What is Niche Marketing? Niche Affiliate Marketing
Niche affiliate marketing is the method of finding small, non-competitive specific markets or "niches" in which to set up shop, make a website, and promote either your own or affiliate products.
What is a Niche? Niche Affiliate Marketing
A "niche" is basically defined as a specific market segment that is relatively narrow in scope. For example, instead of having a website about "sports," you could get more specific and have a site about "baseball." However, baseball is still a tad broad, so you might want to get even more specific and have a site about the Yankees, or baseball practice tips, or baseball equipment reviews. Those are more "niche" than baseball alone, and sports is certainly not a niche at all by itself.
What makes a good niche?Niche Affiliate Marketing
A good niche has relatively high traffic potential while at the same time having relatively low competition from other marketers. It's a good strategy to avoid relatively saturated niches like credit repair, internet marketing, and insurance. Now, I'm not saying you should never go near those niches, however if you're just starting out it might get a bit frustrating trying to go up against a lot of competition. There are plenty of niches out there that get good traffic and don't have internet marketers crawling all over them yet.
Why niche marketing?Niche Affiliate Marketing
If you can find a good niche with low competition and high traffic, it will be easier for you to "win" that niche and get your website in the top ten search results. This will drive lots of targeted traffic to your site, which in turn means more monetization potential. Traffic = $$ in the internet marketing world, and he who controls the traffic wins. If you're trying to win in a very competitive niche it will be very difficult to gain the necessary traffic. It's doable, but I'd say hold off on the uber-competetive niche affiliate marketing until you have some experience under your belt.
How to find good nichesNiche Affiliate Marketing
Finding good affiliate niche markets takes a little creativity and research. Think about the products you use every day. Try to get pretty mundane. Think about things people buy, and even better try to think about things people buy online due to a better selection/better prices/ease of shopping. For example, a niche I have been inspecting but haven't done much with yet is "faucets" and other random plumbing type things like sinks. People buy these things all the time, yet because they're not glamorous they don't have much competition. Get really random, and you could find a ton of niches sitting right under your nose because they're things you become almost "blind" to. How many times do you think about faucets? I'm sure you use them about 10 times a day without noticing.
For examples of good niches and the websites that people are making to dominate those niches, have a look at this page chock full of examples.
Niche competition researchNiche Affiliate Marketing
Now, once you've come up with a few good affiliate niche marketing ideas, you have to do some research into their popularity and competition. Get a good keyword tool and put in your niche ideas and see how popular they are. When you see some promising keywords, pull up a new browser window and go to Google. Type in your keyword and see what comes up. If you see a lot of results (typically more than 2-3 million might be too competitive, but there are other factors to consider) you might want to try a new keyword. It's kind of a process that can be made relatively easy by using the proper tools. After doing a basic search in google, do a new search by putting your keywords in quotes. For example if you searched for car parts, do a new search for "car parts." This lets you see how much competition is out there for your specific keyword. Instead of google finding the results of pages with car or parts anywhere in the content, it now searches for pages with the specific phrase car parts. This will help you see how much specific competition you have.
Niche Keyword Research ToolsNiche Affiliate Marketing
A couple free keyword tools I use are Wordtracker's free keyword tool, and Rushmore's Advanced Keyword Research Tool. Rushmore's tool is particularly useful to help determine a rough idea of your competition in a specific niche, however it's a little slow.
Wordtracker's service is one of the best, although their free tool is a little limited. Their paid service is pretty comprehensive and you can check it out with a free trial.
Site Build It has one of the best keyword research tools, and it's included in their service (which I highly recommend). Check out my review of their keyword tool here.
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