What is Affiliate Marketing? Part 2 - Finding the right niche, A 2023 Guide To Getting Started

 After explaining the basics and terms in the first article of the “ Affiliate Marketing ” series, today I would like to go into the first important step.

It's all about finding the theme of your affiliate website , commonly referred to as a niche.

Because this definition of the niche is very important for the subsequent implementation of the affiliate website. The design of the website, the selection of the affiliate programs, the content, the marketing, etc. are based on this.

So let's get down to finding the right niche

What is a niche?

To get straight to the point, there isn't one universal definition of a niche.

If you search Google, you will find a variety of definitions. One determines it by the number of visitors, the other by the scope of the topic and the third by something completely different.

I define a niche in much the same way as Wikipedia does. There it says:

"A market niche in a part of a market that has not or only insufficiently been served by the competition."

Applied to the Internet, I would define it as follows:

"A website niche covers a special topic that has not been served at all or only insufficiently by other websites."

However, in order for a market niche to become a niche market , another requirement must be met. It has to be economically worthwhile!

And so I would define an optimal affiliate niche as follows:

"An optimal affiliate niche includes a topic that offers relatively little competition, many visitors and a lot of revenue potential."

How do I find the right niche for affiliate marketing? 

Finding a niche for an affiliate website is a little different than finding a blog niche. This is simply because an affiliate website is usually managed very differently than a blog.

While blogging is daily, an affiliate website is not maintained as regularly. As a rule, less heart and soul is attached to an affiliate website, so that the niche selection is certainly a little different here.

Nevertheless, it is of course not wrong to look for topics that you are familiar with. This has the advantage that you can also create content relatively easily and quickly.

But as you can see in my definition of an affiliate niche, 3 factors are particularly important:

competition , visitor numbers and revenue potential

How to Pick Your Niche and Find an Affiliate Offer?

Here I will go through the research of affiliate topics as an example. That's just my approach, which by no means has to be the only one. If you do something else, I'd love to hear your comments

1. Affiliate marketing topics ideas

First, I collect my topic ideas. These can be things that interest me or that I stumbled across on the Internet, for example. What the ideas usually have in common is that I am interested in them and more or less familiar with them. But every now and then there are topic ideas that are completely new to me.

It's also worth looking for trends that might suit an affiliate site. I have already written a detailed article on this: “ Finding and using current trends ”

For example, on eBay you can see very well what is currently selling well and it can be worth starting an affiliate business .

2. Who is interested in affiliate marketing?

Then I look at how many people are also interested in these topics. After all, a niche shouldn't be too small, otherwise you'll be number 1 on Google, but only 100 people per month will find you.

My favorite tool for this task is Market Samurai. This allows you to quickly and easily find out how often certain terms are searched for

Alternatively, you can use the “ Google AdWords Keyword Tool ”. Google Trends is also very useful, as you can also see seasonal fluctuations here.

I find the new “ Google Keyword Tool based on search queries ” very exciting. This offers the possibility to select categories and subcategories on the left side.

For example, you can go into the categories "Computer => Computer Accessories => Computer Cables" and get a long list of keywords. Then there is also the number of search queries per month, the strength of the AdWords competition and the expected click price.

If the number of visitors is too large for a topic idea, then you should consider splitting the topic up again.

3. Competition in Affiliate Marketing: the Current State And Few Tips on How to Come on Top

The strength of the competition cannot be analyzed so clearly. Of course, you should first check whether there are websites or blogs that deal with the topic in question. To do this, you can search for the most important keywords in Google and also analyze directories such as Yahoo.

Market Samurai (unfortunately the program has been discontinued) shows very clearly how good the competition is. Various data from the Google Top10 for a search term are evaluated and color-coded to indicate how strong the competition is.

But you can also analyze this with the Firefox plugin “ SEO for Firefox ”. If you have the plugin active, then the Google search result will be supplemented with interesting information such as page rank, Alexa value, backlinks from various search engines, domain age and other values.

From this you can see very well whether these are more specialized niche sites or more general but large sites.

Google Suggest, i.e. Google's automatic recommendation when entering keywords, is also a good way to check the competition. In addition, you come up with new niche ideas. Just go to Google.de and enter something in the search field.

In the ideal case, the competition is neither particularly strong nor as specialized as you would like it to be. However, if there are already very specialized websites on this topic, then you should change the topic or at least the approach (instead of online role-playing games, e.g. online racing games)

4. Earning  potential of affiliate marketing

The third important factor is revenue potential. No matter how interesting a niche may be, if you can't make any money there, then that's uninteresting from an affiliate perspective.

To find out whether you can make money with a topic niche, you should visit the affiliate networks and look for the topic there. Are there affiliate programs that fit your topic very well?

But the analysis of the AdSense prices is also interesting. What is the expected click price for your own keywords?

You should also take a look at large online shops such as Amazon. Are there products there that fit the niche topic?

The search for a suitable affiliate niche is therefore based on the following key points:

• Find niche ideas

• Visitor numbers sufficient?

• How strong is the competition?

• What can you earn in this topic?

soft factors

Besides this analysis, one should not forget the soft factors when searching for an affiliate niche.

So it is usually worth listening to friends and acquaintances. They often tell of wishes and needs that can possibly be implemented in affiliate sites.

Because that's the most important thing. People must have a need that they want to satisfy by buying a product (Sale) or providing contact information (Lead).

But also the visitors of existing websites and blogs often give hints what they might wish for. By carefully observing the online and offline world, you can identify needs and gaps in the market.

Such a gap in the market can also simply be a gap in knowledge. So there are already products that meet the corresponding needs. Only the target group knows nothing about it. This can change with a special niche website.

I already have a website/blog

Many readers of this series probably already have a website or blog. So you don't start from scratch by searching for a topic.

Even if you are already a little committed there, it does not hurt to check the topic or topics of your website/blog for affiliate suitability. You may also find a suitable additional topic that you can integrate and is very well suited for affiliate marketing.

Conclusion

If you want to do affiliate marketing specifically (and not just blogging, with a little bit of affiliate marketing), then you should research very carefully when choosing a topic and find the optional ideas.

If you find topics where the 3 factors look very good (traffic, competition and income potential), then you have already laid a very good basis.

The next part of the affiliate marketing series is about the affiliate networks. I will show what they do and what the advantages and disadvantages of these networks are.