Niche and product selection are crucial cornerstones of affiliate marketing success. Choose a profitable niche aligned with your interests, market demand, and growth opportunities to maximize sustainable income as an affiliate marketer.
Doing the right research to select the right niche is one of the most important tasks you need to do to ensure your success in Affiliate Marketing. Probably after SEO and WordPress, the Niche topic is the one that has been written about more than any other topic due to its importance in Marketing.
Effective keyword research is the cornerstone of successful affiliate marketing niche and product selection, allowing marketers to align their strategies with market demand, consumer behavior, and the competitive landscape. By leveraging advanced keyword research strategies, affiliate marketers can optimize content relevance, improve SEO rankings, and maximize conversion opportunities, ultimately driving sustainable growth and profitability in affiliate marketing efforts. .
Some people believe that you have to take your own passions and interests into account when choosing a niche and product. On the other hand, some simply pull out the keyword tools and base their selection on numbers. They say that you just have to go to the markets and observe what products are selling, what products are profitable and opt for them. The truth is that you have to combine both methods.
Combining Personal Interests and Profits
When selecting the product that you, as a new affiliate marketer, are going to promote, experts recommend following your personal interests or selecting it for its earning potential. We recommend merging them and using both techniques. You can recognize your passions but also be aware of the realities of the market through keyword research.
Let’s say you are passionate about collecting vinyl records and can write academic articles on that topic. The question is how large the community of other collectors of that product is and whether it can be promoted profitably through effective keyword research. We suspect the profit potential would be close to zero.
Balancing Passion and Profitability
But should you ignore the things you care about and focus solely on profits? It certainly sounds easy and attractive. If you were trying to promote Amazon products, for example, you could simply go to Amazon and select products that are among the best sellers.
Since the site also has review ratings, you can limit your product selection to products that earn four or five stars. How simple is that? A few minutes on Amazon and you will have a list of the best products with enthusiastic buyers who rate the product positively.
Before you run away screaming with joy, you must take one more step. Unfortunately, today many of the product reviews you see are fake. Businesses and resellers found that a high number of positive reviews led to higher sales.
Combining Expertise and Market Realities
We don’t believe you can focus solely on what is profitable. Why? It will probably take you three to six months to write posts and copy copy for your social pages before your affiliate marketing efforts start to pay off. If you choose a topic you hate, you won’t be able to tackle the task of writing new posts for your site and sustain the effort for the time it will take.
So how do you combine what you love with a realistic view of profitable affiliate marketing? If you’re lucky enough to know what you’re passionate about, start your list of potential products with that. Below, list the areas in which you have experience. After that, add the products you know to the list. Rank the items on your lists in terms of how well you know each topic.
You should also consider the elements you know and the areas of your experience and expertise. It is better and easier to write about what you know. You get an advantage in your writing because you know the topic. By basing some of your articles on research, you will be able to more easily separate the good information you can use from the worthless information. Think about the following questions:
Evaluating Your Potential Products
Are there products that you have used over time that you can write how-to articles and reviews about? Add them to your list of potential niches and products to promote. Do you have experience that you would like to share with others who could potentially benefit from it, or would you like to solve the problems of others in your area of expertise?
Add that to your list of potential products and possible niches. Once you have a list of your passions and a list of topics, you’ll know it’s time to evaluate them in the market to see if any of them offer earning potential for your affiliate marketing efforts. It does this with keyword analysis, which we cover in the next section.
Niche and Product Keyword Research
Keyword analysis is vitally important to the success of your new affiliate marketing business. It largely determines whether your efforts are profitable. You should spend most of your pre-setup time conducting extensive keyword research that evaluates the competition, the strength of the competitor’s domain, and the potential profitability of the product you are considering promoting.
The inefficacy of a new affiliate marketer trying to compete in a highly competitive market whose top spots are dominated by million-dollar companies with large staffs, big budgets, and years of marketing experience should be obvious. Therefore, it is better for the new affiliate marketer to promote products with keywords that are often called “long-tail keywords” and “golden keywords”. Conducting thorough keyword research is essential to identify these profitable opportunities.
You can do all your keyword research using only free tools. However, your job will be faster, easier, and more complete if you use one of the tools that does cost money.
Looking at Long Tail Keywords
One of the biggest mistakes new affiliates make is choosing a highly profitable product in a large market. At first glance, this seems like a good way to go. High profits per item and a large market seem to be the path to success. Why is this a bug? Because it means that there are many competitors, most of whom are better funded than a beginner affiliate marketer. Affiliate marketers who successfully target those products have skills that have been honed over the years.
Despite the challenges ahead, do you still want to target a highly competitive niche? The most successful strategy we know of is to start choosing low competition keywords within a niche. These types of keywords are long-tail keywords.
Researching the Competition
What you look for when you do keyword research are hidden, untapped product niches with little to no competition. The competition you encounter is weak and you can easily work to position yourself above them.
What do we mean when we say that competition is weak? Determining the strength of your competition is quite complex because several factors come into play, including the following:
- Domain name age: How long has a domain been active?
- Number of backlinks: Backlinks are a measure of how important other websites feel your site is because they linked (or provided links on their sites) to yours.
- Trust Rank: A rating developed by Majestic (a search engine optimization company) that measures how trustworthy your website is.
- Citation Flow: This measuring stick, also developed by Majestic, tracks how many people cite your website on the Internet.
- SEO (Search Engine Optimization: This term refers to using techniques and strategies to optimize the way search engines like Google view your site. The way engines view your site has a large influence on ranking. , the traffic and income you earn as an affiliate.
If you judge the competition solely by the number of websites trying to rank for the same niche, you are missing out on a lot of great opportunities. Free keyword tools usually don’t do that analysis, they just provide the number of searches.
Highly profitable niches usually have very tough competition. As a new affiliate marketer, you will find it very difficult to get a top position or even a first page position for one of those keywords. Your new affiliate marketing site will be relegated to the bottom of the list and there is a good chance that no matter how much work you put in, your site will never reach a profitable position.
Understanding the Power of the Long Tail
What you are looking for in a search engine is often called a “long-tail keyword.” If you imagine all the keywords for a topic or product in a graph sorted by the number of times they are searched, you will find few terms, perhaps at most a few dozen, resulting in a large number of searches. This will be illustrated by a huge hill as seen in the Semrush image where we can also see how as the keyword becomes more “long tail”, the search volume decreases but the conversion rate increases, which means better positioning in the search engines.
But when you look at the other search terms in the topic, you’ll find that there is a “long tail” of keywords extending that receive far fewer searches. In fact, some of them may receive only a few dozen searches per day or month. The earning potential of these long-tail keywords seems much lower than highly searchable keywords because they are searched much less.
Many new affiliate marketers overlook them in favor of the terms that get the most searches. What new affiliate marketers don’t realize is that their chances of getting a high page position on Google for one of these high-search keywords are slim to none because of the competition.
The Importance of Long-Tail Keywords
According to Chitika, a company that studies website traffic, the first page of a Google search captures about 92 percent of the website traffic for that term. Chitika’s analysis goes on to report that the top three spots on the first page of Google results capture around 60 percent of the traffic.
So, contrary to the initial impression that going for a high traffic keyword will lead to higher profits, going for those long-tail, low traffic keywords is the best way to earn affiliate income for the new affiliate marketer. It is much better to rank high for a low volume keyword and make some income than to try to rank for a high volume keyword and earn nothing because the competition is too tough and you don’t even rank on the first page let alone the first three places on that page.
Going for a low volume keyword and ranking high is a good strategy for future growth. You rank high for a low-volume keyword because Google recognizes that you are meeting the needs of the audience searching for that term or product. Then add another long-tail keyword and work on ranking for that one. With every new long-tail keyword you rank for, your site’s authority increases in Google’s eyes.
Create about 20 long-tail keywords and rank for them, and your authority will increase with each one. As you increase your authority, you will be able to rank for more competitive keywords that drive more traffic. With each step, your authority, website traffic, and income should increase. That’s much better than trying to go after a high-volume keyword that you really have no chance of ranking for and never being able to get off the bottom of the list where there’s no profit.
Making Long-Tail Keywords Work for You
Long-tail keywords are typically three- to five-word phrases that are much more specific than base terms. Some may even be complete sentences that include more than 5 words. The key is that they are specific enough to target a particular niche or detailed search intent. The reason this is important to the affiliate marketer is that people who enter a more specific keyword are usually closer to the purchasing decision. They’re done with all the general product research and question-solving, and are focusing on the details involved in a purchasing decision.
One of the quick and dirty ways to find out if the search term you are looking for promises any profit is to use Google Search. In particular, consider looking at Google’s “write ahead” results. What is that? you ask. When you start typing a word in your browser’s search bar, Google’s type-ahead feature fills in the letters with the most searched terms.
It can be very instructive (and helpful) to pay attention to both the words and their order. See if they match the way you phrase your product keywords or the title of your product post on your website. If they don’t match, change them until they do. We have often found that a change in word order to match the way Google says people search (rather than the way we think it should be) results in much higher search volume and a higher salary.
Why? Because now your product post title matches how most people search for it and not how you imagine they search for it. Google is your friend and can provide you with a lot of valuable information for your affiliate marketing business, if you learn to listen.
Niche and Product Golden Keywords Research
Golden keywords are keywords filtered through several more screens to end up being the golden drops that will hopefully be the keywords that people use when purchasing products instead of just browsing. The exact definition of “golden keywords” varies slightly from one keyword tool to another. Generally, these filters look for the following characteristics:
- Low Competition: Measures the number of other sites targeting the same market.
- Pay Per Click and Other Advertisers: Shows how much other marketers are willing to pay for this keyword.
- Keyword Purchase – This shows how much you would have to pay or bid to get this keyword to advertise your products.
- Minimum number of searches (some tools allow you to select the number): It is the number of times people search for this term on the Internet.
Different keyword tools use different filters to limit the list of keywords to what they define as long tail keyword, gold keyword, etc. Additionally, most keyword tools allow you to vary different settings to make your custom filter more or less restrictive. You can see from the filter features that you are trying to find the keywords that will make you, the affiliate marketer, the most money possible.
Free keyword tools usually only give you search volume. You can find all the other factors by jumping around and using this search and that search, but it will take you ten times as long. Successful people realize that their time is their most precious asset. Successful people often take advantage of their time by exchanging part of their money for tools that allow them to work faster or better.
Examining Keyword Research Tools
Doing a good job of keyword research for the product you want to market is critical to your success. It takes some time to do a good job because many factors go into selecting the right keywords. Some tools evaluate keywords using 20 to 30 different factors. You can do all your keyword research and analysis using free tools. However, it will take you more time and you will have to review all those factors manually.
So the question is what do you use: your time, which is your most precious commodity, or your money for a tool that will help you accelerate your path to success? It’s hard to underestimate the amount of time a good keyword research tool will save you. It can generate hundreds of potential keywords for your preferred product and allow you to analyze and filter them in minutes using your criteria.
The same work would take hours to do manually using one of the free keyword research and analysis tools. It often takes several iterations of searching, generating, and analyzing (a matter of hours) to find the golden keywords you are looking for.
Speaking of paid tools, make sure they have a good money-back guarantee and take advantage of it if the tool doesn’t work or doesn’t meet your expectations. Many keyword research tools have their own libraries of instructional videos that show how to use the products. Many of them also have their own forums and user groups where you can share tips and advice.
Keyword Revealer
Keyword Revealer ranks all keywords with a numerical score that shows how difficult it will be to compete. It also shows the number of searches and possible revenue. You can apply different filters so that in minutes you can rank only the keywords that would be easy to rank for and have the number of searches you specify, so that there is a reasonable chance of making a profit.
It has a very easy-to-use free trial apart from the paid plans (Basic, Pro and Elite) depending on how many searches you need to do daily. I think lower membership levels that give you fewer daily searches (at a lower price) will meet the needs of most affiliate marketers.
Google Keyword Planner
Google Keyword Planner seems to be looked down upon by many Internet marketers who say that it is not as good as it used to be. What they are mainly referring to is that instead of giving us exact numbers, for example, for the number of searches, it gives us a range. For example, Google Keyword Planner will say that searches for a given keyword range between 1k and 10k. That makes it harder to dig deeper and discover those golden keywords you’re looking for.
However, it shows a good list of keywords; For example, in my test with the keyword “affiliate marketing,” a list of 1,198 related keywords appeared. The thing is that the analysis takes a little more time than with other tools. If you are on a budget, I suggest using Google Keyword Planner, it is free.
Google Keyword Planner (formerly Google Keyword Tool) is a free keyword tool, as we already mentioned. You have to set up an account to start using it.
With Google Ads, you bet that you will make more profit selling your affiliate products than your advertising cost. Some affiliate marketers have mastered this calculation, but it is not something for beginners. Many beginners have lost their shirts. Avoid trying Google Ads until you have much more experience.
Keywords Everywhere
Keywords Everywhere is a great keyword tool that adds search volume, cost per click (CPC), and competition data right on the screen. It currently aggregates this data for 16 of the most popular websites. This Chrome extension is available at https://keywordseverywhere.com/. It offers new affiliate marketers an analysis of their competitors, the keywords they rank for, and the CPC and keyword search volume. It has no monthly subscriptions; It is a pay-as-you-go program with a variety of pricing plans.
Ahrefs
Ahrefs.com is a popular SEO (Search Engine Optimization) tool and software suite used for optimizing websites for search engines. It offers a range of features and tools to help users improve their website’s search engine rankings. Some of the main functionalities of Ahrefs include:
- Allows users to analyze their website’s backlinks and search traffic.
- Provides insights into keyword research, including search volume, keyword difficulty, and more.
- Helps users identify and fix SEO issues on their website.
- Tracks the rankings of specific keywords over time.
- Enables users to discover and analyze the most popular content in their niche.
- Offers detailed information on who is linking to a website, the quality of those links, and potential link-building opportunities.
Ahrefs is widely used by SEO professionals, digital marketers, and website owners to improve their online presence and drive more organic traffic to their sites.
Spy on the Competition
Spying on the competition allows you to see where your target audience spends their time and what their interests are. Shows you what social sites they visit. You can also get information about the demographics of your niche audience such as income, age, gender, likes and dislikes, etc. The more you know about your target audience, the better you can tailor your approach, your website, your emails, etc. to customize your appeal and make your affiliate marketing business more effective. After all, wasn’t that how Facebook became a multi-billion dollar company? And we gave them all the information!
Below are some tools you can use to check what competitors are doing:
SimilarWeb
SimilarWeb displays sites similar to yours, allowing you to spy on popular websites. It shows you the global rank, country rank and category rank of any website. It also shows you a lot of information since it targets the same audience, it can help you learn more about it. It shows you information about traffic sources and top referral sites, display advertising, and social sites and interests so you better know what your audience likes and where they spend their time. It then shows you the website’s competitors and similar sites so you can expand your competitive research on all of these other similar sites.
Enter your competition’s URL and it will show you how your competition is doing. Shine on your own site and it will show you how you are doing. Have you seen internet gurus claiming they had 100,000 visitors and made a million dollars last year and you’re not sure about that claim? Place your URLs on SimilarWeb; the truth will be revealed and you will be able to see how they are really doing.
Facebook Audience Insights
Facebook’s Audience Insights is a tremendous tool to really drill down into demographics and uncover gender, age, education, income, likes, dislikes, and education. level, job, etc. of your potential audience.
Please note that this tool is designed to limit and target specific markets for advertisers. So if you want to advertise on Facebook, Audience Insights allows you to specifically target the market you want to reach by specifying specific demographics. For the affiliate marketer who isn’t interested in paying Facebook to advertise, Audience Insights gives you important information about the characteristics of your target market, allowing you to better customize your approach, message, and method of reaching them.
SpyFu
You are allowed to enter one domain at a time and get a limited view of the power of SpyFu. But to take advantage of the full power of SpyFu, you must sign up for a paid account. It has a basic plan, they also have higher priced plans and special reports that you can commission SpyFu to do. The result has specific recommendations and tells you what to do.
SpyFu is a keyword tool designed specifically for competitive analysis. It allows you to spy and download your competitors’ keywords. You can see what they pay for their advertising. It allows you to see what works for your competitors and what doesn’t.
Examining the Markets
One of the reasons the affiliate marketing opportunity is so large is that the world of different products and niches that an affiliate marketer can address is huge. Just as important is when the costs of reaching a particular market are so low that the affiliate marketer can target smaller markets, more niche products, and more niche audiences and still make a profit. Effective keyword research plays a crucial role in identifying these profitable niches and products.
In the past, advertiser reach was much more limited. You had to be able to pay perhaps hundreds, thousands, or millions of dollars for print, television, or radio ads to reach your audience. Depending on how many dollars you could spend on marketing, the reach could be limited to just a local region, state, or, for the really big spenders, nationally. That limited the products it could sell and the markets it could target.
The Modern Affiliate Marketing Opportunity
Compare that to the opportunity the affiliate marketer has today. For a few hundred dollars, you can establish your internet presence and start marketing, so you can target much smaller audiences and much more niche products that appeal to a much smaller audience and still be profitable. And you can also present the products you promote to the entire world.
Earlier in this post, we talked about keyword research and finding profitable niches and keywords with low competition. In this section, we talk about markets, which is kind of an overview. How do you want to position your affiliate marketing business in terms of markets? Do you want to target a seasonal market or an evergreen market? Do you want to focus on a web-based business or are you interested in one of the social media markets?
A key to your affiliate marketing success is understanding your audience and meeting their needs. For example, different social media giants target slightly different demographics. Which would be the most effective for you, your niche, and your products?
Understanding Your Audience
In 2024, Facebook estimates that 2.95 billion people use one of its social application platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, etc. Most of that audience uses at least one of those platforms daily. Google receives 99 mil searches per second. The other social apps have equally huge audiences. With such a huge potential audience, it is easy to see how the affiliate marketer can reach several thousand buyers interested in their product among a potential audience of billions.
Companies like Google, Facebook, and other social media giants make it easy for you to find your “hungry crowd” by providing you with tools that allow you to narrow down your billions of users to find your crowd of hungry buyers. After all, their business is advertising and they have been collecting information on those billions of users for years. If the best audience for your product, for example, is men 25 or older, with some college education, and who drive Fords, you can find them. Using your analytics tools, you can select your target buyers even more closely.
Today’s mass audience can be divided into two main market categories: evergreen and seasonal. Some affiliate marketers insist that you should only target evergreen markets. Others have made profitable careers promoting in seasonal markets. We cover both below.
Evergreen Markets
Markets that are stable and have a fairly constant buying population throughout the year are called evergreen markets. Affiliate marketers targeting evergreen markets say that all your hard work as an affiliate marketer will earn you a pretty steady income. That income can grow as your reputation increases, your promotional skills improve, and your audience grows.
Affiliate marketers targeting evergreen markets say you can’t go wrong targeting the health, romance, and money-making markets (they’re the 3 pillars that keep the business going). As some people believe, they are the three pillars that preserve the happiness of every human being (health, money and love). As an affiliate marketer, they can provide you with income year after year because people will always have problems in the areas of health, romance, weight loss, wealth, and making money, and they will always be looking for solutions to those problems.
One downside to evergreen marketplaces is the lack of attention paid to affiliate marketers. Some affiliates feel that they can address an evergreen market that will “last” (or be evergreen, so to speak), and then their affiliate marketing efforts will be done. Nothing more false!
You may be targeting an evergreen market, but that doesn’t mean your website is evergreen. You should continually add content to your site that your target audience finds interesting and useful. Your competition certainly will! If you do nothing, your ranking among the sites competing in that market will drop, and along with that drop in rank, there will be a drop in your affiliate income. So keep adding content. You don’t need to add at the same breakneck pace as you did when you created your site, but keep adding so search engines can see that you’ve added something new and will re-index your site.
Seasonal Markets
Some affiliate marketers target seasonal markets. These markets peak for a limited period of time and interest in them declines the rest of the year. Therefore, if you are targeting a seasonal market, your income will not be constant over the course of a year. Some examples of seasonal markets are all major holidays such as Christmas, Easter, Halloween, etc.
The key is to specialize, that is, focus all your efforts 100% on each and every one of those seasons and that way you can obtain very good results even when those seasonal markets do not cover the entire year.
There are also seasonal markets that are not tied to a holiday but have a shorter period of profitability that peaks and then declines. Anticipating and catching the wave of a hot product and capitalizing on it can be very profitable. However, the life of that profitable period is short and sometimes uncertain if the targeted product doesn’t take off.
Here are a few more examples of seasonal markets: Skis and ski equipment typically see an increase in interest and sales in the fall and winter, swimwear and swimming see an increase in the spring and summer, and plant seeds and gardening equipment begin to sell.
Some affiliate marketers solve the problems by targeting more than one type of market by having two separate sites. The advantage of targeting two markets with less competition may be worth the extra work. Your keyword and niche analysis will show you.
Market Size and Competition
When it comes to niche marketing, what you look for in market size is the ideal area. You don’t want a niche market so large that it attracts a lot of competition and corporate heavyweights willing to spend a lot of money to reach the top position, but you also don’t want a niche market that is so small that you can’t make reasonable affiliate profits from your efforts.
You want a niche market that is perfect and small enough that it doesn’t attract too many competitors with more money or reputation that would be nearly impossible to compete with. But you also want it to be big enough to have the opportunity to be rewarded with sales for your affiliate marketing efforts.
We are all seduced by the word “easy”. Thorough research into a niche that can earn you a steady income takes hours, sometimes hours over several days. But keep in mind that you are setting up things that can give you an income stream that lasts for years. In the future, you may still get paid for things you set up many years ago, and while you’ve spent some time renovating them, it’s nothing compared to the time you spent setting them up.
Niche competition and competitive analysis is about much more than the number of sites competing for the same niche as you. It’s about the strength of the competition. An analysis of your niche competition’s strengths and weaknesses can often be your roadmap to competing successfully. It’s about spying on your niche competition to see what they do, see the keywords they use, see where their visitors come from and other factors. You then analyze this information to see the best way to compete.