There’s a lot more to choosing a niche then pick something you know, love or are passionate about.
You need to take into consideration your business plan (if you have one) income expectations and goals over all and on a per site/campaign basis, competition, and available knowledge.
If you’re not using at least some of these items to decide on the affiliate marketing niches you’re going into that you could be wasting time, losing money or worse BOTH.
The rest of this post will be dedicated to a further explanation on the above listed 5 critiques of a niche.
Business Plan
Few affiliates have a business plan but if you’re taking this business seriously then you need one. It doesn’t have to be written to academic standards but it should outline your goals, methods, plans for growth and expansion etc.
In terms of choosing a niche for a site your business plan will guide you in a couple of ways.
- Are you going to have one or two sites or an army of mini sites
- How are you going to make money? (affiliate programs, CPC ads etc.)
Knowing if you plan on having a bunch of sites will allow you to target smaller niches that can often be quite profitable. How ever the flip side if you intend on having only 1-3 sites to meet your income goals then you’re going to want to choose a broader niche, or a complete market.
i.e. Golf, rather then just golf instruction videos or How to fix a golf slice.
Income Expectations
If you expect to make $10,000 a month from affiliate marketing then I wouldn’t suggest you start trying to build a huge site around scrap booking.
Why? Well not because there isn’t huge traffic in that niche, but the sales volume is lower so you’re going to need more actions to make the same amount as a more lucrative niche. Also it doesn’t focus on a burning desire that someone needs to solve, or a serious problem (i.e. stretch marks or bad credit) that the visitor needs to solve.
When choosing a niche you want to keep your income expectations close by. Choosing niches that are going to be conquerable and will provide adequate payoff for your work is key here.
Goals
Closely related to income is the goal part of choosing a niche. I break my income goals down to a per site basis. For me saying I want to make $25,000 in commissions this month isn’t really doable, it’s just a number. How ever if I say that I want site A to make $1500, site B to make $2400 etc. then I have something I can work with.
Before choosing a niche for a new site, or your only site keep in mind of course your income expectations as we discussed in the last point, but also your income expectations on a per site basis.
Using this as a rule of thumb when choosing a niche is a must to ensure you achieve your target income and goals.
Competition
Of course we couldn’t skip over this.
FIRST let me say if you look at several of the money keywords for you new potential niche and see that the top spots are Wikipedia, Amazon or some other behemoth of a site you might want to keep looking.
I’m not saying that these sites are immovable, but there are a lot better uses of your SEO and promotion enery.
Look for niches where there’s lots of paid advertisers (means someone is making money right) and where other affiliate, content or review sites are sitting in the top 10, 20 and 30 sites in the SERPS.
You can always back engineer a competitors affiliate content or review site, but forget trying to compete with the HUGE authority sites.
Available Knowledge
This is something people often over look, but can you find information about this niche to write for it, make videos, audios, newsletter content etc?
I know most niches have information readily available, but some are harder to write for conversion then others.
Think about how you would potentially write for this niche before you jump in.
Do you already have the necessary knowledge, is it easily researched? Do a bit of leg work up front to avoid getting into something you won’t finish later on.
Spend a bit more time planning, and researching a niche before you go into it and you’ll find that you start to make more with each site, and you reach your income goals quicker.