost every month. Getting the new websites ranking and keeping them updated with new content gets harder and harder the more websites you have. That’s why I would suggest keep expanding on the first website you get a bit of traction for instead of creating too many new websites all the time. Of course, that is a general tip and might not be true for everybody.
Relevant Affiliate Programs
The last step in the list is to determine how good the affiliate programs in the niche are. Some niches have great affiliate programs, like for instance, crypto, CFD trading, travel, fashion, and more. Other niches like gaming might have a great potential for traffic, but the number of good affiliate programs that will be relevant to promote might be few.
This last step could also very well be your first step. I often find myself discovering great affiliate programs that I want to promote first, and then I do the keyword research and consider if I think it is something I have an interest in learning and writing about afterward.