Finding Good Affiliate Niches

by Paul on September 1st, 2004

When getting started in affiliate marketing you obviously have to begin somewhere, but where is that? You might think porn, prescription drugs, or gambling is a good start, but those are highly competitive.

If you are wondering what the really competitive stuff is that I keep on mentioning then the first place to look is your inbox. Spammers are usually the first indicator for what the next big thing will be. Usually you wish to avoid these niches.

Search Engine Pages

If you think you have found a niche, then do a search on it in the SEs and see how many results come up. The more there are, the higher the competition. The less there are the lower the competition, but this could also mean that it is not worth getting into. Use good judgement.

Also checkout the Page Rankings of the top 10, 20, 30 sites for your niche and see how well you would stack up. Although PR is not the end all be all of success it can be a good indicator. Also check the backlinks for specific keywords.

Some Rules

Here are some rules you should follow if you are looking to jump in the affiliate marketing game. They are not set in stone, but should provide you with some great starting points.

Pick affiliate programs that have products or services that you know a lot about. This way you will have original and interesting content to produce better webpages that sell.
Pick product/services that have several affiliate merchants you can sign up with. You can promote them all and see which one works out best for you and if worse comes to worse at least you will get a cookie set in your visitors browser for later returns. Try to avoid writing web pages that are unique to only one merchant until you are positive that is the one you are going to stick with.
Forget about the competition. Yes I know I tell you to be aware of the competition, but affiliate marketing is a zero-sum game. The high-competition niches pay out bigger, but are harder to get into. The low-competition niches pay out lower, but are easier to get into. Balances out.
Diversify. Kind of goes against number one since there are only a limited amount of things you can know about, but once you get the first 3 then number 4 should be your highest priority.

These will not get you rich quick, but they will help you on the road to success.

Finally here are some questions you should ask yourself:

What’s hot? What are the new topics coming out?
What will people buy that are searching on these topics?
What kind of ideas can I extrapolate here?

b5media.com

Work Boxers