In part 1 of Deciding Which Affiliate Market to Promote I talked about the importance of promoting a niche in the affiliate industry that you are particularly interested in rather than chasing the “money” niches in hopes of getting rich quick. I ended the post suggesting readers write down a list of interests/hobbies which would be used for their final decision towards selecting a niche to get started in the affiliate marketing industry.

So you have your list of interests sitting in front of you; now what? Your going to analyze your list using certain factors I’ll be discussing in this post; narrowing it down to the top 3 niches will give you the highest probability of becoming successful as an affiliate marketer!

After analyzing your list against each factor make sure to eliminate niches that go against each factor. In the end, you should try to end up with about three different niches that you will be promoting.

Factor 1: Competitiveness of the niche
Competitiveness of the affiliate niche isn’t really as important if you’re already an experienced affiliate marketer because you probably already have the foresight of knowing what roadblocks are heading your way as you progress in becoming successful in the niche, but for a new affiliate I advise you try to weed out the extremely competitive and even semi-competitive niches from your list. Steering clear of competitive niches in the beginning will help shield you from huge disappointments when you aren’t able to become even moderately successful in these niches.
So how do you figure out which niches are competitive? There are actually a few ways to do this - one way it to perform a search about your particular niche on the search engines and analyzing the total number of search results returned. The higher the total search results the more competitive the niche. In addition, you could also check the number of backlinks for the top 10 or 20 search results, and again, the higher number of backlinks these sites have can help gauge the competitiveness of a niche.

Factor 2: Variety and amount of products/services and affiliate programs in the niche
The best way to get a feel for the amount of affiliate programs in a particular niche is to join several of the more popular affiliate networks like Commission Junction or ShareASale. Once you signup as a publisher browse through the affiliate network categories to see which niches left on your list have a large number of products/services to promote. Selecting niches that have the most products/services to promote will make building your website and affiliate marketing promotions that much easier.

Factor 3: Ease of converting traffic/leads into qualified sales in the particular niche
By now your list is probably narrowed down to just a few niches and you could probably select which ones to promote on your own, but one other important factor to consider is the payouts for each niche. You’ll probably want to select niches that are easy to convert with payouts that aren’t too low. To put this into example, it would probably be easier to start generating income selling hotel bookings, car rentals, or airline tickets in the travel niche; rather than trying to generate leads for luxury home purchases. There is no real way, except through some common sense and critical thinking, to get a solid answer for this factor. As you become experienced in affiliate marketing you’ll begin to get a better feel of which affiliate niches can generate qualified leads/sales easily, but for now just think to yourself “what are people more likely to make a purchase for online - A or B”?

There are many other factors you can use when deciding which affiliate market to promote, but the above mentioned is a great start to help you out when making your decision on which affiliate niches you’ll be promoting. The main objective is to make sure you start out with niches your interested in so affiliate marketing will be something you enjoy doing!

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