Many of the first questions people ask me are about how to find a niche for affiliate marketing.  While I have discussed this some on the blog, I thought it would be useful to go through my actual thinking as I brainstorm niche site ideas live.  We discuss where the ideas come from and how you can come up with your own ideas.  We'll focus on evaluation of those ideas in a coming week.

We also enjoy a special appearance of my son Zachary as he brings us the Internet Marketing Fortune Cookie this week.

Show Notes

Here are the highlights of the things I have shared in this episode:

  1. What are the considerations that you need to think about when identifying which niche sites to build? Here are my suggestions:
  • Pick something that you know about, care about or want to learn more about because building quality sites cannot be done overnight and you will easily lose interest if you chose otherwise.
  • Find people’s pain points. Examples can be weight loss, relationships and recipes for healing.
  • Capture activities which people are passionate about. Examples can include golf, mountain biking or origami.
  • Things that people are willing to spend money on. An example can be home improvement.
  • Think of places where people feel they will get a return on their investment. An example is making money online.
  1. The first step in finding a niche: writing down a list. Here are three categories which you can start from, along with robust examples from my own list for you to have a jumping point:
  • Things that you are interested in – They don’t necessarily have to be things that you are already an expert on. This can range from guitar playing, darts, podcasting, electronics, home security and automation, hunting, customizing SUVs, hand gun safes to automotive.
  • Things that annoy you and you’d like to fix – This can include health problems, weight loss, exercise, sports injuries, home remedies for snoring, shaving, and meditation.
  • Other great ideas that you might have – I call this the Miscellaneous Category and my list include security guard training, ‘as seen on TV’ or infomercials, and holidays. Keep your eyes open so you may bump into creative ideas anytime!
  1. Your homework: Come up with 20 items for each of the first two categories and 10 from the 3rd one and let’s reconvene next week to filter which ones are the most viable to pursue.
  1. LNIM Fortune Cookie of the week: A friend or partner will be giving you needed information. Listen.

 

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Episode How To Find A Niche For Affiliate Marketing Transcript

Late Night Niche Site

When you go to identify a niche for a new site there are lots of things to consider. The first very simple thing is actually to have the idea in the first place. One thing that people will tell you a lot of times is that you want to pick something that you actually care about. Then there’s another school of thought that says you shouldn’t worry about that because that’s going to lead you to choose things that aren’t quite as profitable, you should pick something based on the merits of it financially, that whether you care about it or not that you think is going to have the best chance of making you money.

For my experience, especially if this is your very first website, you absolutely need to pick something that you know about, care about, or want to learn more about, because building quality niche sites is not that easy. It’s not something that you’re going to do in an afternoon and then be done with it, it’s something that is going to take a little bit of stick-to-it-iveness. You’re going to have to spend time, energy, and effort.

Even if you’re going to outsource a lot of it – which is something we’re going to talk about as we go through the Late Night Niche Site, how to outsource things like content and maybe some of the SEO tactics that we’ll use and stuff like that – if you don’t care about it, you’re going to lose interest. I promise you, I have been there. Unless you’re a trained profession at this sort of thing, I recommend that you definitely weight that in as you pick your niche.

We’ve talked in several episodes in the past about the kinds of things that you can consider when you’re picking a niche. These are things like you want to find points of pain for people, or things that people are passionate about, things where people are willing to spend money, or places where people feel like they’re going to get a return from their investment (whatever that investment is).

Examples of pain points would be things like weight loss, relationships, recipes for healing certain problems that people have. Examples of things that people are passionate about would be golf, mountain biking, or something that they really care about like origami. Improvement things, especially ones that return an investment, like making money online.

That has to be the most popular niche, it’s the niche that Late Night Internet Marketing falls into and you’re listening to me now, so you can certainly relate to that one in the sense that you’re willing to spend time even just listening to this podcast, which represents an investment. Your time is really valuable and I recognize that, so thank you. You’re willing to invest that time because you feel like by listening to this podcast you might get something out of it, or I hope you’re pretty sure that you’ll get something out of it at this point.

Those are the kinds of things that you think about. Overlaid on top of that I’ve suggested that you want to start with some things that you are interested in, so I think step one and the step that we’ll try to go through today is that you’re going to want to make a list of all these things that occur to you. When I’m doing this I usually try to get a list of 20 or 30 things, because what we’re going to do is once we get this brainstorming list of possible new niches together we are going to actually do some very simple testing to check some criteria about whether or not those niches are winnable, whether or not people are there, whether or not there are customers there and whether or not those customers have commercial intent.

We’re going to ask other questions, like whether or not there is something there to sell, whether or not there’s something there to say. We’re going to go through all of those kinds of things, but not yet. First we need a list of things that we might be interested in.

When I’m doing this for myself or when I’m coaching people to do this I’ll ask a series of pretty simple straightforward questions. Again, this is for the case when I feel like I’m in the mood to do something that I actually care about.

I’ll tell you something else, too, about these niche sites. One of the things that I always have in the back of my mind is what if I really get excited about this and decide that I want to make this the authoritative 1,000 page site on the internet about this topic. Can I see that as a possibility? I don’t dismiss things when I can’t, I don’t automatically exclude things that won’t fit that criteria, but I definitely consider that about whether or not the topic I’m considering has legs if I decide to turn it into an authority site. We’ll talk about all of that later, but right now we want a list.

What I thought I would do that might be helpful to you is let’s go through my list, just off the top of my head here, and try to understand the kind of things that I think about. I think you’ll be able to see if I’m listing those kind of things there are a lot of things that you could think about too. So let’s talk about it.

(Transcript continued on its own page, click here)

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