Finding a Niche to Start Affiliate Marketing

Hey, I’m not a guru at affiliate marketing and I’ve only begun recently. However, some of what I learned proved to really be helpful for me to start the whole affiliate marketing business and I thought it might be helpful for some of you guys too. If you are already into affiliate marketing or are a super affiliate, you’ve probably done this before and will probably laugh at it. However, this is targeted for those aspiring marketers who want to get on their feet. This is how I did it and as it worked for me, who doesn’t have a lot of affiliate marketing skills, I believe that it’ll work for you too if you are just starting out.

What Are You Interested In?

When you’re just starting out with affiliate marketing, finding a niche that can work for you is crucial. Why? This is because most people just starting affiliate marketing can lose hope very quickly when they don’t see the money flowing in. From what I have learned, turning off your computer and making a list with the good old pencil and paper works best. Then ask yourself some of these questions.

• What are my hobbies?
• What do I like?
• What do I need?
• What is a topic that I know quite well about?
• What is something that I can talk about all day and not be bored?

To make it a big easier to follow, I’ve decided to answer these myself to give you guys an example of what the exercise should look like. Of course, you don’t have to answer all five questions above as I did, but these questions can help you stimulate your mind to think about the stuff you are interested in.

• My Hobbies: football, basketball, swimming, reading, singing, listening to music, gaming, sudoku, building stuff, photography
• What I Like: mp3 players, earphones, footballs, football shoes, cameras, laptops, books
• What I Need: laptop, mp3 players, football shoes, music CDs, new earphone, The Last Lecture, a new DSLR camera
• What I Know About: football, mp3 players, music industry, photography, Internet, physics, math, blogging
• What I Like Talking About: football, mp3 players, cameras, making money online, blogging, singing, science problems, Internet

Okay, I did the above really quickly. Again, you don’t need it this thorough, but usually, the more you put your time into this, the more you are likely to come up with a great first niche.

Shrinking the List

Considering that you’re still in the beginning stages of this whole making money online through affiliate marketing, I suggest the best thing you do now is focusing on one campaign or a couple campaigns. However, that’s not going to come by just taking some random topics from the “brainstorm” we did above. We’ll look for some similarities and see where you REALLY seem to have an interest in. Let’s look at my example for now.

I’ve decided to see how often a topic comes up through the five points, as I thought this would be the easiest way to identify where I have a good enough interest in to make some progress. If they are similar, like “football” and “football shoes”, I just grouped them together.

• Mentioned 5 Times: football, mp3 players (accessories)/music, cameras/photography
• 4 and 3 Times: blogging, laptop, Internet/blogging, books

That should be good enough for now. Again, I’m going through this really quickly right now just to show you guys, so I’ve decided to but off the mentioned once or twice topics because if they are mentioned that little, it’s a good indication that you’re not THAT passionate about them. So basically, here’s the final list that I have:

• football, mp3 players/music, cameras/photography, laptop/Internet, books

Now, this is just some of the topics I can probably work with as my first niche. In my case, all the topics that I chose will not exactly be a niche, but be a market. Thus, it will be extremely hard to break into the market. However, instead of looking at going deeper into each market and looking for a specific niche, I think it’s more important to do some research into each of these markets so you can have some prior knowledge before choosing a more specific niche. The knowledge I’m talking about here is not the knowledge the on the topic, but the knowledge on which niches within these markets are profitable and which aren’t. There’s no point in putting up a site that no one is interested in and no one will buy from.

Anyways, that will be the subject of the next part of this series: researching each niche before digging in so much that you can’t come back. If you haven’t read the first part of this series, I highly recommend that you do, as you do need to know why you need a niche.

Thanks for staying with me this far, if you did. I’d appreciate any comments you have on this article as I’m always looking to improve! If you liked this article, I also suggest that you subscribe to the blog as I’ll always be looking to deliver quality content. Thanks again!