So you decided to start affiliate marketing, The very first thing you need to do right now is to find your own niche.
Finding your own niche and not promoting every latest product launches will make you stand out by serving your blue ocean with products that help them solve their pain.
To cut the story short, you need to know your own niche if you want to stay longer in the game and make more passive income.
In this guide, I will be walking you through several steps for finding your own niche even if you’re just starting out.
Here’s what we are going to cover:
1 What is Affiliate Marketing
2 Merchant
3 Affiliate
4 Customer
5 What is a Niche
6 Research and Brainstorm
7 Check it’s Monetization on Clickbank
8 Use the keyword planner to double-check your niche
9 Start Selling Product
Before we dive into the main purpose of this article what does affiliate marketing really means:
What is Affiliate Marketing
These is an online business model that involves selling other people product/service in return for percentage agreement in the commission given by the product owner usually called a merchant. As an affiliate marketer, you can be both – a merchant or an affiliate marketer.
So let’s break it down even further into a few sections that will help you better understand how affiliate marketing works.
Merchant
The merchant can exist in a different form, a merchant could be a product creator, brand owner or a seller.
Mostly consider a company that produces a product to the consumer.
For example, let take a look at Samsung. They are a popular brand right.
They produce electronic goods and gadget
You can find everything been sold by them on the website, meaning they can be both product creators and sellers at the same time.
Affiliate
As affiliate concern, you can be either publisher or advertiser, To actually make it huge in this type of business model, you’ll mostly find yourself doing both for you to scale it up.
Affiliate marketing is the best option for you especially when you’re just getting started in the online business game. And also the result you would see will surely depend on picking the right product to promote and the quality of traffic you can drive.
The job of an affiliate is to promote selected industry’s products in a return to convert and sell to as many customers as they can.
This way, they can earn a percentage share in commission return revenue generated from their effort.
This will make more sense if you have a popular blog with organic traffic coming to it.
For example, check out Ryan Robinson blog and how he’s using affiliate marketing as a tool that goes hand-in-hand with his blog:
He simply creates content around the best tools that he feels are good to automate daily online business tasks, then he embeds his affiliate link in each of the tools he’s writing about to get a commission each time someone purchases the tool.
But most times, not all these tools will have an affiliate program.
Implementing this kind of content creation with affiliate marketing can easily be served as your entire business.
Some websites are solely built around affiliate marketing and daily deal
Consumer
The customer is the engine that drives the smoothness of the affiliate marketing business model. Without the involvement of the customer, there won’t be anything called affiliate marketing.
And without the customer buying a product mean no commission is to be paid to the affiliate.
As an affiliate, you can sell as many products to customers in different ways as possible.
Also, you don’t always need to disclose this type of relationship to the customer
in a nutshell, customers are the backbone of any business, the same thing applies to affiliate marketing.
But if you like to be transparent, then you can use a disclaimer to inform your prospects letting them know that you will receive a commission when they use your affiliate link to purchase any of the offers you’re promoting.
But you don’t have to.
Before we dive into how to pick a profitable niche to promote in affiliate marketing. Let look at what niche is exactly.
What is a Niche?
You need a profitable niche in affiliate marketing in order to scale it up. So what’s a niche all about?. Here’s a definition from Google.
Determining what niche to venture into when you’re just getting started as an affiliate might be difficult.
If your problem is choosing a niche then look no further because in this article I’m going to show you a better way to discover your own blue ocean audience so you can serve them better by solving their problem.
You see many mistakes newbies make when just getting started in this journey are trying to serve everyone so they can make more money they could ever imagine.
Making more money in the affiliate marketing business is not determined by how many people you’re trying to serve in various niches,
You can decide to focus on one particular niche and make more money than anyone trying to serve everyone in the red ocean.
And now, since you know how affiliate marketing works and why you need a niche to be profitable, let’s dive right into picking a profitable niche!
Step 1: Research and Brainstorm
Finding a niche can be one of the most dreaded aspects of business research for most marketers.
What you hear most when starting an online business especially affiliate marketing is, “find your niche,” and you will attract your dream audience.
A niche is a highly-specialized sub-market. For example, here’s are some criteria to look out when picking a profitable niche product.
Profitable Niche Category Which Is Lucrative Affiliate Marketing Niche
These markets are evergreen and profitable and forever will be, for the “laid, paid and live forever” reasons I highlighted above.
- Relationship
- Health
- Wealth
The health market includes niches such as diets and weight loss, embarrassing problems, quit smoking and medical issues to name but a few.
Looking at these core market ideas, you will see that, they are the main daily human desires.
These are what people are actually looking for and want
People want a good relationship, they want to be healthier and they also want to be rich.
So whatever you’re trying to promote as an affiliate should fit into any of these three core markets and desires.
Wealth is a broad and wide market but also can be broken down into sub-market like real estate, stock, marketing, flipping on eBay, etc. Each one of this sub-market can now be broken down into what we called a “Niche”.
Taking marketing as an example, you decided to start a marketing agency helping eCom store owners to scale their business to 6 figures using Facebook ads.
Switching your focus targeting a particular solution to help solves a problem makes it a niche.
When you look at the example above, you’ll see we are not trying to help anyone run an advertising campaign in any niche but focus only on eCom store owners alone and using a specific marketing objective in this scenario using Facebook ads.
Doing this we differentiate you from everyone trying to just help any business run an advertising campaign for their business.
The important thing is understanding how your niche affects everything you’re going to do as an affiliate.
If you’re going into the health market, your main goal is to narrow down as possible because the health market is a very wide market, Let say you want to focus on “Fitness” for example. What fitness are you targeting particular?
Are you helping people building body or helping people lose weight or build muscle?
You should be able to answer all these questions.
With these core market desires, there is a wide range of sub-market to start promoting affiliate marketing product, your main goal is to break down the sub-market into niches by doing so, you can get a clearer vision about your audience and also serving them better with your affiliate product.
After you have brainstormed your niche idea, It is also good to choose a niche from the problem people are already searching for and need a solution to it, a great tool that gives you this advantage is .
An example of a search result of any topic could look like below.
You can find full question comparison here
Now, that you have a clue of what you would be promoting and also you’re able to know that these topics are getting query on the search engine. It’s time to find an affiliate product to promote.
Step 2: Check Monetization on Clickbank
The next step is to take the fitness niche idea for example to a marketplace like Clickbank to test if there’s anywhere to monetize this topic so you can start generating affiliate commission.
There’s no point in getting started into affiliate marketing when your topic can’t be monetized
A good place to start from is Clickbank.
It gives you the opportunity to promote thousands of affiliate products from different niches with a mass appeal because they have many users.
To start getting ideas if your niche idea can be monetized, all you need to do is click on the “Affiliate Marketplace” on their homepage.
You can input your niche idea into the search bar at the top:
Doing this will help you narrow down your niche idea
Also, on the left-hand side menu, you can see a lot of categories where you can get an idea of where your niche falls into.
Next, select your category or search for your niche idea from the search bar and take a look at the results populated:
The result link can be found here
This page might look confusing to you especially when you’re new to ClickBank, follow me as I explain step-by-step.
The left-hand side is where you can find all categories of products available on Clickbank right now.
Each product with gravity ranging from low to high, so what does this mean? Simply put this metric essentially highlight how well the affiliate product sells in that category niche.
I recommend making your result based on “Gravity”
Let look at the search result that populated when you search for “Fitness” to see if any products look like to be easy to sell in that niche idea.
The product above has a high Gravity score and a great average income per sale.
This is the best way to research a potential affiliate marketing niche so you can know if there are products and services that people would actually pay money for.
To source for another winning product just repeat the process.
The purpose of doing this is to find natural products that wouldn’t be difficult to sell to your audience.
For example, the fitness package would be easy to sell on a popular blog about fitness diet.
But, selling something more general like luggage might not be (unless it’s really innovative).
Step 3: Use the keyword planner to double-check your niche
Another best option to check if you are picking the right niche for your affiliate marketing niche is using the keyword planner inside google ads platform to get an idea of the related keyword.
Since your main focus is to drive traffic and sales to the merchant product, it’s good to know where you stand and the competition you are against.
This helps you figure out how much clicks cost, who is bidding, and how you can compete.
To get started with this tool, head over to Google Keyword Planner
Next, type in your keywords for your niche. Focus on related words that will bring up diverse results.
For example, with our example of niche fitness, I typed in the following keywords:
Fitness
Fitness diet
Fitness gym
Then click “Get Results”
The key here is to look at average monthly searches, competition, and the bidding:
The max CPC is an average cost per click that the particular keyword cost.
The impressions are total amount query the keyword is getting per month.
For example, fitness and fitness gym are going to be tough to rank for with higher search amounts and high competition.
The Keyword idea below the search result will help you discover a bunch of keywords you can also target apart from the one you enter into the search box.
And make sure you find your niche around keywords that are not too competitive. A keyword with a medium strenght will be easy for you to scale as a start rather than competing with others in the high competition strenght.
Because the higher the competition the most more the bidding CPC will be high.
When you are done checking the keyword ideas, I suggest you go to Clickbank to try and narrow down your niche further.
For example in the case of exercise bike
Doing this guaranteed you have narrow down your niche rather than promoting every fitness products in general.
Step 4: Start Selling Products
At this stage now is to start selling your products to your potential customers on your website using either traffic source you have chosen.
To see more success as an affiliate you should be selling more products as possible.
If you can’t make sales, you can’t make money!
My most recommended affiliate programs on the internet are Clickfunnels, Amazon, Clickbank, JVzoo, and WarriorPlus.
A great place to start promoting affiliate products right now is Amazon.
Amazon is the No.1 marketplace that has a wide range of products you can start promoting in different categories.
Amazon is also well known as a big giant company in eCommerce-based businesses. Amazon is a great place to start;
It’ FREE to join the amazon affiliate program and have access to millions of products you can start promoting.
The commission pay is also good when you’re promoting products in the B2B space.
Another great place to start promoting products is Clickbank.
Now that you have gone through the process of sourcing for your affiliate marketing niche and decided on your niche, you can use their website to find a product that sweet you.
Then set up your own website or blog to start selling any of these products using content marketing.
Final Thought
In the beginning, it won’t make sense and sales might not be flowing as you wanted, Don’t feel bad but keep putting more effort and providing value to your audience.
Affiliate marketing is not a get rich quick scheme, don’t expect to be the next Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg overnight. No! It doesn’t work that way.
Affiliate marketing is a lucrative online business no doubt about that, you can start seeing results in no time even if you just starting out as a beginner.
One interesting thing about this online business model is that It gives you the freedom to start earning passive income online and work from anywhere you’re in the world.
I have given you ideas to use to start brainstorming your next affiliate marketing niche.
Always, make sure to narrow down your niche and check the monetization on Clickbank because of no essence having a niche that can’t be monetized.
Using the Google keyword planner to double-check the potential of the keywords if it competitive or not.
Lastly, start picking products to sell on platforms like Clickfunnels, Amazon, Clickbank, JVzoo or WarriorPlus.
And always remember to repeat this process each time you want to promote any affiliate marketing product.
Over to you!!!
What concepts have the best work for you whenever you want to promote affiliate marketing product?