Choosing a Profitable Niche for Affiliate Marketing | The 5-Step Process

So, have you made up your mind and want to get started with affiliate marketing? The first thing you’ll have to do is pick the right niche (or the category) of products you’ll be promoting.

Selecting a niche can be a daunting task since it can involve tons of research. If you are passionate about something or have a hobby, then that can be your true calling. However, there’s more to it; you’ll first want to make sure it’s profitable.

Just having one isn’t enough. You want to make sure there’s money in it, or it will only waste time and effort. Using this simple 5-step process, the task of finding one will be a breeze.

The 5-Step Process

Alright, so now that you’re ready to get started, let’s begin.

These beginner-friendly steps will make it look easy; however, ensure you take action on each step. Taking on one step at a time is the recommended approach.

#1 Finding Your Interests

Yes, that’s correct. This shouldn’t come across as a surprise; you’ll first want to make sure you are passionate about something. Reason? If you don’t absolutely love a topic or are just promoting something for money, you’ll run out of gas in no time.

It’s a little hard to stay on track when you’re associating yourself with a category/topic you don’t absolutely love. For example, if you like pets and/or if you own one and can talk about them all day, that’s one idea for a niche.

Think of something interesting enough for others, and if you can write about it all day long and help others, that’s your true calling. It can be anything – writing about dogs, cats, jewelry, camping/outdoors to name a few.

Since you absolutely love something, it will also make for more natural communication if you happen to stumble across a prospect. Closing that sale will be much easier for obvious reasons!

By the way, you’re never married to a topic either. If you don’t feel comfortable at any stage and want to switch, do it! The more you test, the better you’ll eventually get at online marketing.

#2 Finding Product(s) To Promote

Once you’ve identified the parent topic/category, it won’t be hard to pick products.

Promoting digital products should be more convenient compared to physical ones.

You won’t have to deal with the headache of shipping or managing inventory of any sort since the delivery is digital.

Often these are instant downloads like the PDF books you come across online. For finding products, ClickBank is a decent marketplace.

Everything on the website comes with a 60-day money-back guarantee so you’ll never face any challenges if someone requests a refund.

The platform hosts thousands of digital products, which are all readily available for you to promote.

As soon as you land on the website, you should notice a list of categories that should look like the image you see to the right.

You can expand each of these to explore various sub-categories to narrow it down further.

#3 Thinning the Herd

Once you’ve found the categories of your liking, it’s time to thin the herd. So, what’s that? With these digital product markets, there are hundreds of products to choose from. You don’t want to promote everything available just because it exists!

So, you’ll explore the category and pick 5-10 products out of hundreds. Fortunately, there’s a way to accomplish this in Click Bank. Head over to the Affiliate Marketplace tab, pick a category, and you’ll notice a section called ‘Gravity’ in the filter.

It’s CB’s way of telling how many affiliates received a commission for selling a product in the last 12 weeks. So, if the gravity is zero for a product, then it registered no sales in the previous 3 months.

CB Marketplace

You want to pick something that has registered a handful of sales but not too many. This is to avoid high competition. If you’re suddenly competing with thousands of affiliate marketers who promote the same product, your chances of getting sales to weaken astronomically.

10-50 is often the sweet spot; however, if you find a product that looks great (and has a higher gravity), feel free to select it.

#4 Taking a Closer Look

After you’ve found 5-10 products that are actually good (and are worth promoting), it will be a good idea to check out their sales pages. Try visiting them using a mobile device and then a computer to ensure it looks good and is consistent across all devices.

There are products that are amazing, but if the sales page isn’t good enough, you’ll have a hard time with promotions. If it looks boring/bland, the visitors will quickly lose interest just like you did. The sales pages will also help you better understand the product(s) as a whole.

A product listing on the website

The more you understand it, the easier it will be to sell it to someone. Once you’ve found a great product, simply click on promote to get your referral link.

#5 Sending Traffic

Once you have picked a niche and have a product you can get behind, it’s time to send traffic to it and test it out. Without visitors, you’ll have no sales because no one will see it.

There are many ways to generate traffic for your offers (both free and paid). If you’d like to learn how to generate free traffic, do check out our free affiliate marketing guide. Then, there are some people who like the fail-fast approach; in that case, you may want to consider solo ads.

Either way, no matter what approach you use (free/paid traffic), if you have a proven product in place, you’ll do well as an affiliate marketer. It’s always recommended to shower your prospects with sheer value.

If your audience finds value in what you have to offer, they will be more likely to make a purchase.

See Related: How to Use ClickFunnels for Affiliate Marketing

Final Words

So, there we have it, which brings us to the end of this guide. This step-by-step process should be helpful to anyone interested in selecting a profitable niche for affiliate marketing.

So, what niche will you pick?

What is your favorite marketplace(s)?

Or did we miss anything in this resource?

Either way, let us know by leaving a quick comment down below.

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