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!

Before I get into the details on how you find your niche and all, this post will first set some needed foundation. A mistake many beginners make is that they have no niche. They either do something general or they choose a huge market that you could never label as a niche. You may be wondering why you need to choose a niche anyways.

You’re Not a Superman
You just can’t do everything by yourself and although you might be the smartest person in the world, you really can’t handle every topic. Rather than being mediocre in a lot of topics, you probably will do better if you devote all your time into one topic. Let me give you a scenario to really try to convince in you into finding a niche.

It’s Like a Major
When you’re in elementary, middle, or high school, you’re learning a whole lot of stuff. This is when you’re trying out a lot of stuff and seeing what’s right for you and what’s not. However, when you enter a university/college, you choose a major and focus on one thing. Maybe language is your thing or maybe even science. Whatever it is, you pursue that dream and later on if you have some time, you pursue another thing.

In a way, it is similar. There isn’t really a job called, “Do-it-all”, but there are jobs like “designers”, “engineers”, and “musicians”. In a rapidly changing world, competition in all fields are getting a lot harder. Even if you chose one job the competition would still be intense. That is after four years of studying your one major! I mean, shouldn’t you be chosen for the four years you devoted your time and energy? Unfortunately, it’s not like that. In the web, it’s quite similar. The competition for a “general” site is intense. It has no color, no focus, and often, no vision or a plan on where to go next. Like choosing a major, you need to choose a niche (even a niche is getting a bit too competitive these days) to test and give yourself some chance of success.

Time is Limited for You AND Your Visitors
Another reason why you need a niche is because of time. It’s just unrealistic to be doing everything at once. Branching off into other niches are possible after one project is at a level where it can sustain itself. However, unless you have some massive budget to begin with, you really want to use your time well. There is no point in making a website dealing with a whole lot of topics that won’t convert. That time could be spent on making one or two niche websites where you devote all your time into.

Also, setting up a website is not the end. What’s hard is optimizing and monetizing it. If you choose something general, chances are, people won’t go to your site as it takes them too much time to find the information they want. If I had some infection, I’d probably want to go to a website where every information on it is related to that infection. I wouldn’t want to have to browse through the webmaster’s picnic last Friday or the dinner he ate with his date last night.

Niches Convert Well
Often, if you choose a niche, it’s a lot easier to make money. Say that I was running a news portal. I probably will deal with topics such as breaking news around the world, sports, celebrities, science, and technology. Once I have a good amount of visitors coming to my news portal, I’ll probably link up the site with an affiliate network. I decide to put up sports related products like soccer balls, basketball jerseys, and autographs. Now, what are the chances that a visitor coming to my news portal to read about the latest news in science will convert? Probably a figure very close to 0.

Guys, it’s not getting visitors to buy stuff through your affiliate link even when you run a soccer related website. If you’re running a general site and hoping to make some money through some converts, I suggest that you stop dreaming as you probably won’t get too many sales, if any! You want to choose a niche, build a site, and optimize it so that a good portion of your visitors convert, buy something, and make you money. Websites with a focused niche can do that, but general sites just can’t.

Conclusion
Now, I’m not preventing you from creating a general website. It’s okay to make one like that and if it is a hobby, I’d say go for it. However, if you’re looking to make some serious money online and want to be successful through the Internet, that’s just not going to help you make money. It’ll only help you realize that general websites usually can’t make money as easily as other niche focused websites.

Again, it’s really up to you. I’ve created a lot of “niche-less” websites. ahnternet is a make money online blog, but in a way, as I’m talking about a lot of my other interests too, I guess it has a toe or so in the “niche-less website” pool. On the other hand, BloggersWalk is quite focused on the topic of whole topic of blogging, so that would be a bit more of a “niche” site than ahnternet.

Did I convince you that niches are the way to go? Still, not convinced yet? Have any questions? Think this post isn’t so impressive? I’d love to hear your feedback, so please do leave a comment. Remember that ahnternet dofollows your website/blog too and also utilizes CommentLuv to help you. Thanks!

Don’t forget to keep up with this series, especially if you’re new to affiliate marketing. For beginners, it’s all about finding the right niche, as your first niche will be where you get your feet wet with affiliate marketing!

To give you a really simple overview of what is coming in the following few days, I’ll be discussing about:

• Why you need a niche
• How to find a niche
• Researching and pre-testing the niche

Again for those Internet marketing experts, you guys probably know this already, but I hope that I’ll be able to refresh some of the things that you may have forgot about, such as researching and finding the information you need for free.

Anyways, look ahead and visit ahnternet daily if you want the information as soon as possible. The best way is probably to subscribe to the feed which is the orange RSS feed icon that you see at the top left of this page.