subject: How do you identify an affiliate marketing niche? [print this page] How do you identify an affiliate marketing niche?
It is possible for you to make a substantial income on affiliate marketing. But affiliate marketing is increasingly a crowded market.To make money, identifying the right niche market is critical. Some affiliate marketers have been lucky to stumble upon a profitable niche but for most other successful affiliate marketers, finding a niche market takes painstaking research. The research should be both online and offline.
For your online research, there are many places you can start from. Take a look at online article directories. What are some of the most common topics written on? More importantly, what articles attract the most views? Looking at this data can give you an idea of the kind of content internet users would be most interested in and by extension the kind of products that would most appeal to them.
Do not restrict your analysis on just the titles of the articles the articles may be on an industry that is already saturated e.g. weight loss. Instead, read the articles and try and identify a sub-topic that may not have attracted the attention of affiliate marketers but that holds substantial potential. As an example, if the most popular topic you come across is on dogs, may be you could drill down to dog collars.
Other than online article directories, check out ecommerce sites that experience huge traffic and sales such as Amazon.com and eBay. Such sites can be an invaluable resource in picking out what people would be willing to pay for. What products attract the highest sales volumes on eBay? And what types of books are constantly sold out on Amazon.com? Such ecommerce sites can effectively do the leg work for you by providing a fairly accurate peek into market trends and thus help point you in the right direction in terms of potential interests and web traffic.
Despite the fact that your affiliate marketing activities will be based online, do not limit your research to the web. One of the key advantages of taking your research offline is that you may be able to identify markets that online affiliate marketers have overlooked. After all, finding a profitable niche where you have little or no competition is the ideal. So take time to visit the mall which shops have the most foot traffic? Of these shops, what product or service do they sell the most? Once find a satisfactory answer to these questions, evaluate if there is a way you can promote this same service or product online.
Advertising media is another great place to pick out a profitable affiliate marketing niche. What items take up the most advertising space on magazines, newspapers, billboards, television and radio? Advertising (and more so offline advertising) costs money. It is unlikely that businesses would be spending that amount of money advertising if there was no substantial market.
One you zero in on a number of potential affiliate marketing areas, the next step is to establish whether or not they are viable. One of the best and cheapest ways to do that is to use keyword research tools (Google for instance has a free keyword research tool) to find out the number of searches that the keywords related to that product attract. The higher the web traffic the product attracts, the greater the probability of making substantial sales.
