If you’ve been dreaming of making money online, you’ve probably read a lot about affiliate marketing. I’m here to tell you that it DOES work, and the income you can earn is only limited by how much effort you’re willing to put into it!
However, you’ll need to have a niche website, and that is intimidating for most people. I’m here to tell you that the process of finding a niche isn’t hard at all once you learn how to go about it.
So what is an affiliate marketing niche and how do you choose one? I’ll make the process easy below!
What is a Niche and Why Do I Need One?
According to Merriam Webster a niche is defined as:
For the purpose of affiliate marketing, a niche is a specialized market where you are going to find products to review and promote to your readers. The number of specialized markets out there is virtually endless, and you can find products or services to promote for nearly every one of them and earn income.
You must have a niche because you need to target a specific audience who wants to see specific information and not just a general overview–these are the buyers! You want to capture the audience that’s as close to their buying decision as possible.
For example, golf is very popular, but is very broad for a niche. Even if you have a lot of content about golf, your site is not likely to be viewed as an authority site for individual products that people are searching for.
Suppose you decide you want to make money promoting quality golf equipment and accessories. Sounds like you’ve got a specialized niche, right?
No, you are still competing with every retailer that has any type of golf product. In a Google search, there were over 258,000,000 search results when I put in the phrase “golf equipment and accessories”.
It’s going to be difficult competing with an enormous amount of retailers for hundreds of products. What is going to make your site an authority for any of those items?
Remember, you want to attract the audience who is close to making a decision to buy the item they’re looking for. So you will want to narrow down your niche from golf equipment and accessories to something more specific, such as golf clubs.
A great niche could be promoting quality golf clubs. By writing reviews of the different types of golf clubs, your posts will show up in search engine results when people search for information on specific clubs they’re looking for–groove faced putter, titanium driver, cavity back irons, for a few examples.
Your site has an excellent chance of becoming the go-to authority site when someone is looking to find the right golf club for themselves. A person searching for a “groove faced putter” is much more likely to become a buyer after reading your review than someone searching for “golf equipment”!
OK, so where do you start first?
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Your Hobbies and Passions
While successful affiliate marketers know how to promote any product for profit, I’m a firm believer that it’s easiest to start looking for your first niche from your hobbies, interests, and anything you’re passionate about. After all, you’re going to be spending your time researching and writing about every subject associated with it.
So choosing a niche that you are going to enjoy communicating to your readers about will make everything come much more naturally and be more enjoyable for you. You will have more authority when writing articles, and your interest will keep you going as you’re building out your site.
As an example, my mother absolutely loves gardening, and she can grow anything and everything well. She is not alone, various types of gardening are not only a hobby for many people, they are a lifestyle.
My mom could definitely turn her love of gardening into a very profitable affiliate marketing website. Her passion would make it easier for her to do research and be an authority. Plus, the whole process would be much more enjoyable!
OK, once you’ve thought of a niche, there are two ways I like to gauge the profitability of that market:
- Amazon–By doing a search in Amazon, I can find over 400,000 items that relate to gardening. There are more than enough products to promote and monetize your site.
- Affiliate Programs–Doing a Google search for gardening affiliate programs, there are many available in addition to selling on Amazon. It’s important that you can diversify and be able to refer customers to more than one retailer for the best chance at profitability.
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Now with a niche being a specialized market, let’s go through the gardening example to narrow your focus!
How to Narrow It Down
As I stated with the golf example, if your niche is too broad, it will be difficult to bring the right audience to your website. You’ll be competing with way too many larger websites for ranking in Google, Bing, and Yahoo.
But if you narrow it down and focus on a smaller specialized market, it will be much easier to rank well in the search engines and bring traffic to your website.
In our gardening example there are many ways to narrow it down. The very best way is make a list of all the variations in your niche. Here’s a sample list of possibilities in our gardening example:
- Organic Gardening
- Flower Gardening
- Vegetable Gardening
- Urban Gardens
- Raised Gardens
- Community Gardening
- Micro Gardening
- Non-GMO Gardens
- Gardening Supplies
- Greenhouse Gardens
As you can see, there are many different ways to garden. But they can be narrowed down even more! Let’s take flower gardening, do you know how to grow roses? Maybe your tulips are the envy of the neighborhood? These would be specialized markets that have followers who want information.
Suppose you choose rose gardening as your niche, are there enough ways to monetize your site to make it profitable?
Think about everything that someone would use to plant and maintain a rose garden–a quality supplier of plants, fertilizer, mulch, compost, gardening tools, gloves, soil analyzers, landscaping materials, and many more.
There are affiliate programs from retailers that supply all of these items, and you can review, compare, and promote all of them on your site.
There are endless ways to educate and inform your readers about caring for and maintaining roses. You can also show how a beautiful rose garden fits in with your flower garden as a whole, which in turn opens up more avenues for content about related flower garden items.
Creating videos about pruning roses, mulching and fertilizing roses, and preparing them for winter are all ways to add excellent content that will show your readers you are an authority in your niche. That trust will make your reviews all the more valuable resulting in more referrals to your affiliate retailers!
But I’m Not An Expert!
Even though you are choosing a niche that comes from an interest, hobby, or particular passion of yours, that doesn’t mean you are an expert. But you don’t have to be!
What you have to be willing to do is to put in the time and effort to thoroughly research each topic one by one as you create the articles on your site. Since you’ve chosen a niche that you are passionate about, the research will be an enjoyable part of the process!
You take your own knowledge and add in all the information that you can find to make a relevant, accurate, fun and informative article.
You will find that you are learning right along with your readers, and that’s OK! In fact, I’ve found that the more questions I get from my readers, the more ideas I have for creating new content.
The more quality content I add, the higher I get ranked and more traffic comes to my site. The snowball gets bigger and bigger rolling downhill, and the end result is more profit in my pocket!
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So What Are You Choosing For YOUR Niche?
Remember, every one of us has something that we love to do or that we have a great interest in learning about. With some thought and the willingness to research and work hard, you can turn that passion into a money-making website!
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Are you inspired to find your niche and create your first website? It’s easier than you think–in fact you can have your site up and running in under 3 minutes on the platform that taught me how to make money online. Get started below!
If you have any thoughts, comments, or ideas to share, please feel free to leave them below–I’d love to hear from you!
Fantastic exposition. great content, easy to read very appealing Thank Rafael
Thank you so much!
Hello Janelle,
Thanks for your very informative post on how to come up with a niche and turn it into a business. I agree with you regarding the importance of choosing a niche that one is a passionate about. I cannot imagine getting up every morning trying to crack my head, thinking about writing posts on a subject that is not enjoyable to me. That would sure be a motivation killer.
I really like the way you have broken down what a niche is which makes it very easy to understand for anyone trying to start a business in affiliate marketing. I particularly liked the examples on gardening. Brilliant stuff.
Thank you so much! My first niche was about dogs because my husband and I are crazy dog lovers. I got so much enjoyment out of researching information for my posts and loved including pictures of our family dogs.
Since it took awhile to start making money, I’m not sure that I would’ve had the motivation to stick with it if it wasn’t a niche I was passionate about!
Early retirement is something that we all strive for as affiliate marketers. Passive income is some of the best income out there as it allows you to earn money while shopping, on vacation or even sleeping. Niches are the bread and butter of affiliate marketing and I am always looking for information on them, so your post really is appreciated, especially that you highlighted it’s a specialized market. Hobbies and passions are a great place to start and I like your breakdown of gardening. The idea behind this breakdown can be applied to other areas as well. Wealthy Affiliate is one of the best platforms and communities out there and I recommend everyone follow the links to see what it’s all about!
Thank you so much for sharing your thoughts, and it’s good to know that you’ve had such a positive experience with Wealthy Affiliate as well. I wish you every success in your online business!
Good evening Janella,
Thank you for that detailed information on what is a niche and why one needs one.
I realize my niche is far too broad as I have quite a few interests and pack them all together on one website. I’m going to have to narrow it down to find something I can become an authority on in my site.
Yes, I agree, with questions from your readers you start searching for the answer learning at the same time.
Regards, Taetske
Good luck in narrowing down your niche to find those targeted buyers! If you need any help, just let me know, and I’ll be happy to see what options we can come up with!
Hi Janelle, that’s an awesome post. Choosing a niche is a complicated task. In my case, I taught some college students soon after my college and after getting introduced with Affiliate Marketing I had no idea on what sort of niche I should get into. After some research, I get into learning Affiliate Marketing and Digital Marketing as a whole.
So my current niche is Digital Marketing. Creating a website is always a cumbersome job for a beginner, but you have introduced a wonderful platform to create a website within minutes based on our niche.
Thanks a lot for sharing this useful post.
You’re welcome, and I’m glad you found it helpful!
Hi Janelle, this is a good discussion of how to get going in an online career. I am getting ready to retire( in 3 years), and I have started checking out what to do with my time and earn extra money. The most powerful part of your article for me is the ‘narrowing down’. I used to think I could just decide on a niche and get to work. Clearly there is research that has to be done, for it to be a profitable business. Thank you for the info
You’re welcome! When I started out, I was afraid that if I narrowed down my niche too much, there wouldn’t be enough visitors to make money. But I learned through my training that 100 targeted buyers close to making a purchase are worth more than 10,000 visitors who are just browsing for general information!
Thanks for this clear and informative article! Finding a niche does seem to be one of the most difficult things people run into when it comes to starting their online business. However, I think you nail it when you say to look at your hobbies and passions and then research to see if there is a market for them. If we like something, chances are we are not the only ones!
You’re exactly right, and you can’t go wrong choosing a niche that you love!
This is indeed very informative. I like how you pointed out that narrowing down your niche is actually better because you are then able to target and cater to the right audience that could potentially be and with higher chance to buy the product you’re promoting. That’s a very good point I have learned from you.
I’m so glad you found it helpful–good luck with your online business!
Hello Janelle, I was thinking about a niche, but I’m not sure if it is too specific or just right. I was thinking about various dog bed’s from puppies to big dog’s. I’m not sure if I should also talk about other dog supplies, or if I could just stick with the different dog bed’s?
Thank you!
For me personally, I would narrow it down to dog beds since dog supplies is a pretty wide niche with a lot of competition. Good luck with your online business!
Thanks for your insight about niche selection. This is a short, sweet and very helpful post. I believe the most important thing when selecting a niche is : You need to love it. You can not give advice or write about something you do not love. Another thing that I think is also very important is your target audience which most of the times is overlooked.
I agree totally! Finding a niche you love is especially important for beginners. Anyone who’s just starting out and not making any money yet can get discouraged if they’re not passionate about their niche. Once you get some experience and are seeing success, it’s easier to make money in niches that you pick purely for their income potential.
That’s very informative and straight to the point. Few months back, I didn’t know what affiliate marketing was until started my search on making money online. It’s a nice way to earn decent money online but one of my issues has been settling on a niche for a website. As you rightly said it’s intimidating, I struggle sometimes when it comes to that. Thanks for the tips.
I’m glad you found it helpful! Keep in mind that you can make money with any niche, so don’t let it stress you. If you pick something that truly interests you and that you enjoy researching and talking about, you can’t go wrong!
One of the great things about the program that I host my websites with is that I can create up to 50 websites with their premium membership for just $49 per month. It’s Wealthy Affiliate and even their starter membership gives you the ability to create 2 sites! So you’ll have the ability to have a website in more than one niche.
Good luck, and I wish you success in your online business!
I can totally relate to “But I’m not an expert” part.
It’s funny. At first, I thought I had no particular interest that I could latch on to as my niche in affiliate marketing. But then as I started looking at general keywords and drilling down to long tail keywords, I found myself getting caught up in the subjects I was looking at and reading up on the related materials that caught my fancy. Before I knew it, I had myself a niche market!
This is what makes this industry so very interesting. If you’re not an expert in a subject, you find yourself suddenly becoming one before you know it!
Thank you for sharing.
That’s the same type of experience I had when starting out! It’s amazing the type of knowledge that you can obtain when you start researching something that you’re interested in. I had a hard time finding something that I wanted to write about at first. But now I have 6 websites and ideas for several more!
Thank you for stopping by!
I agree that finding a good niche can be one of the hardest things when first starting out. Also finding one that has enough traffic looking for what you promote without too much competition.
Research is also very important, do lots of research and you will save so much time and money. I made a lot of mistakes with the wrong niche simply because i didn’t do nearly enough research to know what I was getting into.
I think your advice for picking something you are interested in is spot on. It’s much easier to pitch something you would like for yourself.
Cheers!
I had advice from a member at Wealthy Affiliate tell me that since I was new, I’d do better with a niche I was really passionate about, and he was so right! It gets tiring and frustrating doing research and writing posts while waiting for that first site to get noticed by the search engines. I don’t know if I would’ve been able to keep the motivation up if I had a niche I wasn’t really interested in. So that will always be my advice for newbies!
Thank you for stopping by!
Very informative and at the same time – clear, simple and short.
Thank You Janelle
So glad you found it helpful–thank you for stopping by!
Thanks, this clarification of how to define your niche was informative and interesting!
I appreciate you taking the time to comment, thank you!