More and more people are choosing to earn extra money with affiliate marketing. And that’s not for nothing. Affiliate marketing is an interesting marketing channel for both companies and publishers. But how do you determine your affiliate niche?
Why choose affiliate marketing?
Why is affiliate marketing an ideal way to start an online side business ?
- Little technical knowledge required . Most affiliate websites run on a simple WordPress theme.
- No start – up capital required . The costs for starting affiliate marketing are very limited. All you need is a domain and hosting. These costs are only a few bucks.
- It’s semi-passive . As soon as your content remains relevant, you will have almost no work to do with it after posting.
So much for the main benefits of affiliate marketing. If you want to get started with it, you first have to choose a good niche. A niche is a specific, defined part of the market. An example of a niche within the furniture industry is office chairs. But which niche is best to enter? Where are the most opportunities? In this article I will help you determine your affiliate niche!
1. Start from your own interests and expertise
Do you have no experience with your own website or writing texts yet? Then it is a good idea to choose a niche or subject that you have an affinity with. Because no matter how beautiful the affiliate business model can be, don’t expect results in one day. To ensure that you continue to enjoy it and get energy from it, it is wise to choose a niche that you like and that you know enough about.
Not only does this make it easier to come up with and create content ideas, it also instills trust and authority. Certainly for specialist subjects, the reader will immediately see through it if he or she sees that you do not have the right expertise. Consequence? The user will quickly leave your website.
Tip: make a list of a number of potential niches that you find interesting. Some niches will be able to fall off at a later stage.
2. What about income?
If you have written down a number of interesting topics, it is important to check whether you can generate income with this. There are several factors to take into account for this.
Affiliate Partners
Are there (multiple) affiliate partners in your niche? For many (e-commerce) niches, there are affiliate partners available where you can send your traffic. Think of famous brands and many other webshops. But if you have a very specific product (think of decorative fireplaces), this is a lot more difficult.
Product value
As you may know, the commissions within affiliate marketing are not always very large. With physical products you should think of 3% – 10%. With products of several tens, this can quickly add up, especially with high volumes of traffic. But it doesn’t help with cheap products of a few euros.
Competition
Lots of competition doesn’t have to be a reason not to try it. But for your first affiliate project, it is not wise to choose a highly competitive niche.
How do you know if there is a lot of competition?
One way to determine this is by doing keyword research and looking at the ‘keyword difficulty’ of the most important search terms.
With tools like SEMrush or Ahrefs you can easily see how high the competition is on certain keywords. The lower the number, the easier it is to score.
With tools like SEMrush or Ahrefs you can easily see how high the competition is on certain keywords. Niches where competition is generally very high are: loans, cryptos, VPNs and gambling.
This does not have to be a problem, many people manage an (affiliate) website initially as a hobby. But if you want to make a lot of money, product value is a good metric to take into account.
Type of search traffic
You have different types of search terms. I always categorize these myself in one of the following 3 categories:
- Transactional : the user wants to buy/purchase something.
- Informative : the user is looking for information, but has no immediate intention to buy something.
- Orientation : The user probably wants to buy something, but still needs help making a decision.
If you want to create a website with a lot of blogs and editorial content, it is not wise to choose a niche where almost all search terms consist of transactional search terms. Google is smart enough to understand what a searcher wants to see and will mainly show webshops (or pages with webshop functionalities) for transactional terms. Then you may have written such good content, in most cases you will not rank.
Examples of transactional terms are:
- buy jeans
- men sneakers
- laptop offer
- etc.
In order to have your affiliate website convert well, orienting search terms are best.
Examples of exploratory search terms are:
- {product/brand} review
- which brand of headphones is best?
- what is the best laptop for students?
- Etc..
3. Is it scalable?
The third point to keep in mind is a little less black or white. But if you want to grow your website in the long term, there must be plenty of opportunities to scale. There must be enough to write about and ideally you want to be able to work with a template that can be used for different products/services.
That way you can continue to grow and create new content. Below I give examples of niches that are easily scalable and why.
Smartphones
Smartphones are a perfect example of a niche that you can easily scale into. There are many different phone brands and providers that you can write about. In addition, every brand comes up with new models a few times a year that you can compare and review. You can also go in different directions when it comes to accessories and phone cases.
Buying guides
There is a good chance that you yourself have regularly come across a buying guide during your search for the ideal product. A buying guide is an extensive piece of content in which you help the visitor choose a product by, among other things, telling them which factors he/she should pay attention to. Buying guides are scalable because there are literally hundreds of products to describe.
To do odd jobs
Do you have two left hands? Then, like me, you often have to look up how to approach certain things. This could be painting a wall, hanging a painting or re-tiling the bathroom. There are a lot of jobs where people are looking for information about how to do it and what equipment you need for this. Perfect opportunity to put your affiliate products here.
Affiliate marketing starts with fun
In this article I have covered how to choose the ideal affiliate niche for your affiliate website. Besides determining a topic, researching profitability and scalability, I want to tell you that it starts with fun.
Affiliate marketing is a very interesting way to earn extra money. But it also takes time, especially if you write your own content. Because you will not immediately expect a lot of income in the first few months, it is nice if you enjoy the build-up process.