Picking Your Niche For Big Profits

First Steps

Your success as an affiliate marketer will depend highly on the niche that you choose. A niche is a topic that you concentrate on. It can be just about anything. The best topic, of course, is a topic that you are most familiar with. Only you know what that topic may be, but if you are like most people, you may find it difficult to decide which is the best topic to generate sales. At this point your focus must be on your knowledge and what you can bring to the table. Sales will follow.

If you are just starting out, you need to do two things:

1. Pick a Niche and
2. Make a business Plan. 

These are done in no particular order but generally you would have an idea of what you want to have a website about before you built a business around it. Of course deciding on making a website, any website, is the beginning of a business plan.

The best choice for a niche is something that you are passionate about, such as a hobby, a cause, or something in your profession. I know that may not narrow it down much, but everyone is different, and only you will know the answer.

Some samples include:

            Cycling, fishing, bowling

            Jogging, running, walking

            Photography, graphics, painting, drawing, art

            Cars, trucks, trains

            Knitting, crafts, pumpkin carving, cupcakes, cookies

            Cure for Breast Cancer, Environment,

            Marketing, How To

…

The basic idea is that if you are interested in a particular subject, then you can easily write about it with confidence and probabilities are there are many people who are interested in the subject as well. 

If people are interested in a subject or know someone who is, they are also quite likely to be willing to buy something about it for themselves or as a gift.

Now we are going to do an acid test.

1. Write down five of your interests on a blank sheet of paper, the topics must be as general as possible.
2. Number each item one through five with one being the topic you know the most about  (ties are not allowed - sorry you have to decide)
3. Beside that number, number them again, but in order of interest (again, ties are not allowed)
4. Total the numbers for each topic, and re-write them in ascending order (lowest on top)

This is the list of your topics in an order that represents your personal best choices.  Your Niche should be number one. You don't have to limit it to just five, this test works with ten, but do not go less than five.

Acid test number two:

1. Go to Google.com and do a search for the top three topics in your list.
2. Note the number of results; this is what I got for photography "About 236,000,000 results (0.19 seconds)"
3. Do the same on Yahoo! (I got 587,000,000 results)
4. Same for Bing.com (I got 1-10 of 636,000,000 results)

These numbers represent the number of pages and websites about the topic that the search engines have already indexed. These are the competitors you will have on each of the topics. It stands to follow that each of these pages are fighting to be number one.

Secret #1:

The funny thing about these competitors is that they are also people and businesses who are interested in the same topic as you! Some of them are just like you and can be customers.

OK I need you to close your eyes...

This is Secret #2

Wow two in a row

What am I thinking?

I should be charging $49 $9.99 for this one, perhaps wrap it up in a neat video: 

"Google, Yahoo! and Bing are going to be your best friends!"

Yep, That it.

$49 sounds really cheap now doesn't it!

As you start out as an Affiliate Marketer, these search engines will be indispensable in your research. Later, after your site has been built, they will be your go-to sites to do analytics. The best part is they are FREE, you don't need to buy special software, and once again I don't collect my $49 :(

Business Decision

Now comes the Second business decision (the first was to build a website)

What kind of business do you want?

I touched on this in the previous article. There are two roads to take 1) Sell your own product, like an e-book, hand painted mugs etc. or 2) be an affiliate marketer, a sales person for another company, and earn money from commissions.

This blog focuses on the second. It makes no difference which one you choose, the techniques and 'secrets' shown in this blog can be applied to either.

If you are a seller, nothing stops you from getting your own affiliates to sell your products for you. I think that knowing what your affiliates do, and how they do it will be very helpful. Just remember, the actual sales must be made on your own site, or you run into the chance of being ripped off! Also, to handle all the tracking of the affiliates you are best off with an Affiliate Network. Again, I'm going to hold off on that discussion.

At this point you should have a reasonable idea of what your business and topic will be. Next, I'll be talking more about business plan and introduce Keyword Searches and Traffic.