Important: If you are super-passionate about a niche, you should make a conscious effort not to be influenced by this or similar articles.
While browsing various affiliate marketing related content and reading people’s comments, I realized many people are genuinely confused about what niche they want to go with.
Not everyone is lucky enough to be hyper passionate about something, right?
Some people are even trying to avoid creating content around their passion or a hobby thinking it would never work as a business.
“Oh, this niche is way too small” or “I would never be able to monetize a site in this niche” is often what people say.
That’s just false.
Sometimes, you just need to go through the process, do the research, and spend a few days buried in articles like this one before you finally come up with the answer on your own terms.
This is why I’ll try to go through the most important questions on the topic of niches in hope it helps you make this important decision.
What is an Affiliate Niche?
Let’s back up for a bit and explain what a niche even is in the context of affiliate marketing.
Niche (adjective) – denoting or relating to products, services, or interests that appeal to a small, specialized section of the population.
An affiliate niche simply means creating content within a limited range of topics that you want to cover. Niches can be very wide, like “health and wellness,” or very narrow, like “fitness for female ballet dancers.”
Generally speaking, the wider the niche is, the more competition you will face.
This is why it’s always a good idea to ‘niche down.’ Niching down means narrowing the area of interest.
Instead of creating a blog on gardening niche in general, you could niche down to tomatoes and explore the world of tomatoes in and out.
In the off-chance that you do cover everything there is to cover about tomatoes, congrats! You made it!
And don’t worry. You don’t have to create an entirely new blog to cover some other gardening-related sub-niche.
You can always use your tomato clout to niche up and start covering other fruit or veggies.
Since you’re already a proven expert when it comes to tomatoes, people will trust you with, say, pickles as well.
Having said all that, employing a good niche strategy isn’t the “be-all and end-all” when it comes to creating success.
Sometimes, it’s enough to simply provide better content and, in time, rise above your competition.
Obviously, marrying both of these ideas will yield the best results.
Why is it important to choose a niche you’re interested in?
If you’re wondering why choosing a niche is such a big deal, you need to “zoom out” a bit and think of the big picture.
Getting rich quickly just doesn’t happen with affiliate marketing.
There are ‘gurus’ out there who will try to sell you courses on how to get from zero to hero in a short amount of time.
Remember, those people are not in the affiliate marketing business. They’re in the business of selling courses.
That’s not to say all courses are BS. Some definitely are helpful. But generally, most of them are at the very least over-priced.
People are easily fooled by masterfully crafted pitches and copywriting. And I’m not talking about complete beginners here. It happens to most of us.
It’s incredibly hard to see through the masterful copywriting. We are almost wired to fall for some of this stuff, especially if we allow ourselves to be fooled.
Anyway, with so many ‘gurus’ out there, they have to keep one-upping one another somehow. Thus, they come up with these bombshell hooks to reel as many people in as possible.
Getting rich quickly is so alluring, but the reality is something different.
Affiliate marketing is a multi-year venture if you want real lifestyle-changing effects.
This is why choosing a niche is so important.
You will be creating content around your niche of choice for a long, long time. The last thing you want is to be surrounded by topics you have zero interest in.
You will burn out and you will give up.
I get it, not everyone’s hyper-passionate about something. But at least try going with a niche you’re interested in or have an affinity to.
If need be, go wider at start and allow yourself to discover where your true interest are. At which point, you can niche down and talk about more specific topics.
This question can help you reverse engineer a niche based on your past experiences
Ask yourself this: “What have I been doing for the past 10 years?”
Write things down if you have to.
Whatever the answers may be, you could use those skills or interests for your affiliate marketing business.
You were a nurse for the last 10 years? Great. What kind of ailments were you predominantly around?
Oh, you were around people with diabetes a lot? Fantastic. You could niche down to a diabetes-related blog.
Or maybe you worked as an accountant for the last few years. You’re thinking, “Surely, no one wants to read about accounting on the internet and you couldn’t monetize this niche anyway, right?”
Wrong.
Tons of people would love you for your accounting expertise.
You could monetize it through courses, guides, tutorials, tips, software reviews, etc.
It would work.
Some of you may be like “But, Tomislav, I’ve been playing World of Warcraft for the past 10 years. Am I doomed?”
First of all, so have I. For the Alliance!
Second of all, not in the slightest.
You could start a blog or a YouTube channel around World of Warcraft. You don’t even have to niche down. World of Warcraft is already something very specific.
If you’re more into computer hardware, you could start a blog or a YouTube channel around that.
Companies are releasing staggering amounts of new hardware all the time. You’ll never run out of content ideas.
There are also countless ways to niche down in the computer hardware niche too.
For example, you could specialize your content around reviewing mice, keyboards, graphics cards, processors, etc.
Or you could choose a niche around the hardware use cases. For example, gaming hardware, video editing hardware, photo editing hardware, etc.
The sky is the limit.
What are the most profitable niches for Affiliate Marketing?
I’d like to stress out the importance of not choosing a niche solely based on profitability, but it doesn’t hurt being aware of this information.
There really are 3 main evergreen niches. And they’re huge. Mega-niches, if you will.
What you’ll notice is that all 3 of them are loaded with human emotion. And, I would argue, none of them are covered as well as they should be in the educational system.
That is why a lot of people are genuinely confused when it comes to this type of knowledge. Especially when it comes to nuances. But that’s a whole different can of worms.
Alright… Without further ado, the 3 evergreen niches for affiliate marketing are:
– Health and Wellness – we all want to get healthy or remain healthy.
– Wealth – let’s be honest, most of us could use a bit more money than we are already earning.
– Relationships – talk about being loaded with emotions and not being taught through the educational system…
You can now see why I call them mega-niches. They’re huge in scope and size.
In fact, it would be impossible for an individual to tackle any of them in their entirety.
The idea of niching down could not be more important here. And, most likely, you’d have to go down a few steps before you run into something you could realistically tackle.
To illustrate, let’s assume you want to go with the “Relationships” niche.
First step of niching down could be “Dating.” Still a huge niche.
From there, the second step of niching down could be the “Dating for Single Mothers” niche. Again, a fairly big niche.
“Dating for Single Mothers in a Big City” would be the fourth step. This looks like something an individual blogger could tackle.
Still, you could niche down from there even further. Say, you lived in New York. “Dating for Single Mothers in New York City” would be something very specific that would still leave you with a fairly big audience.
You’d be creating content around more specific keywords and end up being relevant in the Google search results much easier.
How do you tell if a niche is too big or too small?
It’s always a better idea to do some research than go into things blindly, no matter what you’re doing.
The same logic applies to choosing a niche.
Having said that, there isn’t a magic formula that would definitively tell you if a specific niche is too big, too small, or just the right size. It all depends.
What you can do, though, is fire up the good ole Google and start entering various keywords and questions related to your niche.
If you get flooded by pages and pages of high quality results for even some of the less used keywords, odds are the niche might be too big.
In theory, it’s entirely possible to go into a more competitive niche and completely crush it by creating better quality content than your competitors. And more of it.
If, on the other hand, you enter keyword after keyword and don’t get many search results at all, one of two things is probably true.
Either the niche is too small, or there just isn’t a lot of competition there. In the latter case, you might have a huge opportunity in front of you.
Maybe you’re among the first to start creating content on something that’s about to blow up in popularity. My suggestion would be do more research and, ultimately, trust your gut feeling.
Do this exercise and potentially discover your niche
Let’s do a fun little exercise.
I’m going to go through several of very popular niches and see if I can come up with an angle for creating content in said niches.
I will try to root the content around my actual experiences and interests.
All of these niches have huge audiences and countless sub-niches. You would have no issues monetizing your content whatsoever.
Provided that you produce quality content in sufficient amount and don’t give up too soon, of course.
OK, let’s start.
1) Hobbies
Everyone’s got a hobby, right?
There was a period of a few years in my early teens when I was heavily into collecting stamps. I have a fairly large collection of stamps from all over the world.
Even though I’ve not actively collected stamps or curated my collection in many, many years, the philately itch still comes back from time to time.
I still love my collection and I wouldn’t give it up for anything in the world.
Had the internet been around in today’s form back then, I would have undoubtedly used it to research stamps and get in touch with other collectors from all over the globe.
Believe it or not, stamps are fascinating. Each stamp is a piece of history. Whether it’s depicting a figure, event or a place, each stamp has a story behind it.
There’s definitely an audience for philately. A blog form would work wonders for this type of content and I’m sure monetizing it would be more than possible.
Stamp collectors, just like any other hobbyists, are hyper-passionate about their hobby and they seek to connect with their peers.
They did it through live events 20 years ago, and they sure do it online now.
2) Pets
This one’s easy.
I have a 10-month old kitten named Micko.
Micko somehow wondered to my doorsteps as a one month-old kitten, all lost and hungry.
As soon as I walked out the door, Micko without any hesitation or fear ran towards me. I was stunned by this. It was a love at first sight.
I realize he did this because someone probably fed him before and he associated humans with food. But at that time, it looked as if he chose me as his owner.
And so I kept him.
As this was my first pet ever, I had no idea what to feed Micko or how to take care of him.
Needless to say, I fired up Google and started researching.
As Micko was growing up, I’ve been observing him and googling anything and everything I thought I should know about him.
Turns out I’m one of those hovering pet owners who think something’s wrong with their pet all the time.
Thankfully, Micko has been generally healthy, but this didn’t stop me from researching quite a bit just in case.
I could easily flip the table and start creating content in this niche. Albeit, from a layman’s perspective.
For example, Micko and I could be reviewing cat food, cat toys or other cat-related products. Come to think of it, it would probably be a ton of fun.
Monetizing a blog or a YouTube channel around this would be a breeze. Amazon affiliate links, anyone?
3) Gadgets
Even though I’m a fan of technology and I’m around computers all the time, I’ve never been that much into gadgets.
I’m a basic smartphone user and that’s about it.
However, I think drones are the coolest thing ever.
I don’t own one, but I watched so many videos on drones it’s not even funny.
I’m fascinated by drones and I can appreciate the passion of the people in this niche.
The only thing that stopped me from getting into this hobby myself were the rather steep prices of drones back when my interest was at its peak.
Nowadays, the mass production has brought the prices down and drones have become affordable. The result was the drone niche exploding in popularity.
Had I decided to get into this niche, I would have simply purchased my first drone and started creating content around it.
From assembly to flying and beyond.
It’s not necessary to be an expert straight away.
Documenting the journey of getting into this hobby and growing my collection and expertise would have been a ton of fun, for sure.
You could do the same.
4) Self-Improvement
Self-improvement is a huge niche and it shouldn’t be surprising to anyone as to why that is.
We all try to work on ourselves in some way or another, right?
Be it by trying to learn how to get rid of stress, or trying to manage our time more efficiently, we all seek quality-of-life improvements.
If I were to start a blog in this niche, I would talk about the following issue I faced and, in many ways, continue to face.
Without going into much detail, my parents divorced when I was two years old. Since then, I’ve had cumulatively spent maybe a few hours with my biological father over the span of 30 or so years.
Not the ideal situation by any stretch of the imagination. This left a mark on me.
For years and years, I dealt with it by ignoring my feelings. Let me tell you, that doesn’t work in the long run.
But in my mid 20’s, there was a shift in how I started approaching this.
Instead of ignoring my feelings, I started exploring them. I started consciously making an effort to find out why I was feeling certain ways in certain situations.
It took a few years and a lot of effort, but I made real progress and it helped me feel better about myself as a human being. A lot better, in fact. And that’s priceless.
I did this without any one-on-one therapy or anything like that. I just couldn’t afford professional help.
This journey of mine really makes me feel like I have something to say on the topic and possibly help others in similar situations.
If I were to pursue this niche, this is definitely where I would start.
5) Gaming
Ok, happy thoughts now! Killing dragons, finding treasure, saving damsels in distress… Yay!
Gaming has been a huge part of my life since as long as I can remember, basically.
From the original Gameboy, to Sega Master System II console, to our first family PC, I just loved video games. And still do to this day.
Gaming industry is huge, dwarfing the movie industry in revenue.
Shunned at first, gamers and gaming are slowly but surely becoming mainstream. It feels like everyone and their mother are playing video games nowadays.
Fortnite, Minecraft, and World of Warcraft are just a few games that not only shaped their respective genres, but made a mark on the pop culture itself.
My interests in this niche are so vast, I would probably have to spend a good while trying to decide how to niche down.
I would probably limit my content to RPG (role-playing) games, both massively multiplayer online (MMO) RPG games and single player RPG games.
If you’re not into gaming and I just lost you with those terms, don’t worry about it. RPG’s are just a genre of games.
If you understood all this, more power to you! I’d love to hear what you’re playing right now in the comments section.
Gaming is also an interesting niche because it lends itself well to more than one medium. You could do well with a gaming blog, YouTube channel, podcast, or a Twitch live-stream channel.
Had I decided to go for the gaming niche, I would have definitely live-streamed on Twitch and used that footage to then make YouTube videos.
Conclusion
Choosing a niche for your affiliate marketing business is an important step.
Do your best not to be distracted by “the next big thing” and don’t follow trends without any rhyme or reason.
Don’t get me wrong, following a trend is not bad by default. There simply has to be a good reason. Passion being one of them. If you’re passionate about something, all else be damned.
Be mindful of the fact that the bigger the niche is, the more competition there’s going to be.
Do some research and try to gauge how much competition you will face and how big your audience is.
Simply Google relevant keywords and questions and see what comes up.
Furthermore, it’s OK to take monetization and profitability into consideration, but those should never be the deciding factors.
Building up an audience and establishing yourself as an authority figure within your niche takes a lot of time and effort.
This is why creating content around something you’re at least interested in goes a long way. If you do that, you will create more content and it will be of better quality.
Passion shows.