Jeremy Kaplan
More than a decade ago, a new form of entrepreneurship emerged on the internet. This tactic, known as affiliate marketing, changed the nature of how stay-at-home bloggers and enterprising professionals approached earning revenue online.
Rather than open dedicated stores and sell products directly, affiliate marketing made it possible for brands to operate with virtually no overhead. Being compensated for the purchases that others make without investing large sums of money remains appealing to this day for many.
However, finding a niche in which affiliate marketing can be profitable is much more difficult due to today’s competition. To help you out, let’s examine what you should consider when picking that niche.
Determine Its Profitability
It may sound obvious, but the first step in determining whether to pursue affiliate marketing in a given niche is to assess how much profit it can generate. Rather than guessing, there are tools that can assist entrepreneurs in discovering profitability. Solutions such as ClickBank provide real-time data on how much is earned or generated per sale (average). There are also customisable tools that can sort these results by sales volume and by overall percentage earned from each sale.
Along with other comparable affiliate programs that offer these features, sorting through how profitable each niche can be for you has never been easier. You won’t have to guess in most cases, and can use these platforms as a method for finding new affiliate marketing niches to explore.
Explore More Than Products
All too often, the world of affiliate marketing becomes focused on tangible items and goods. This is understandable: most purchases involve products rather than services. However, confining your affiliate marketing efforts to merely physical goods can result in missing some highly profitable niches.
Take financial services as one example. There are many networks that cater to thousands of unique service-based brands, including programs in the financial sector like easyMarket Partners. There are many examples for other service-based niches, so don’t forget that affiliate marketing often works just as well – and usually pays even better – when dealing with services.
Avoid Seasonal Opportunities
While this is more broad-based advice than an absolute requirement, avoiding seasonal affiliate marketing niches is often recommended. While it’s perfectly possible to build a network of multiple season-specific niches through which to make money, it can be time-consuming, require much more effort, and ultimately not be as reliable as niches with year-round demand.
By ensuring that your niches are desirable to audiences throughout the year, your revenue streams will be more consistent. This often makes planning the expansion of your network – and your own personal finances – easier to handle. As such, one niche that provides profit 12 months of the year is typically better than 12 niches that each profit only 1 month per year.
Affiliate marketing is a tried and true tactic, but does require ample research and maintenance. By considering a wide array of both products and services, researching overall profitability before committing, and looking for niches that can profit throughout the entire year, you’ll be better equipped to position yourself within niches that truly deliver revenue.
