The #1 reason why beginner affiliate marketers fail is because they choose the wrong product niche. As an example, if you try to create a website about dogs to promote any physical goods on Amazon that a dog owner may want to buy, you’ll find it extremely difficult to get traffic to your site.
This lesson is going to teach you some simple strategies to use to take a niche like dogs and still use it while also avoiding most of the competition. It’s one of the most useful tips that I can offer to beginners.
Interests & Hobbies
I receive a lot of emails from people that ask about choosing a website niche based on their own interests.
In general, people will often want to build a website about a product and/or niche topic that they are actually interested in.
While it is possible that you may be interested in something that is fairly unique, most people usually have a general interest in the same types of things. This results in difficulty when it comes to finding a niche domain name that is available and has low competition.
Although it is helpful to actually like the product and/or niche topic that you build a website about, which is a common thing that is taught on the internet, I would like for you to consider the alternative approach.
What niche is best?
If you cannot find a low competition niche that is of interest to you, I want you to consider throwing the interest logic out the window.
Instead, just go for a niche that offers more potential. You’re not going to be married to the niche forever because the goal with niche websites is to create numerous sites. All you really need to do is tough it out with a subject until you’ve built the initial website. Many of my affiliate sites are hardly ever updated and still generate monthly commissions.
No matter how hard you try to stick to your interests, if you’re building somewhat small niche websites then you will eventually run out of things to create websites about or have a lot of trouble finding new ones. I simply don’t worry about these types of problems, because I will never turn down a niche based on personal interest.
Sure, it’s easy to look at a strange niche topic and wonder how anyone could really be interested in it, but if search engine traffic can be verified, then it really exists. The goal with niche websites is NOT to build a website that everyone in the USA or even the world wants to visit. The goal is to target a relatively small group of people because you will have very little competition.
By avoiding the competition, you can cut out 95% of your work necessary with other types of websites If you’ve never tried this approach, I strongly urge you to give it a shot as quickly as possible. You won’t regret this decision because this work actually produces results that will end up in your bank account.
Advanced Niche Selection Strategies
I want to talk about some specific niche selection strategies now.
Niche selection is absolutely vital to success with affiliate marketing, so if you have built websites in the past that don’t get any exposure, it could be because of bad niche choice or perhaps a lack of a niche focus.
When it comes to online marketing, there are a few general niches that nearly everyone will try to promote at some point in their marketing career. Products for Internet marketing is one of them.
Physical product niches that are commonly picked include Electronics, Automotive, Health & Personal Care, Home & Garden, Sports & Outdoors, and Pets. These markets are commonly chosen because they are known to perform well online.
On one hand, this is a good reason to pursue a niche, but there is a major problem that people run into when they make this type of choice. Since these are the most common niches, they will also have the most competition from other marketers.
The result is that only a handful of marketers in these niches are successful, while the rest end up wasting a lot of time and effort building websites and marketing them to target these niches only to never receive traffic on their site.
Low Competition Niches
So, how can you avoid this common downfall? There are actually two different strategies that I like to use, so I’m going to discuss both of those with you.
#1 – The obvious strategy is to avoid these niches completely as an affiliate marketer. By doing so, you immediately cut your work in half by avoiding a large portion of the competition. Instead of competing against hundreds, thousands, or even millions of other marketers, you can actually find niches where you only have a handful of competition or possibly none at all.
The downside to this strategy is that the niches are typically not quite as interesting to most marketers, but it doesn’t mean there isn’t someone out there that is interested in it. Yes, you can make a ton of money by getting in a great position in an extremely popular niche market, but accomplishing this isn’t something that will happen overnight. By targeting a more specialized niche, your earnings will be less, but you will actually be able to start making money in a timely manner.
#2 – The other strategy allows you to stay within those popular niches while still avoiding competition. To do this, you have to get extremely specific with your niche market. As an example, targeting the Pets niche in general would be a business death sentence. However, if you target something very specific within that niche, like Extra Large Metal Mesh Dog Crates, you can actually avoid a huge portion of the competition.
With this type of affiliate niche selection strategy, you’re going to be dealing with low traffic levels if you want to successfully avoid 95%+ of the competition. It will limit the amount of money a single affiliate site can make each month, but the point is not to build one site that is going to make thousands of dollars every month.
Either strategy is really about being able to quickly build sites that have a focus on content instead of marketing or backlinks. More website content equals more search engine traffic, especially when you’ve properly narrowed your focus to a low competition niche market.
To continue your learning about affiliate marketing, we recommend our article that will teach you the basics learning for beginner affiliates.