Keys to Choosing the Right Affiliate Marketing Niche [2.1]

Hey, it's Sam Oh and welcome to the second
module in our affiliate marketing course. In this module, I'm going to show you
how to find, choose and qualify a niche that's right for you. But before we get to the techniques to find
and qualify a niche, you need to know what to look for in a niche. And there are four factors we'll focus on. The first factor is competition. Now, because we established in the first
module that we'll be creating content and ranking it in search engines like Google,
we'll be looking specifically at SEO and keyword competition. And the main purpose of this is to get an idea
if we could somewhat easily rank for keywords that are relevant to an affiliate site. Now, there are a lot of things that go
into assessing keyword competition, but at this stage, we just want to get
a high-level overview for a niche. So we'll use a simple 3-step process to do this.

Step 1: Generate keyword ideas. Step 2: Filter for low-difficulty keywords
using a metric called "keyword difficulty," And step 3: Narrow in on affiliate keywords. To get started, search for a phrase related
to your niche in a keyword research tool like Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer, then
go to the Matching terms report. Now, to filter for low-difficulty keywords,
just set a keyword difficulty filter to have a max value of something low like 10. Finally, you'll want to filter
for affiliate-type keywords. For example, keywords that include the word
"best" tend to surface product roundups like "best golf clubs".

Or keywords that include the word "review"
will usually surface product reviews like "stix golf clubs review". To do that, hit the Include filter, choose
the Any tab, and in the text field, just add words like "best" and "review". Now, if we hit the Show results button,
you'll see there are thousands of relevant, low-difficulty keywords that cumulatively
have high search demand. Again, we've only scratched the surface
with keyword competition and we'll go into more detail later. But if you want to learn more now, then
I recommend watching our full tutorial in our free SEO course for beginners on how
you can assess ranking difficulty for any keyword. In fact, I highly recommend watching the full
course as the concepts and techniques will be fully applicable for affiliate sites too. Alright, the second factor is commerciality. Now, not all niches are created equal. Some have insane commercial value which can
lead to millions of dollars in monthly revenue, while others might only result in
a few hundred dollars – if even.

Ideally, you want to choose a niche that
has mid to high commercial value so that you don't reach a point where you'll
max out on your profit potential. A few things you can do include, market research
on the niche, look at commissions for relevant affiliate programs, and look at advertising
costs to get an idea of how valuable certain queries are to different companies. We'll talk more about understanding
commercial value in the next lessons. The third factor to consider is personal interest. Plain and simple, you don't have to be passionate
about a niche to make a successful affiliate site. But it doesn't mean you should choose
a niche just for profit potential. From my experience, choosing a niche
that you're at least somewhat interested in is the best route to go.

Because people often quit their affiliate
sites because they have zero interest in the products they're recommending 
and the content they're creating. Losing drive may be
the #1 killer of affiliate sites. The fourth factor to consider is
breadth of the search market. Again, because we're going after search
traffic, you want to get an understanding of how much traffic you can get to
your content from search engines. Fortunately, keyword research tools make this
easy for us because they tell us search volumes, which are the number of monthly
searches that happen for a query. SEO tools can also give you search traffic
estimations for your competitors which is even more helpful than search volumes
because what we want is traffic, not searches. So by understanding the breadth of
the search market, you're essentially getting an estimation of how many people are
interested in topics you'll be writing about, how much traffic you can get from these
topics, and in turn, how many clicks you can get to your affiliate links which should
directly be correlated with your revenue.

As a general rule of thumb, you'll want to
start off pretty niche because competition will likely be lower. But your niche should be tied to a larger
industry so you have the opportunity to niche out, which is going to give you
room to eventually reach more people. For example, you might start an affiliate
site in the bed frames niche. And after doing some quick keyword research
for affiliate keywords, you'll see that there's a cumulative search volume of over 130,000
monthly searches in the US just for "bed frames." Not small at all, but not huge.

But the great thing about bed frames is that
it's quite natural to niche out to topics like "mattresses," "pillows," "sheets," and
even to the broader topic of "sleep." There's tons of room for growth. Now, what you're going to find as
you're researching niches is that lot of these factors are connected. For example, niches that are highly commercial
will also have high competition and niches with low competition will often be
things you're not interested in. It's all about finding a balance from
this criteria then committing to a niche. In fact, these four things that we just talked
about are going to help you rate any niche so you can qualify one that's right for you. But before we get to qualifying, we need
to start brainstorming a list of niches and doing our research.

And that's what we'll be talking
about in the next lesson..

As found on YouTube