How To Choose the Right Niche for Your Affiliate Marketing Business
Affiliate marketing has long become a goldmine for crafty affiliates, but only those able to choose the niche that matches their business case. In the ever-evolving affiliate marketing landscape, you need elaborate affiliate link tracking, accurate attribution, and much more, but it can all be rendered useless if you’ve chosen the wrong niche.
Without any further ado, let’s dig into the affiliate marketing niche choice, starting from some basic initial considerations.
What to Consider Choosing the Right Niche?
You can think of dozens of factors that impact your affiliate marketing niche choice, from your core offering to your link tracking capabilities.
Here are the most important four:
- Your passion, motivation, ideas, and ideals
- The level of competition in your niche
- How well you can monetize your talents
- For how long can you keep your affiliate business running
More on these below.
Passion
If you choose the niche you don't like, you won’t exert much effort to succeed there. The good news is that affiliate marketing is so vast that you can find a product or service to advertise for almost any niche.
If you like gardening, that's fine. You can create content about the products you love. If you are an expert in personal finance, that’s also fine. You can assist other people with their financial issues.
This is also a great leisure time activity for university students, as they can conveniently work from the comfort of their student accommodation and earn some extra money.
Competition
If you select a niche with high interest and competition, advanced affiliates may outperform you severely. On the other hand, if you choose a niche with low interest and no competition, you will have to deal with a lack of customers and low prices.
At the end of the day, you have to make a realistic choice, which makes it possible to break through the competition and sell your views, clicks, and leads at a competitive price and within a monetization model you’re comfortable with.
Monetization
There are five standard payment models in affiliate marketing:
- Pay per sale (PPS): a flat fee (bounty) or a commission from the sale
- Pay per action (PPA): downloading apps, filling out an email form, leaving an email address, and other formats
- Pay per lead (PPL): a commission for a qualified lead, which is usually a lead that filled out the form or shared personal information in any other way
- Pay per view (PPV): typical practice for mobile user acquisition and brand awareness campaigns where views matter
- Pay per click (PPC): you receive a commission for the clicks on your affiliate links, regardless of whether these clicks lead to purchases
It goes without saying that all these models have their pros and cons, meaning you must choose the one that fits your particular goals and business case. For example, if you can bring in lots of clicks but are unsure how many of these clicks will convert, chances are your optimal commission model is PPC.
On the other hand, if you are sure many of your high-intent leads will make a purchase, you can safely choose the Pay per sale (PPS) model.
Longevity
Consider reliable and reputable affiliate marketing platforms like Amazon, eBay, Shopify, and more. They have vast experience and an established market for their products and services.
Such companies have a strict affiliate policy monitoring and know how to manage affiliates. Their affiliate tracking program assists you with tracking affiliate marketing efforts.
Affiliate Tracking
The affiliate link is a URL with your username or ID, provided by your advertiser or affiliate network.
Here’s what an affiliate link looks like:
Source: Similarweb.com
The gist of using affiliate links is simple: you place them in strategic locations around your content and encourage users to click.
Next, you track them with these affiliate marketing tracking methods:
- Impression tracking: This tracking method allows you to analyze the viewing statistics, such as when users who see your banner don’t click on it. You can adjust your ads by knowing why they are less appealing.
- Per-product tracking: This tracking method allows you to track every product individually, knowing what users and why proceed with the purchase.
- Cookie tracking: The good old cookie tracking method is still popular and viable, enabling you to place a cookie in the user’s browser and track them until the cookie expires. With some limitations, cookie tracking can fairly accurately connect your customers to your campaigns and advertisers.
However, with Google Chrome third-party cookies being phased out, businesses will need to adapt their strategies to maintain accurate tracking and campaign measurement. This change emphasizes the importance of developing new methods for user tracking and data collection.
- Postback URL tracking: adding ID tags to the affiliates' URLs with further monitoring of the affiliate links.
How Do I Select the Right Affiliate Marketing Niche?
Here are the 6 steps you need to take to select the best affiliate marketing niche:
Follow Your Passion and Expertise
You will gain more trust if you are knowledgeable about the product in question. Followers will likely read your articles and buy products through the affiliate links if they feel your excitement.
Create a list of 10–15 topics you like and move to the next step.
Follow the Trend
There are two common ways to find the most popular product within your spheres of passion:
- Google Trends
- Amazon Product listings
Google Trends will show you the popularity of specific topics on the web. Use typical keywords for these tools, and you’ll see the topic’s trendiness for the selected timeframe.
With Amazon Product listings, you can select goods you are most likely to buy and examine the ones with good reviews.
Choose some popular products you like (within your fields of interest) and proceed to the next step.
Analyze How Much Affiliate Programs Pay
Now, find the most reputable and suitable affiliate programs for your needs. Just type in the search bar keywords from your topic + affiliate program.
You can find an example of searching for such programs below.
Then, explore how these programs pay, check their affiliate rules monitoring, and how they track affiliate links.
Save the list of the most lucrative and decent programs and go to the next stage.
Explore Search Volume and Competition in Your Niche
To analyze the traffic sources, use Similarweb. To discover your niche's volume and competition, use SEMrush or Google Keyword Planner. The last two can offer you a broad keyword list related to your topic. Add the ones you’ve chosen, and they will show you more.
The key metrics you need to use are monthly keyword search volume and cost per click (CPC). The first gives you insights into search volume. The latter indicates the amount of money you will pay for one click. By comparing this data, you can determine which niche can provide significant profits with less competition.
Find Gaps in Affiliate Marketing Content in the Niche
Analyze the content of your competitors. Ponder what you can add to this content to serve your readers better. If you don't have anything to add, switch to another niche. If there are some details you can improve do it.
Create a Unique Selling Proposition (USP)
Knowing your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses and your offer’s upsides will aid you in creating your unique selling proposition (USP). Once you’ve shaped and tested your USP, you’re almost ready to go live with your affiliate marketing program.
The next stage is selecting the right affiliate marketing tracker.
Pick Out a Proper Affiliate Marketing Tracking Software
Search for affiliate marketing trackers, like CPA network software or other applications, to select the best affiliate link tracker. Ideally, automated affiliate marketing can serve as a proper tool for marketing mundane tasks.
Think about cost efficiency. Review the ones that are:
- easy to use
- efficiently track all your affiliate links
- provide reports and analytics
- integrate with other marketing software and tools
Get It Right from the Get-Go
The affiliate marketing niche you choose will be the focal point of your passion, so make sure you can bring value to the table. And if you’re only about to start, consider finding a free affiliate link tracking software.
Start small while thinking big, switching from the easiest to the most complex affiliate marketing practices as you gain footing in the game.