How to Choose a Niche for Affiliate Marketing

Writing blog posts can turn out to be a very good side income. The only active effort required is to write blogs and post them. After they have been posted, you can live off of the commission from the users clicking on the affiliate links. In today’s article, we’re going to talk about how to choose a niche for affiliate marketing.

For those of you still wondering about what choosing a niche for affiliate marketing means, it is the central theme of your blogs that you keep writing about, and choosing the right topic can not only help your blog’s visibility on google but also impact how much you earn from affiliate links.

This is why you should choose a niche carefully. If you check amazon’s percentage that you receive for various different products, you can easily choose which niche you want to pursue

Now, while it might be tempting to directly choose digital video games, luxury beauty, and lawn & garden;  you should go for a topic that you know you can cover well and you know has a wide audience.

Being able to upload frequently is a key factor for growth and you need growth to get more clicks on your affiliate links. Your goal while picking a niche is to eventually become the go-to blog for any query on that niche. This way you can move beyond amazon affiliate marketing and move on to partnerships with brands in that niche who need more attention.

Since niche blogs are also a good way of niche marketing, you can expect higher-paying ad placements in your blogs once you enter a niche fully. Even if not ads, you can start making custom affiliate marketing links that can give you better returns on your blog. Once you become the de-facto website on a niche you can start expanding to other niches.

You want to make sure that nobody else is using the same niche to grow as well or at least check whether there are any big companies in the market or not. In case of any big companies are there in the market, you might need to change your niche or further pick a less common niche.

You can write general topics but you should avoid that since most of the bigger blogs are already writing about it. Write about keywords that are less popular or lack good content. For example, writing anything in the beauty genre is currently very difficult to rank since there are so many other beauty magazines out there.

You might want to stay away from a few topics such as health and medicare and anything that can directly impact another person’s health.

Pick easy topics that are easy to write for you personally. Adding a bit of your personality to the blog is what is going to help you stand out. This could help you in your SEO as well. Don’t pick trending topics such as new technology or beauty, choose smaller niches such as marketing or personal wellbeing or more general tips and tricks.

ALSO READ: What is Grassroots Marketing? Expert Ideas with Examples.

How to choose a niche for affiliate marketing

1. Research

Research different niches before choosing one, go to keyword finders, and try to find keywords that can help you identify your niche. You can even look into your older articles and try to find niches that you feel you can sustain over a longer period.

Research topics that you like and can write about more often. A good niche is one that is growing constantly and has new readers coming in every month. This obviously helps you as a writer find new fans that you can monetize on, but apart from this, it allows you to widen your audience and skill set.

Let’s say that you’re a writer who writes about the recent developments in the tech industry, as and when more people join this niche, you can start diversifying into more than just tech reviews, you can start writing about other topics which regular readers of yours might like.

This way you always have the opportunity to jump ships in case you want to.

Your research should also include the keywords that need to be covered to get your article to trend. This part of the research is very intensive and can take up to weeks of planning. Make sure you have enough articles to upload for an entire week before starting this process. In my own personal experience, having a few articles in the bank helps a lot.

Apart from just searching keywords, try finding places where you can promote your article. You need to understand the audience and write blogs keeping your audience in mind.

You need to check how often others are posting and how long their articles are. Ideally, you would most more frequently as compared to your closest competitors and have just about enough content to explain the topic but in reality, you need to worry about word count and posting frequency as well.

You need to also research out the affiliate programs offered by the different companies and apply for partnerships. This is a core part of your plan and is a necessary part of the research

ALSO READ: What is Channel Marketing? An Expert Guide for the Beginners.

2. Scope out competition

Now that you know which niche and affiliate programs you want to be using, it’s time to get to the second part of the process. At this stage, you want to check out your competition. You should start seeing the number of viewers that the other websites are getting and where they are getting their main traffic from.

To get to the level established by the bigger articles you will have to first start off with small topics that have very few search results and a relatively low number of articles written about them. This way you can start getting some sort of traction on your blog.

Although your initial traction will be difficult, the next part will be even more difficult, to make sure that the traction you’ve gained through the small article persists, you’re going to have to update the article every once in a while to make sure that the SEO and the content are up to date.

You’re also going to have to maintain writing blogs on smaller topics so that you continue getting traction on the smaller topics so that even if your article on bigger topics doesn’t get traction, you can continue getting new readers on the other blogs.

One thing you should be careful about is writing a blog post on a topic that your competitor just wrote about. Try to write about topics that don’t have any new blog posts written on them in the last few weeks.

3. Add new articles

Adding new articles is the backbone of your SEO, the more articles you add, the more chances you have of getting ranked.

Write articles on topics that have not been written on in quite some time. Write blogs with affiliate marketing in mind. Write about topics that have affiliate links available.

One of the most popular affiliate programs is the Amazon affiliate program, to be a part of the affiliate program you have to meet the affiliate program criteria.

Some of the criteria include not using link shorteners, having a comprehensive privacy policy, following the privacy guidelines mentioned by amazon and so much more. Another major caveat is how their laws work for children under the age of 13. You need to make sure that you do not collect information for children under 13 and more such rules which makes it almost impossible to make blogs on any topics which are related to children under the age of 13.

You want to write articles that grab attention and can retain the reader’s attention. This helps with improving SEO for your website. Another metric is the share metric, you want people to be sharing your article, try writing articles that are catchy and easily shareable.

The flow of new articles needs to be more or less constant, you need to try maintaining a baseline number of articles that you post per month. Post as frequently as possible, post multiple times a day if you can. The more frequently you post articles, the more likely are you to get fans for your blog.

Writing about beauty and lifestyle is one of the easiest ways to ensure returning readers but this space is very crowded, so be careful and choose a niche where you can get repeating readers. For example, writing about tech is a very crowded market but writing about experimental tech is slightly less competitive which makes it a good niche to target.

As a small blog, you need to decide whether you want to cover recent news or cover evergreen topics such as how-to and product reviews. When covering news, you need to be on your feet and post as soon as something breaks. This can get tedious but on the other hand, you can easily gain new readers and the competition is slightly less since the quicker you post, the more attention you get.

On the other side, you can choose to take evergreen topics. With evergreen topics you don’t need to worry about writing as soon as the news breaks, you can take your time and research the topics very well before posting. You will face more competition here but you can use strategies to avoid the competition by choosing an appropriate niche.

At the end of the day, you still want to earn some money off of your blogs, which is why you need to take part in affiliate marketing and you need to make sure to add your affiliate marketing links in the article or blog post. As you start writing more blogs and people start referring to your website more often, you can start becoming a source. This is why you want to make sure that whatever you write is accurate and can be considered as a fact unless specified otherwise.

Be transparent with your reader and make sure that you get your point across to the user, in most cases the work of a blog is to inform and keep the reader updated. Try not to use targeted ads in case you’re using affiliate links. This makes the user experience just a bit better.

4. Be on the lookout for new up and coming blogs in the space

Once you’ve been following these steps for long enough, you should have a sizable number of readers to be deemed as a popular blog. To maintain this position, you need to know about the smaller blogs as well, you need to constantly be on the lookout for new blogs and news websites. Take note of their marketing techniques and affiliate links to analyze their strategies and performance.

If you’re big enough you will eventually become the source the newer blogs will be citing. You want to therefore make sure that you provide accurate information that can help people.

Try collaborating with the smaller blogs to remain relevant since the smaller blogs are going to follow pretty much the same strategy as you have to reach the top. Collaborating with smaller blogs can not only help you gain more exposure to topics that you’ve not yet touched while not having the entire burden of writing the articles.

If you can maintain this position for a long enough time, you might as well just become the biggest blog in the niche.

Once you start getting some traction you can use your affiliate links to get some income and eventually this can become a source of passive income when you become a big enough blog to be the top result even though you have not been an active part of your blog.

5. A few last words

When choosing a niche for affiliate marketing, don’t take up anything related to health or anything that can directly cause death, you should try avoiding niches that include children under the age of 13.

Whatever you do, make sure you stick to the affiliate guidelines given and try not doing anything in the grey area.

Include the affiliate link in the headings itself so that people can click on the link whenever they finish reading the article, adding it to the top makes the link big and bold, just as any other affiliate link should be.

Let your readers know that the links are affiliate links.

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