If you’ve been a regular reader of this blog you probably have seen me use the term “money niches” in a few of my posts and have wondered what exactly do I mean when I use the term.

Money niches are affiliate marketing niches, which if promoted successfully, can bring in a tremendous amount of income for the affiliate marketer. These affiliate niches are usually extremely easy to convert traffic into sales, or provide high payouts for each lead or qualified sale. Money niches do have a drawback - they are usually highly competitive making it very difficult to become successful for someone just getting into the affiliate marketing industry. Examples of money niches include travel, ringtones, pharmaceuticals, and insurance leads. All these niches have at least one of the two characteristics of money niches that I just mentioned.  Many affiliate marketers chase after these niches because there is a lot of money at the end of the rainbow, so to speak, if they are successful in their efforts.

It took me about a year before I really felt comfortable with affiliate marketing and decided to take a dive into money niches, but because I was already generating a fairly steady income online I wasn’t too worried if it took awhile to generate any income through these niches or even if my efforts failed completely. Once your a seasoned affiliate marketer and have a good steady income being generated from your affiliate sites, by all means go ahead and take a dive into the money niches to get your piece of the pie!

Popularity: 98% [?]

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!

Popularity: 100% [?]

This post is going to be short, direct, and to the point; but will be a very important part of your success when first jumping into the affiliate marketing industry so pay attention!

Many people get into affiliate marketing with dreams of getting rich quick without putting much effort into it! They select niches in the affiliate industry they have no interest in, but for the mere fact that others have become rich through that particular niche. Unless your really, really, really lucky then your pretty much doomed for failure if this is the idea you have entering into affiliate marketing!

The exact opposite is probably true if your just starting out in affiliate marketing; expect long hours of work in addition to reading up on the latest trends and doing research on affiliate programs. When I first started out I would spend 12 to 16 hours a day working; first because I loved what I was doing, and second because I had the drive to become successful in what I was doing. The reason why I loved working that many hours a day was because I selected affiliate marketing niches that I had interest in so it was more like a hobby than actual work.

Getting into a niche that you enjoy is probably the single most important factor when first starting out in the industry because your going to be doing a lot of research in the beginning to get a hang of how the industry works. You’ll be spending a large amount of time signing up for new affiliate programs (which can get extremely boring), looking for graphics if your creating your own websites, and other similar tedious and boring work! You need the work to be something you enjoy and success will come naturally if you’re really enjoying what your doing.

Later down the road once your pretty much an expert at setting up domains, developing websites, trading links, and all the other fun stuff that comes with the territory do I suggest you jump into the “money” niches! Only after a few years of working on niches I enjoyed and getting a grip of how the affiliate industry works did I get into the “money” niches. Only after I was an expert in most of the aspects and skills needed in affiliate marketing could I create new websites extremely fast in almost every type of niche imaginable so it wasn’t like work anymore. It was like I had my own production factory complete with its own industrial manufacturing line including factory workers which churned out websites at record speeds!

So get that notepad and pencil out and start jotting down your hobbies, interests, and other things that you enjoy because in my next post I’ll discuss what factors you’ll need to look at when deciding which niche is best out of the list you created!

Popularity: 22% [?]

Do you make money online? Then there’s a big chance your in the affiliate marketing industry! Most people making some kind of money online today do it somehow through affiliate marketing. Whatever you classify yourself as - Black hat SEO, white hat SEO, pay per click advertiser, Adsense, make money online blogging, “super affiliate” - all these types of niches are all part of the bigger affiliate industry that has exploded at a tremendous rate!

Unless your selling your own products or services on the Internet you are more than likely promoting or marketing a product/service for someone else. Many people have been very successful in the affiliate marketing industry and it just seems to be getting bigger and bigger each year! Just look at the two niches “make money online” and “super affiliate” that have become household catch phrases in the affiliate marketing industry. Thousands of blogs and websites dedicated to these two niches have been popping up all over the Internet lately with self-proclaimed affiliate marketing experts with their claims of how they made it from rags to riches in just a few years.

As the affiliate industry continues to grow and mature more opportunities are opening up for affiliate marketers as there are more brands and products to promote, more services, and new niches! Just a few years ago it was extremely difficult to find a niche with a wide variety of products or services to promote that would fill-up a complete website. Finding affiliate programs in a specific industry/niche took forever as there just wasn’t enough programs available.

If your reading this and have always been curious about making money online there is a no better time than now to get started. The startup costs to get into the affiliate marketing industry are minimal to none with the cost of bandwidth and web hosting going down, cheap domain name costs, affordable and professional web design services, and no signup costs to join affiliate programs! Why not take the plunge today as the risks are low and the rewards can be huge!

Popularity: 16% [?]