5 Steps Affiliates Should Follow to Find Profitable Niches

In my previous post, I highlighted 15 possible affiliate niche areas, driven by the evolution and roll out of technology, for the affiliates to focus their attention on in 2023 and beyond. In this post, I describe the steps affiliates should follow to come up with specific niche ideas around which to build a niche website.

Overview

The importance of having a website has been explained thoroughly and if you are not fully aware, you may refresh your mind by reading my previous post on the subject. You have, however, heard about broad niches and specific or focused niches. You may still have questions on how to move from a broad niche idea and come up to a specific niche, and later on, build a niche website. If you are having these queries do not go elsewhere; you are in the right place. Continue reading.

1) Evergreen vs trending niches

An evergreen niche is an industry with constant appeal, meaning that it does not rely on seasonal trends or gimmicks to attract customers. In fact, its products or services to people are such that they are inherently needed or desired. In other words, the products/services/brands are on demand irrespective of the season, months, and year-round.

Thus, evergreen niches help both affiliates and merchants generate revenue all year around, and they range from daily necessities to basic needs products. Among these, the highly lucrative niches are:

• Health Niche,
• Gardening Niche
• Weight loss Niche,
• Pets Niche,
• Sports Niche,
• Photography Niche,
• Online Learning Niche,
• Food Niche,
• Home and DIY Niche,
• Beauty Niche, and
• Marketing Niche,

among others. Note that these evergreen niches will further be affected by the new trends in technology most especially, artificial intelligence [AI], Internet of Things [IoT], Metaverse, and Augmented Reality [AR], among others. So, affiliates should be ready to embrace this change in how technology roll out may affect the way they do business.

With trendy niches, they are dealing with popular products/services/brands and at the time of the hype, they are flocked by a big following. However, this positive trend sooner than later drastically falls. Such niches are described as trendy niches and are not the best for building a long-lasting affiliate brand. These should be avoided. So what action should you undertake?

First, do a search for what are evergreen niches and make a catalog of them. Then you may go on to arrange them in order of your interest among them and after you have finished these two tasks identify the best two or three.

2) Where is/what is your passion and interest?

Under this step, after selecting the two or three niches that suit your passion and interest, then add on this quality. Now it is time to evaluate which one, among the chosen one, [of course they are among the evergreen niches] you have good knowledge about!!

The knowledge here referred to is not what you have heard people say about a niche. It is the knowledge you can leverage while building a niche website, writing content, and growing your affiliate marketing or any online business brand. After evaluating these best choices and identifying the one most suited for your passion, interest, and knowledge, then you are set to go to the next step.

3) Evaluate the popularity of your chosen niche topic!

You may ask: how do I do this? Calm down, that is exactly why you are reading this post. Continue reading, please.

This can be done by establishing what kind of competition you have for your niche topic. What you should now do is type and run a search for your niche topic on Google and see how many search results appear for this topic.

Suppose your passion is in the Internet of Things [IoT] technology and how it is applied in farming and you choose as your niche topic “Connected Farming”, then type this niche topic as your search keyword and perform an organic search.

Obviously, you may see that the search volume is very high!! Do not get worried yet, for these results take care of all searches involving any of the words within your niche topic and for both terms. Now to be specific about the exact terms in the niche topic search the same niche topic on google, but this time the niche topic is in quotation marks. You will notice that the search volume reduces drastically, in our case to 7120 results, far away from 530,000,000 results. Look at the screenshots for comparison.

Now you realize that your niche topic is less competitive if only 7120 is the search volume worldwide. But you may want to further investigate the monthly search volume. Go to Google Ads and you will see as one of the services is Keyword planner

Click on get started icon and follow the steps. You will be provided with monthly volume searches of your keywords, which in this case is your niche topic. As you can see, our niche topic attract 10-100 average monthly searches, indicating that it has a low competition.

Because of this low search volume, which means that you are faced with low competition, you may go ahead to select and work in that niche. However, if you find very high competition, then scroll all the way down on the Google search results page, and you’ll notice some of the other related search terms. Pick a search term and test it to see how many people search for this specific term every month.
You will not go wrong if you take the time and go through these steps. Surely you will come up with a very good niche, with low competition. Now if this is done what next? Continue reading, please.

4) Evaluate the Potential of the Niche to Generate Income

Although you are advised to choose your niche in such areas where your passion, interest, and knowledge are, sometimes this may not guarantee success. Another issue that is equally very important is finding if the niche will be “profitable”. In other words; what is its revenue potential?

One of the factors that will affect your potential revenue will be the competition from other affiliates or business players within the same niche. If you pick a niche with too much competition, your affiliate business will get beaten down by high-authority websites. On the other hand, if you pick a very narrow niche with no demand, your business will barely make an impact. In a nutshell, your niche should be such that it lies in the middle and most importantly, a niche that can also be monetized easily.

But a big question is: how can I evaluate the revenue potential of my niche topic? Let’s see how this can be done.

This can be done by testing to see if any merchants/brands or businesses are advertising for your keywords [niche topic]. If people are spending money on AdWords to advertise products targeting specific keywords related to your niche, then know that you have picked the right niche topic.

As an affiliate, you will quickly be able to write good quality content that will increase traffic to your niche website and then go ahead to promote affiliate products related to your niche. It also means that you can easily monetize your niche website with AdSense ads.

5) Check for Available Sources of Traffic

The success of affiliates/publishers and indeed online businesses hinges on the availability of organic traffic to their niche websites. However good the content, if your site does not attract visitors, it cannot profit you!! You may ask; how can I know the potential sources of traffic if I do not already have a niche website? Do not get worried about this. Shortly, I will show you how. Keep on reading, please.

Do simple market research about your niche topic. Here’s how you can get started: Once again, let’s say “Connected Farming” is one of your favorite niche topics, and you want to start an affiliate business around this niche topic. Now, let us see if this niche topic has a big enough audience and see how much competition it has.

Go to Google Trends, and type: “connected farming” to see if this niche topic has any interest and how many people are searching for it.

Normally google trends will show a graphical performance of the search topic for the past twelve months. This is an important step because this graph will show you whether the interest in your topic is stable, rising or declining over time.

As you can see, “Connected farming” looks like a great niche topic for affiliate marketing. Although the trend is fluctuating, perhaps following major growing seasons, it shows great promise since the application of IoT technology in agriculture is in its infancy and is set to grow exponentially from 2023 and beyond.

Currently, this technology has taken root in the United States and India, as indicated by the regional distribution map (B). It should, however, be noted that over the last 5 years, the worldwide interest in this topic has been stable, and it is set to continue to rise. This means you will have a growing audience to drive traffic to your niche website for many years ahead. In tandem with the adoption of IoT technology in farming.

My piece of advice is that should you find that the interest in your niche topics is declining, avoid building a long-lasting affiliate niche website that should last for a long time.

Build your niche website

Having come up with the niche topic that you have tested and have found to have the potential to be monetized, now you set to build your niche websites. Please I strongly advise that you ignore all those who tell you that you can do affiliate marketing business without a website. For details on why you need a niche website, I refer you to my earlier post that deal with website building.

That said I hasten to point out that they are various Affiliate Training companies that offer training in affiliate marketing. These can help you to at least learn not only the basics about affiliate marketing but also walk you through the process of building your website. You also need additional training in how to create content that rank in search engines.

If you are leveraging affiliate marketing, then, Wealthy Affiliate is the company to focus on. Having been started by affiliates, themselves, they offer in-depth training that should get anyone to succeed as an affiliate marketer. Wealthy Affiliate is an all-in-one platform, which has all the tools for both training and running your website at one source.

You can go through that shot video to give you a hint how profitable it will be for you to work with this company. Follow the link and enjoy the video.

If you are a complete newbie in affiliate marketing or online business it may be a good idea to go through training and setting up of the website step-by-step under professional guidance at Wealthy Affiliate.

……………. Enroll for a Wealthy Affiliate Free Starter Membership Here……….

Final Thoughts

When performing a niche research, especially for first-time affiliates, I advise that you favor an element of passion, personal interest, or unique advantage, as guides in your final niche selection.

This will not only help you stay motivated for a long time, but it will also enable you create content and build a brand with personality and authenticity. This will be very hard if you were simply motivated by what is trending at the time and the urge to make quick money.

Please, Do not rush this step! Just for more emphasis, I repeat once again that ensure that the niche topic that you choose for your affiliate marketing business is about something you love, interested in, and above all passionate about. It must be such a niche that you love to write about.

However, since the overall aim is building a business with great potential to make you money, the same should be true for your passionate niche topic!! Otherwise, it will be pointless to spend your money building and hosting a niche website. So, this is why I strongly recommend that you do not rush this step. Please, take your time.

That said, I also add that you focus on one niche first and learn the whole business well before switching to other niches. Why? Because having mastered the process well, you will be able to duplicate the same strategy you used on the first niche and apply to the next niche.

Thereafter, your success in affiliate marketing will grow faster with the subsequent niches and possibly along with earning more money because you by now you will have learned what to do and how to make money in affiliate marketing.

Do not throw away this advice: ALWAYS! Start with one niche first. The whole idea of sticking with one in the beginning is to ensure that you learn how to make money in affiliate marketing, leave alone developing a system and a strategy that fits you to succeed in affiliate marketing business.

Conclusion

I have walked with you through the steps a beginner and indeed an expert may go through to generate a niche topic and thereafter build a profitable affiliate niche website. If these steps are followed well, one cannot error in coming up with evergreen niches. I have also advised beginners to focus on niches that fall into such fields where interest and passion lies, and on one niche for the start. This should help them learn the strategy and the mode of operation of affiliate marketing, which they can duplicate for other niches.

I hope you have found this information helpful. Should you have questions, comments, or further suggestions on this topic, please you are welcome to make it. Thank you.
Cheers

Joseph Hawumba