[Affiliate Marketing Niche Blog Series] Step One: Find a Niche

Welcome to step one of the Affiliate Marketing Niche Blog Series! In this installment, I’m going to find myself a niche to promote. As I type this, I actually haven’t started the process at all. So you’re going to be able to follow along with me as I actually do the research.

We all know that it can be hard to choose a niche, but I don’t think it’s for a lack of good niches. I think it has more to do with the human inability to choose one thing out of millions of possibilities. So I’m going to set the following rule for myself:

Don’t make this more difficult than it has to be!

Let’s Get Started

Okay, so where to start? Well a niche can either be based around physical products and goods. Or a niche can be based around a service. Or a niche can be based around a group of people with a need, where you offer them the solution to their problem.

It’s that last group that I believe can be the most lucrative, because you’re finding a starving crowd that’s eager to pay you to help them solve their problem! Think about engaged women who are desperate to lose weight before their wedding day, etc. You get the point.

Although a starving crowd is a great niche, finding a niche based around a product, good, or service isn’t a bad way to go either. After all, people constantly buy things online, and want to find great deals. They also want to find information about the products they’re buying.

I think for the sake of this series, I’m going to focus on the physical products niche, because it will be the easiest for everyone to follow along with. I’m confident that by the time I’ve wrapped the series up, I’ll all be able to take my checklist and custom WordPress installation and apply it to any of those niche types I listed.

So back to the task at hand: finding a niche. I recently wrote a blog entry about my foolproof method for keyword research, and in that I used “cordless drills” as my niche example. Maybe that would be a good niche to use for the series, so let’s explore that further.

Researching the Niche Idea

First things first, I head over to Google Trends to get an understanding of search trends at Google for the main niche keyword phrase “cordless drill.” If you look at those results, you can see there was a nice spike around Christmas and then the traffic went back down. But another look shows that traffic patterns have been consistent over the past few years. So the traffic is steady, and if I got my blog started now, I’d be in great position by December to take advantage of all the Christmas traffic. Google Trends: pass

Next, I want to go to Terapeak and see if cordless drills sell well on eBay. Using their free search tool I see that over the past 14 days, there have been 6,941 eBay auctions in the cordless drill category, with a 54.93% sell-through rate. That means over 3,800 drills have been sold on eBay in the past two weeks. Terapeak: pass

Next I want to check to see if the niche is represented at Amazon. So I go there and discover they have an entire section of the site devoted to cordless drills. When I check some of their bestsellers, I can see that the top drills are getting a healthy amount of customer feedback ratings. I consider this a great sign of a vibrant niche. If people aren’t talking about it in the obvious places, then it might not be worth pursuing. However in this instance, that’s not the case. Amazon: pass

Finally I’m going to check Shopping.com to see if “cordless drills” are listed in their top 100 searches, however upon checking, I see that it is not listed. They do have Tools and Accessories in the top 100, so I click on that to see if “cordless drills” show up anywhere on the top 100 keywords underneath that search, but it doesn’t show up there either. So this isn’t one of the top 100 niches out there. Shopping.com: fail

The Conclusion is…

Okay well I could continue to analyze this niche to death, but here’s what I have so far:

• The niche gets a decent amount of consistent search traffic at Google.
• The niche has a decent volume of successful auctions at eBay.
• The niche is well represented at Amazon.
• The niche is not in the top 100 at Shopping.com.

I can live with those results. It’s clear to me that people do buy cordless drills online! Sure it might not sell as well as Nintendo Wii’s might, but if our niches were only limited to Shopping.com’s top 100, well there wouldn’t be very many niche opportunities out there.

Wait… What About Competition?

It’s looking good for “cordless drills,” but I just have one more thing to check, and that’s the competition. Now at this stage, I’m not going to do any in-depth competition research because I’ll leave that for the keyword research stage. At this point I’m merely interested in knowing that there is competition, as a lack of competition is a warning that the niche might not be lucrative. Of secondary importance is to get a quick overview of the competition so I know how saturated the main keywords are. Too many competitors for the main keywords isn’t a bad thing, because I’ll be targeting lower competition keywords and phrases. I just need to know what I’m getting myself into is all.

I head over to Google’s Keyword Tool and do a search for “cordless drill.” The results came back with a ton of keywords, and when I sort by the competition column, there’s quite a few keywords with full bars or nearly full bars. These represent the amount of PPC (pay per click) competition there is for those keywords, which is an especially great sign! A good general rule of thumb is this: if people are willing to spend money advertising in a niche, then people are making money in that niche.

Since I plan on focusing on SEO and other types of organic traffic to my blog, it doesn’t concern me in the slightest if there is steep PPC competition. It just tells me I picked a niche that has products people are buying. So I believe I’ve found my niche…

The Winner is…

Cordless drills!

Now I have an admission to make before I wrap up this first segment of the series… I know next to nothing about cordless drills. Because of that, my next segment on niche recon to “get inside the heads” of the people in it will be very important. A lot of people find their niche, jump straight into keyword research, throw up a site, and wonder what went wrong. It’s important to understand who the buyers are and what they need, before we proceed.

That will be the next installment, so stay tuned…

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