How to Find a Profitable Niche For Affiliate Marketing

How to Find a Profitable Niche For Affiliate Marketing – In this article, I’m going to guide you how to find a niche for affiliate marketing. If you’re new to affiliate marketing or you want to launch a new site that you plan to monetize with affiliate offers, this video will show you how to find a profitable niche.

Your first step is to head over to Quantcast.com.

Quantcast has a great list of, basically, the most popular sites online. This is an awesome place to go when you’re in the brainstorming phase. Head over to Quantcast, scroll down, and click on the Browse Rankings link that’s right below the search field. What you want to do is, really, just look down the list and just see what is doing well online.

Obviously, these are going to be a lot of household names, a lot of huge sites like Pinterest, Wikipedia, LinkedIn, and things like that. You’re not really trying to emulate these sites; you’re just looking at what people these sites tend to target.

When you’re in the Top 100, they’re going to be more general. Google and YouTube appeal to just about everybody. As you get further down the list, and especially when you get to the second or third page, you’ll notice that they become more and more a niche and they start appealing to certain groups.

Fandango is about movies. E! Online is about entertainment. Poll Daddy is a place for polls. Drudge Report is about politics. As you go down the list, you can find more and more niche sites and that’s a place that you can go to get inspiration for your niche. Obviously like I said, you’re not going to copy these sites because these are massive multimillion dollar sites. What they help you do is come up with topic ideas.

For example, we have Trip Advisor at the 140th spot. What you’d want to do is say, “What about travel? Is that a niche I might explore?” and then follow the next steps I’m going to show you. The next thing you want to do, once you have an idea, is head over to Quora.com, which is a crowdsource question/answer site. You want to put ‘travel’ into the search field. Then look at some of the top questions that come up in Quora search results. The reason you’re doing this is you’re taking the broad niche of travel and finding smaller niches that you can create sites around, and then monetize with affiliate offers.

For example, we have this question here by Sameer: What are the best travel hacks? That’s a niche right there, travel hacks. Instead of covering all of travel, you can cover things like frequent flier miles, how to travel on the cheap, things like that. We also look at this question here: What are the most surreal places one can ever visit? You could focus on surreal destinations. Is India a good travel destination? You could have a blog or a site that covers traveling in India. These are just ways that you can brainstorm different niches under this greater niche.

If you feel like this is not working out, this is not something you’re interested in or not something you want to be involved in, you can go back to Qauntcast, look at another site, and see what that broad niche is, and then repeat the process. You can also do the same thing at Yahoo! Answers, which is like an old-school version of Quora, but they actually have a lot of good questions that are asked there that can lead you into smaller niches. Just Google ‘Yahoo! Answers’, click on the first result.

Then you want to type in the same keyword you used at Quora in Yahoo! Answers and click on Search Answers. Under the search result, you want to choose Most Answers. Of course, there’s going to be some questions in here that don’t really make sense for your niche, but there’ll be some gems in here too.

For example we have this: What are your 10 must visit travel destinations around the world? That could be a blog topic right there. You could create a blog about travel destinations that you should visit before you die. You cover the most popular ones or some maybe that are great but not as well known. What was your most memorable beach or seaside vacation? You could create a blog about the greatest beach or seaside destinations in the world.

The next place you want to look is Clickbank.com. You’re not actually going to try to find specific products to promote quite yet, but this is a great place to go to see whether or not the niche that you’ve found can be monetized with affiliate offers. Clickbank is just one way to monetize your site with affiliate offers, but it’s a good place to look because it’s very popular. Head over to Clickbank.com, then click on the Marketplace button at the top, and then you can search. You can either look at a category that fits under whatever niche you’re looking at. Travel actually has a category, so you click on that.

If you don’t find a category in the sidebar that fits well with your niche, you can actually just search for it using a keyword at the top where it says Find Products. Then when you do that or you choose a category from the sidebar, you want to take a look at some of the offers and see how popular they are.

You want to pay specific attention to gravity. Gravity is basically how many sales this product gets. You want to see whether or not these are products that you could potentially promote to the people that visit your site. You just want to scroll down and see what’s doing well and see what’s interesting. For example, ‘Escape Plan: Ditch the Rat Race, Discover the World’. This might be nice for that travel hacks niche site if you decided to make that.

If you don’t find anything on Clickbank, no worries; there are plenty of other ways to monetize your site with affiliate offers. You’re just looking here to see whether or not your niche can be monetized.

Another way to check whether or not your niche is something that you can promote affiliate offers on is actually to look at Google AdWords and check out the cost-per-click for keywords related to the niche that you might want to enter. Head over to Google AdWords, log in, and under Tools and Analysis, choose Keyword Planner.

You want to click on Search For New Keyword Ad Group Ideas and enter a few keywords related to your niche: Travel, traveling, things like that. Click on Get Ideas, then click on Keyword Ideas and pay attention to the suggested bid. The suggested bid is basically how much an AdWords advertiser pays for one click in AdWords for people searching for this particular keyword.

You’re obviously not going to be targeting broad keywords like ‘travel’ and ‘traveling’. Actually, it doesn’t even matter if you’re going to be doing SEO for this particular site. What you really want to see is whether or not there is a demand for that particular type of traffic. As you scroll down, you want to look for cost-per-clicks that really jump out at you.

For example, we have ‘student travel’, which has a suggested bid of $4.10 for one click. That might be a niche right there. Under the broadness of ‘traveling’, if you decided to do something about student travel, you know that there are advertisers paying $4 for one visitor. I’ve found in my experience that the higher this cost-per-click, the more affiliate offers and affiliate options you have. This is something to pay attention to.

In general, the cost-per-click in the whole travel niche is quite low. For this reason alone and the fact that the Clickbank marketplace didn’t really have so many great offers that you could promote, you might want to go back to the beginning in Quantcast and look at another niche and follow the same process.