So you are looking to make money online. You have heard of affiliate marketing. You know what it is, but how do you go about it?
The first problem you have is how to choose a niche for affiliate marketing.
What Defines a Niche for Affiliate Marketing
Before you choose a niche (pronounced neesh or nitch dependent on where you come from) you need to know what one is.
The dictionary defines a niche as ‘ denoting or relating to products, services or interests that appeal to a small specialised section of the population’.
But do you want to market your site to a small section of the population? ideally no.
For me a niche is a small solution of a larger problem.
Take wedding dresses. these solve a problem of what the bride will wear at her wedding.
You are not trying to sort out the whole wedding, but a small part of it.
If you think about what is required to satisfy a bride with her wedding dress then you don’t need to do much more than this for a niche.
If you decided to have weddings as your niche, just think of all the bits you would have to blog about. There is the venue, how to dress the venue, the photographer, the groom’s clothes, bridesmaids, best man, the songs, the reception, the after do etc.
You would not be able to do it all in a lot of depth and people searching for wedding dresses may come across your site but there would be little information to keep them there – you would be getting around to it but…
So weddings is too large a niche, but taking any one of the smaller sections could make a very nice niche.
How to Look for a Niche
Ok you have an idea of what a niche is and you really don’t want it to be wedding dresses. So how do you find your niche?
What are you interested in? computing, watching tv, surfing the web, scale modelling, jewellery making, playing video games. All of these are too big to be a suitable to be called a niche. you would have to narrow down the area to find your niche.
If you make two columns on a piece of paper and write down all of the things you like doing down the left. On the right you can write down the ideas it evokes.
so if on the left you have written down scale modelling – on the right, write down the type of modelling you prefer or
like to do. aircraft, fantasy, ships, land vehicles.
Picking one section from the right could become your niche. although land vehicles could also be split down into ; military, racing vehicles, road vehicles, etc.
How to Validate Your Niche
Once you have chosen something you want to create a site about, you need to validate your niche as being worth it.
If you chose something like knitting purple socks for one legged people then there may not be too much demand for your services.
So how do you do the validation?
You are looking for competition – yes that’s right you will need competition. This means that people are searching for it and others are solving their problems.
If you type what you are thinking of doing into Google with “” around it then you will get an idea of how many people have sites with that on them.
As suspected there are no results for “knitting purple socks for one legged people”. But for “aircraft scale modelling” Google returns that there are over 76,000 results.
Looking down page one it is mainly manufacturers, so adding the word blog to the search reduces the total down to 11,200.
So if you enter this niche without specifying the type of aircraft you wantyou want to blog about, then you will be up against all of these blogs. You can specify your niche as world war 2 planes and this will reduce your competition.
One thing I would like to add is that you will be helping others with their problems.
With the aircraft modelling example, then it could be how to build a kit for the first time. How to get rid of glue lines. What to do to improve your model. How to paint your model. How to research the history. How to make dioramas. How to add realism. how to photograph your models.
Examples of a niche
Basketball training – basketball generally is too broad.
Wedding dresses – weddings are too broad
coarse river fishing – fishing is too broad.
Landscape photography – photography is too broad.
Men’s watches – watches are too broad.
Bird house plans – woodworking is too broad.
Bodybuilding supplements – bodybuilding is too broad.
Bulldog care – dog care is too broad.
Classic video games – video games is too broad.
If you are still struggling why not try out Wordstreams Free niche finder.
I put wedding in there and it came back with over 3000 niches – wow
Hopefully you are getting the idea and are ready to think about picking your own niche to start your online business in.
What Have You Chosen?
You have read this far and are excited to pick your niche.
Why not tell us what you have chosen in the comments box and we can help you validate your niche.
Alternatively if you are struggling to find your niche, why not write into the comments what you like and we can help you select a niche.
Once you have chosen a niche you want to know what to do with it.
The best niche Affiliate training I have found is reviewed here.
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