How to Find a Profitable Niche for Affiliate Marketing

In affiliate marketing, there can be profits in it only if you find the right market to sell to. This specialized market is often referred to as a niche. Finding a hungry niche of people looking for a product or service and then providing that product is the key to affiliate marketing success. Follow these steps to go about hunting down one of your own.

Finding a Market

Step 1:
Always find a hungry market before you find a product. You want to make sure there are people out there willing to buy what you're selling. Start with the demand and then supply that demand.
Step 2:
Brainstorm market ideas. These ideas can come from anywhere. Make a list of topics that interest you or topics that come to mind. Make a list of ten of these broad ideas and write them down. A sample list could be: cars, football, cats, dogs, wine, golf, pregnancy, soccer, yoga and gardening.
Step 3:
See what’s hot. If you're having trouble thinking of topics, there are places on the Internet that tracks the most popular searches. See the resource box for links to these websites.
Step 4:
Narrow down your topics. Words like “cars” or “football” are much too broad to make money. The competition for the keywords in this wide niche will be stiff. You'll need to find smaller niches within this topic like “football gloves” or “toy remote control cars."
Step 5:
Find related keywords. Once you have entered your broad term into the keyword research tool it will return the top one hundred most popular related keywords to your broad phrase. For example “football jerseys” and “football card” may come back as suggested keywords. You can dig even deeper into any of the returned keyword phrase by clicking on it and finding an even more targeted niche such as “upper deck football card.”
Step 6:
Take note of your niche keywords. Once you have a list of niche keyword phrases from your broad keyword you'll want to copy them down. You can write them down on paper or copy and paste them into a word document or spreadsheet. Also take note of the number beside each keyword. This tells you how many times in a month people search for that particular keyword phrase and gives you a rough idea how much demand there is for that product.

Determining Competition for Your Keywords

Step 1:
Check out the competition. The key to finding a profitable affiliate marketing niche is to find something that people want that's in high demand but has limited competition among sellers.
Step 2:
Find out how many websites are already targeting your keywords. To do this go to an internet search engine (we’ll use Google) and enter into the search field a keyword phrase surrounded by quotation marks. For example: “football gloves.” Hit enter to retrieve the results.
Step 3:
Read and study the results. At the top of Google you'll find the words “Results 1-10 of about (number of Web pages) for (the phrase you typed in).” For example, type in “football gloves" and you will get back “Results 1-10 of about 121,000 (at time this article was written)." You want to pay special attention to the total number of Web pages that are optimized for your keyword. Choose a keyword phrase that has a low number.
Step 4:
Find a low competition phrase. Continue entering keyword phrases surrounded by quotation marks until you come across phrases that aren't that competitive. In the beginning, we recommend getting as low as possible. Keyword phrases with competing Web pages under 20,000 will give you a much better chance to rank well in the search engines. If you really want to up your chances of getting on the first page of Google’s results aim for competing Web pages with a number of 5,000 or less.
Step 5:
Keep track of your results. Be sure to write down all the keyword phrases you find with low competition. Keep track of the number of competing web pages, as well as the number of searches on this keyword according to the keyword research tool. Once you've found in-demand keyword phrases with low competition you've found your niche markets. You're now ready to find a product to serve that niche and start promoting it through affilaite marketing.