Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about niche – refining and expanding my focus. Does that sound like a contradiction? Well, let me first tell you what I think about niches, and then I’ll tell you what I’m doing.
If we’re going to succeed at affiliate marketing – or any type of online marketing no matter what our business is – we have to target a specific niche.
There are only a few exceptions to this.
If you’re a mega-gigantic international corporation selling something consumed by just about everyone, everywhere, AND you have hundreds of millions of dollars to spend on “awareness” campaigns … then don’t worry about niche.
But if you’re like 99.9999999999% of us, you better focus on a niche.
- Why?
- What is a niche?
- How do I pick one?
- What are some good affiliate marketing niches?
Why Focus on a Niche?
This is pretty simple. Focusing on a niche will maximize your marketing resources – your time and money.
Internet algorithms like niches – meaning they’re designed to deliver things of a particular interest (the niche) to people who are interested in that niche. So if you’re not targeting a niche, your ads won’t get shown to anyone, because the algorithm doesn’t know who to show them to.
But what if I want to target two different niches? My products will appeal to multiple people types of people in different niches you say. Great. That’s a good product, but if you try to target multiple niches with the same marketing campaign you won’t really be targeting anyone.
That will just confuse the algorithm about as much as targeting no one. If you want to target multiple niches, you need multiple marketing campaigns, and maybe even multiple social media profiles.
Ok, But What is a Niche?
In marketing, a niche market is a focused, targetable portion of a broader market where the specific product or service is aimed at satisfying the particular needs of this market segment.
So there are innumerable groups of people who share a specific interest. They may be nothing like each other in any other way – but they all are interested in a specific thing. That’s a “market segment”.
Depending on what you’re selling that interest group can be large or small, but that group has to be big enough to make it worth targeting them. If you’re selling a $1 product with a 25-cent profit margin – you’ll need a very large group of people to target.
If you’re selling 500 million dollar super yachts – you get the point right?
So you’ve got a group of people who share an interest, and now you need a product that appeals to that interest. A product that will add to their enjoyment of that interest, and/or people in that group share a common problem, and your product solves that problem.
How will your product positively transform the experience of people who are interested in X?
(X=specific interest)
Your marketing campaign needs to focus on how your specific product meets a particular want/need of a specific group of people.
How Do You Pick a Niche?
As previously mentioned you need to pick a targetable niche. There needs to be enough people interested in that niche that algorithms can recognize them. And then there needs to be enough of them to make it profitable to target that niche.
I mean if all you want is views and interaction, then that doesn’t matter – then you can target a niche that just has a lot of interest regardless of potential profitability. But don’t spend money marketing to that niche, just make content that appeals to them and you’ll get the organic traffic.
Then pick a niche that aligns with your interests and expertise.
You probably have some idea what that is. So picking a niche usually is just about doing some research and figuring out how what you already want to do fits into a niche that already exists.
Often the problem with picking a niche is just not doing the work to recognize which niches already exist and figuring out how our interests align.
In the past, I’ve tended to just do whatever interests me without thinking about how it fits into a niche. And because I have multiple interests my content and marketing haven’t been focused.
So if that’s your problem, like me, you have to focus. You can still have multiple interests, AND if you want to target multiple niches, you just have to properly keep those focuses separated so you don’t confuse the algorithms.
BONUS TIP
If you’re focused on organic (unpaid) marketing, it can be tempting to chase the most popular niches to get the views (engagement, followers, subscribers, etc.).
But this will hurt you in the end. You may get followers, but if they aren’t actually interested in the real niche you are pursuing they won’t help you get to your actual goal, and they may even hurt you.
If you make a popular trending dance video and get lots of views and followers, and then your next video is selling a how woodwork book – most of your dance fans probably won’t care and it will kill the reach of your woodworking video.
What are Some Good Affiliate Marketing Niches?
Any niche (just about) can work for affiliate marketing because there are affiliate marketing products that will appeal to people in every niche.
Popular niches – which include their own sub-niches are:
- Health and Wellness
- Wealth and Finance
- Beauty and Fashion
- Technology and Gadgets
- Travel and Lifestyle
- Personal Development
- Pet Care
- Home and Garden
- Hobbies and Crafts
- Parenting and Family
If you’re interested in affiliate marketing, you’ve undoubtedly been targeted in the “Make Money Online” niche (with its own Affiliate Marketing sub-niche). This tends to be one of the most popular niches for people who are trying to make money online to pick as their niche.
So people who are trying to make money online, are trying to make money, targeting other people who are trying to make money online, and selling them products to make money online (often by selling the products to make money online). Do we see the problem here?
And What’s My Niche?
When I started affiliate marketing I had no intention of targeting the make money online niche. I thought I’d be targeting travel, outdoors/hiking, or something in health and wellness.
The program I signed up for promised it had a variety of products to promote. But those were all “in development”. The main product they were selling was the program itself. I chose to promote the other product they had which was in the wealth-building niche.
I kept on working on making content for the travel and hiking niche, just trying to build an audience. Thinking I could eventually figure out a way to make money from it with promotion deals (I still didn’t really know how affiliate marketing worked).
That first affiliate marketing program was a disaster for me. I wasted a boatload of money, and eventually got my Facebook ad account permanently shut down. I gave up.
But then I discovered Dean Holland. And he showed me how to make affiliate marketing work in any niche. He didn’t just tell me how to sell his products, he’s been teaching me how online marketing and affiliate marketing work no matter what I do.
This is what we call a sustainable business model (not a pyramid scheme).
Now some of his products are within the make money online niche. But as I said it’s not about how to make money online, by selling how to make money online products to people who are just trying to make money online, etc.
It’s first of all how to make affiliate marketing work no matter your niche. And if you want – how to sell your own product no matter what it is.
Even when it comes to the making money online niche, I feel like it’s directed at a sub-niche of people who have already failed at trying something else that didn’t really teach them how to do this right, or even people who have been screwed by crap products.
That’s the sub-niche I was in, and that’s who I’m targeting with this. Hopefully, I can get to some people before they get shafted by some of those crap products.
Anyhow, the main idea is – there’s a lot of terrible advice out there regarding affiliate marketing. Some of it never worked; some of it used to work – but things have changed. This is how it really works.
But still, it feels weird to me to try and tell people how affiliate marketing works if I haven’t made it work. Granted I’m not really telling you how it works, Dean Holland is.
He’s the one teaching me. I’ve been learning how to do affiliate marketing. That’s why I’ve stuck with Dean, even if I haven’t gotten REEECH! yet. I’ve learned what needs to be done. I’ve learned to take responsibility for doing things right. And I’ve learned to be patient.
And I’m going to target a completely different niche other than affiliate marketing. But because it has nothing to do with the how-to-do affiliate marketing niche, I can’t talk about any of this stuff to that niche.
That’s not what that niche is interested in. So I’ll be doing what I’ve learned in that niche, and I’ll be talking about how it’s going over here for anyone interested in affiliate marketing.
Hopefully, then I can show people how to apply these principles to other niches.
The niche I’ll be targeting is in the Hobbies and Crafts niche, in the sub-niche of movie making. I already know there are several products that have affiliate marketing programs I can promote to that niche. I already use some of them.
Then if I can get established in that niche, I can drill down into the sub-sub-niche of people who like movie making and want to learn how to use affiliate marketing to help support them as movie makers.
To do this I will have two different social media accounts for YouTube, Facebook, and TikTok. The content I will make for these different niches will be completely different – each focused on the interests of that niche.
The movie-making niche is way easier to target because there are way more people interested in it. So it should be easier to build an audience. But I will have to build a much bigger audience to make it profitable.
So that’s my goal, those are my niches. What’s your niche?
Leave a Reply