Choosing a niche is the first main step you need to take to build an affiliate marketing business, and it’s one that trips many people up when they’re first getting started.
So, I am going to break down the process of choosing a viable niche for your business on this page. But before I do, I want to explain why you need to choose a niche to begin with.
Why Should You Choose a Niche?
When you boil it down, there are two main reasons that have to do with traffic and conversions.
Firstly, choosing a niche allows you to become an “authority” on a particular topic, which can greatly increase the chances that you will rank in search engines like Google (and therefore, get targeted free traffic). Why? Because you are demonstrating that you know what you’re talking about by creating helpful content on your site that covers all aspects of that particular niche.
For example, if your chosen niche is dog training, you would create content not just about dog-related products but content that covers all aspects of how to train a dog. And in doing so, you are demonstrating that you are an expert on this topic, which can lead to higher overall rankings.
Also related to traffic is brand recognition. By focusing on a particular niche, you can establish a trusted brand in the space that people remember, which can encourage more people to return to your site after the first visit, which (among other things) can help increase your site’s traffic.
Second, focussing on one niche, as opposed to trying to promote “everything” with your site, allows you to optimize your site for conversions a lot more effectively. In other words, it can help you create highly targeted promotions that really resonate with your audience because you know who your audience is, what problems they are facing, and how your recommendations can help them.
You can also strategically weave your promotions into your site throughout the content you create wherever it is relevant to where the person is on your site.
So, the bottom line is that choosing a niche is super important if you want your site to get traffic, and traffic is essential to making sales. With 10,000s of different niches out there, there’s simply no way any one individual could create enough content to cover all of those topics effectively, let alone set up promotions that resonate with each group of people effectively.
How Do You Choose a Niche?
There are three main things you will want to consider when choosing a viable niche:
- First, the ideal niche is one you are genuinely interested in. You don’t necessarily have to be passionate about it, but being interested in your chosen niche is SUPER important because it typically leads to you putting more effort into your business since you are enjoying what you are doing. When you love the topic, it will rarely (if ever) feel like “work” to you, and you will happily go the extra mile when it comes to building out your site and growing your business.
- Second, the niche must have traffic potential, which ultimately means you need to make sure that a decent amount of people are interested in the topic. Thankfully, even seemingly small, obscure niches can be the basis of a very successful business because there are BILLIONS of people online. So even a “small” niche can actually have quite a lot of traffic potential.
- Third, it’s best to ensure that the people in your chosen niche are buying products online. This isn’t technically essential because you can always just run ads on your site, but if you want to maximize your site’s revenue potential, you will want to promote products and/or services as an affiliate, and that means people need to be buying that stuff online. The good news is there are millions of products you can promote as an affiliate, and more and more people are buying stuff online than ever before, so there is almost always an opportunity to promote something relevant.
So, those are the three main things to consider when choosing a direction for your business. And to actually put that into practice, you want to start by brainstorming topics that interest you, narrowing it down to your top three choices, and finally, choosing the topic that interests you the most.
From there, you can use a special tool called a keyword research tool to figure out if the niche has traffic potential. And you can use sites like Amazon (and Google) to see what products and/or services people are buying in that space.
That’s an overview of what you need to do, anyway.
Wealthy Affiliate has an AI Niche Finder tool where you type in a topic you’re interested in, and it gives you a whole bunch of niche ideas based on that, as well as brand ideas.
And if you do decide to join WA, not only will you get access to this tool, but you will also get step-by-step training on how to use it to find an awesome niche.
Anyway, with all that said, I hope you found this page helpful. And on the next page (coming soon), I will be showing you how simple it is to get a website up and running!
Next up: How to Build an Affiliate Marketing Website
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