Ristvin Marketing Blog

You Need People Searching for Your Niche and Affiliate Programs That Satisfy the Needs of the Niche With Quality Products

To be a profitable niche, two facets have to be met:

a) There have to be good affiliate programs & products you can promote.
b) Demand (found by the number of competing websites on Google)

The niche that you are looking for is kind of like the bed that Goldilocks fell asleep on in the bear’s house… It’s just right, not too big and not too small.

The Right Niche Shouldn’t Have Too Little Competition

Too little demand means there are only a few searches done each month. Which means that the market is practically dead in the water. So no matter what affiliate marketing “system” you use, there’s nobody in this market and therefore… no profits for you.

You probably won’t find many affiliate products or services to promote either.  If no one is searching for the niche, no one will supply products for it as they aren’t going to make any money.

The Right Niche Shouldn’t Have Too Much Competition Either

On the flip side, if a niche is overly crowded it will be just as difficult to make any money.  For example, “home mortgage” gets well over 600,000 searches a month. There’s definitely a lot of interest in this niche.

But the odds are… you will never make much money in this market. Why? Because the market is saturated, no, super-saturated with  9,610,000 of competitors, each trying to cash in on this piece of pie.

A Profitable Niche Must Be “Just Right”

There must be enough competition to bring traffic on a regular basis, not so many competitors that you can dive in and start making money right away, and affiliate programs that have a proven track record of selling with a high commission that makes it worth your time.

In the last post, You saw how to preliminarily narrow down your search for a niche.  Now let’s see how to judge if it’s profitable…

Profitable Niches Have Profitable Affiliate Programs That Address the Needs of Searchers

There are a couple good places to find out if a niche is going to have affiliate programs and products to promote and make your niche profitable for you.  One of these is Commission Junction.

Log-in to CJ and click on “get links”.  Then type the keyword for your niche into the search box.  This should bring up links to advertisers promoting products for the niche.  If there are no advertisers, you most likely should give up on that niche as you aren’t going to make any money.

But, if there are merchant links, click on the 3 Month EPC link at the top of that column to order the results by EPC. EPC is the amount of money the average affiliate makes per 100 visitors he sends to that merchant.

Find the merchants with a high EPC.  Check out the advertisers by clicking on the Advertiser link for any particular link.  One thing about CJ is that the commissions aren’t always the best, but they have a reliable program and if the EPC is high, you’re going to make money.

Another place to check for affiliate programs is ClickBank.  ClickBank deals entirely with downloadable, digital products whereas Commission Junction sells many tangible products and services.  Many affiliate marketers make their entire profits from CB.  And, it is easier to deal with downloadable products as they satisfy your customers need for getting their purchase immediately.

Go to CB’s MarketPlace and enter your niche keyword in the search box.  What you are looking for here is the “Gravity”.  The higher the Gravity, the more affiliates are making money with the product in the past month.  You want to find products with a gravity over 100 if possible.  These are the best ones as people are buying them regularly.

Once You Know There’s Profitable Affiliate Programs in Your Niche, Now find the Demand

Head over to Google and type in your keyword in quotes, such as, “fly fishing”.  If this were your niche, you would find over 9,800,000 competing websites for this term.  So, there’s plenty of demand.

Now go over to your favorite keyword research tool.  I use NicheBot but many affiliate marketers use WordTracker.  I like NicheBot because it is a whole suite of keyword tools and it also uses WordTracker, so you get the best of both worlds.

Type in your main niche keyword and search for it.  How many keyword phrases are returned?  If it’s over 500, you have a good niche and plenty of keywords to theme your niche website around to attract traffic.

Does Your Niche Have PPC Value?

You can head over to Google Keyword Tool External,  or if you subscribe to NicheBot, you can just stay there and do a PPC data search.  Either way, you’ll get the same data.  Let’s just look at the top PPC data for “fly fishing” using Google.

Be sure you choose to display all the columns and click on the Estimated Avg CPC to order the column from highest to lowest CPC.

Companies are willing to pay $5.33 per click for some of these keywords.  Not the best.  In some niches they are willing to pay $25 or more.  Those are super hot, competitive niches.  Our fly fishing example is average, but show potential as a profitable niche market.

It is the keywords that have a high PPC value that make for the best niches… Those niches within a niche that bring the long tail searchers and the most willing to buy from you.

In fact, I market to this niche and know as a fact that at certain times of the year, visitors to my site are just itching to buy the newest fishing products and ebooks on fishing and where to fish.  I also know that my fly fishing information pages get lots of Adsense clicks too.

This is a good niche as you can target your traffic with Google Adwords without killing the bank and know that during some seasons, you will be filling your bank account with a steady stream of income.

Next post let’s look closer at keyword research as, once you have your profitable niche, keyword research is the backbone of your affiliate marketing campaign…

Tags: affiliate marketing campaign, affiliate program, clickbank, commission junction, niche marketing, niche within a niche, PPC value, profitable niche market

Related Posts on Ristvin Marketing Blog

• August 28, 2009 -- What is Affiliate Marketing?
• April 9, 2010 -- List Building… When You’re Promoting Another Merchant’s Product as an Affiliate
• March 20, 2010 -- What to do if the ClickBank Vendor’s Sales Page Stinks
• March 20, 2010 -- Are You Evaluating ClickBank Affiliate Products for Maximum Profitability?
• March 19, 2010 -- Understanding ClickBank and How This Popular Affiliate Network Works