The first hurdle that new bloggers and affiliate marketers face is finding a profitable niche. Most new bloggers start with a topic that they are passionate about which is good because you will need to create lots of content. If you intend to actually make money with your blog, this topic needs to be one where your target audience is willing to spend money. That’s what we mean when we say “profitable niche”.
How do you identify a profitable niche?
- First you want to look at your “target audience”. That’s a fancy name for all the people out there who would be interested in your topic. Are they cash poor college students or do they have discretionary income to spend on a hobby, like golfers?
- Are there enough products that this target audience would love to have that you can earn money when they buy them? Some topics are more geared to information gatherers rather than buyers and you would need to create your own products. Others naturally have tons of affiliate products that you can provide to your visitors and earn a commission when they buy.
- A profitable niche is also one that you can write about til the cows come home :). There should be lots of angles and key phrases to write about over time. New content is key to bringing in visitors — or traffic.
How do you make the most of a profitable niche?
- If you can, obtain a keyword rich domain name. This isn’t absolutely necessary, but if you can obtain a domain name with your main keyword(s) in the name, so much the better.
- Keyword research is where it all starts. You will need to find all the major keywords in your market. These will be used for optimizing your web pages and blog posts as well as providing ideas for domain names and products.
Getting help finding a profitable niche
Obviously you can do all the research yourself. It isn’t particularly hard, just time consuming. If you are not getting your blog or online business up and running because you are stuck on this step, I can recommend that you turn to Susanne Myers. She is an online marketing expert in profitable niches and getting traffic to your blog.
Susanne realized that many new bloggers were having trouble finding a topic to blog about and started putting together packets called Affiliate Niche Packs where she has done all the work. How cool is that? She keeps finding and researching new packs. As of this writing she has affiliate niche packs for:
- Migraine Headaches
- Yoga & Pilates
- Social Media
- Divorce
- Link Building
- Article Marketing
- SEO
- Pregnancy
- Stress, Panic & Anxiety
- Home Decor & Interior Design
- Dog Training & Care
- Fitness & Exercise
- Weight Loss & Diet
- Crockpot Cooking
- Blogging
I picked up the SEO Affiliate Niche Pack and here’s what I got in my pack:
- Two 30-day marketing strategies (one for beginners and one for advanced). You get a detailed step-by-step tutorial showing you what you should do every day for 30 days to get your profitable niche up and making money. Then you get a checklist to refer to each day.
- A detailed description of the niche and who the target market is. She even gave some sub-niche ideas since this area is highly competitive.
- A list of 8 affiliate products that you can promote with descriptions and links to the signup form.
- 100 domain name ideas along with some other words that can effectively be used in case the main domain name you want is already taken.
- 2024 keywords and key phrases along with # of searches and competitors. She guarantees that all packs will have at least 1000 keywords.
- 100 blog post or article ideas. A great thing to do with this list is to put the title and a few bullet points in draft form in WordPress. Then when you need some inspiration, just look through your drafts and fill out the bullet points with content.
- 15 resource boxes. When you submit your articles to article directories or write guest blog posts, you will need to add a compelling author resource box at the end with a link back to your site.
If you are struggling to research and select a profitable niche, I suggest you look through Susanne’s Affiliate Niche Packs to give you a head start. Click Here to browse through her topics.
