2 Amazingly Simple Amazon Affiliate
Niche Selection Strategies
Introduction
In this post we welcome fellow BHW member slowboy/greg and we talk about his experiences around niche selection.
He owns an Amazon affiliate website over at Car CB Radios where they review powerful
CB radios and other cool CB products for your car.
Niche selection is vital to success with affiliate marketing, so if you have built websites in the past that
don't get any exposure, it could be because of bad niche choice or perhaps a lack of a niche focus.
When it comes to online marketing, there are a few general niches that nearly everyone will try to
promote at some point in their marketing career. Products for Internet marketing is one of them; even it
isn't a physical product that gets shipped like those sold on Amazon.
Physical product niches that are commonly picked include Electronics, Automotive, Health & Personal
Care, Home & Garden, Sports & Outdoors, and Pets. These markets are commonly chosen because they
are known to perform well online.
On the one hand, this is a good reason to pursue a niche, but there is a major problem that people run
into when they make this type of choice. Since these are the most common niches, they will also have
the most competition from other marketers.
The result is that only a handful of marketers in these niches are successful, while the rest end up
wasting a lot of time and effort building websites and marketing them to target these niches only never
to receive traffic on their site.
So, how can you avoid this common downfall? There are actually two different strategies that I like to
use, so I'm going to discuss both of those with you.
#1 Select an unpopular niche
The obvious strategy is to avoid these niches completely as an affiliate marketer. By doing so, you
immediately cut your work in half by avoiding a large portion of the competition. Instead of competing
against hundreds, thousands, or even millions of other marketers, you can actually find niches where
you only have a handful of competition or possibly none at all.
The downside to this strategy is that the niches are typically not quite as interesting to most marketers,
but it doesn't mean there isn't someone out there that is interested in it. Yes, you can make a ton of
money by getting in a great position in an extremely popular niche market, but accomplishing this isn't
something that will happen overnight. By targeting a more specialized niche, your earnings will be less,
but you will actually be able to start making money in a timely manner.
#2 Select a micro niche within a larger niche
The other strategy allows you to stay within those popular niches while still avoiding competition.
To do this, you have to get extremely specific to your niche market. As an example, targeting the Pets
niche, in general, would be a business death sentence. However, if you target something very specific
within that niche, like Extra Large Metal Mesh Dog Crates you can actually avoid a
huge portion of the competition.
With this type of affiliate niche selection strategy, you're going to be dealing with low traffic levels if you
want to successfully avoid 95%+ of the competition. It will limit the amount of money a single affiliate
site can make each month, but the point is not to build one site that is going to make thousands of
dollars every month.
Conclusion
Either strategy is really about being able to quickly build sites that have a focus on content instead of marketing or backlinks. More website content equals more search engine traffic, especially when you've properly narrowed your focus to a low competition niche market.