Identifying Your Niche

Finding an area of online commerce that you can enjoy working with and at the same time make a profit from is a vital part of any online business, not just affiliate sales. In this section, I'm going to give you some important tips and some basic strategies to use to help you identify your own 'little corner of the Internet'.

I want to point you once again to Rosalind Gardner's Super Affiliate Handbook. What I'm going to show you is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to finding profitable Internet niches. Rosalind steps you through an incredibly thorough marketing research process that weighs competition and advertising costs, evaluates demand, and identifies trends so that you ultimately end up with a profitable niche.

The first step to idenitfying your niche is especially true in affiliate sales. If you don't enjoy the topic you're working with, then you can forget about making any money. The saying "If you build it, they will come" simply does not apply to affiliate sales. If you were to reword that saying to something like "If you build it AND become an expert in that area AND create an enjoyable web experience AND add pages and pages of useful content that you can't find anywhere else", then you'd be getting closer to the mark. Relevant content and lots of it is the key to affiliate sales on the Web. If you don't enjoy what you're doing, it shows.

Start by brainstorming ideas for your affiliate business.

What do you love to do?

What topics are you enthusiastic about?

Are you already an expert in something?

What are your hobbies?

What experiences have you had that not many others have?

What obstacles have you overcome that others may be experiencing?

Just let your mind loose. Jot down anything and everything that comes into your head. Remember that even if you're not already an 'expert' in a particular area, if you love that subject, then you are already excited about it and can learn to be an expert. Don't worry about coming up with ideas out of left field. Sometimes, the more obscure an idea is, the more success you can have with it. If you need some help with ideas, just go to any online directory and start browsing through the topics.

Once you have a list of ideas in front of you, it's time to find out if there's a market for any of them. The best way to accomplish this is to use a piece of software designed specifically for finding niches called

NicheFinder

NicheFinder is a keyword research tool that will identify hundreds of keywords and keyword phrases directly related to your topic. It will then calculate the demand for each of them based on recent search engine statistics. It also identifies how much competition there is for each keyword or keyword phrase and calculates a KEI or Key Effectiveness Index based on supply vs. demand. NicheFinder is an extremely quick but accurate way to determine if there is a potential market for your ideas. Give it a try by downloading the free demo.

If you would rather spend hours and hours doing niche research yourself, that is also an option. To help accomplish this, you'll want to use that spreadsheet we talked about back in the section on software. You're going to need four columns for this exercise, so type out the following four headers into colums a, b, c and d:

Keywords Demand Supply S/D Ratio

To identify keywords and keyword phrases associated with each idea, use the free Overture keyword selector tool. Let's say the topic you're researching is 'barbecue'. Type 'barbecue' into the tool and then enter the search terms and counts that are displayed by the selector tool into your spreadsheet keyword and demand columns. The results that you get in the overture tool show all the keywords and keyword phrases associated with 'barbecue' and how many times those search terms were queried during the previous month.

Now go to Google and run a query for each of the search terms on your spread sheet. Towards the upper right-hand corner of your browser window, Google will list the total number of results it finds for each search term that you query. Type these numbers into your 'supply' column of the spreadsheet. If you haven't already, configure the S/D ratio in the 'd' column to display the results of Cn / Bn. The S/D ratio is what you want to look at after completing the spreadsheet. Essentially, the lower the S/D ratio is, the more demand there is for less supply, and theoretically, the better opportunity for you to get customers to your web site and make sales.

Decide upon two or three (more if you wish) niche areas that look promising and then move onto the next section - Finding Affiliate Programs.

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