Over the years, a lot of methods and strategies have evolved about how one should find the most profitable niches for affiliate or online marketing.
The most common and talked about method of finding a niche is to follow your passion. Its been proven that if you are passionate about something, chances are writing or blogging about it would not sound burdensome to you. And if you offer value add content to your customers, you can eventually make money out of it. The problem with this approach is that not all passions can be easily translated into money making ideas. And even if they do, it would be a long term project to rank and get the required number of views to make money.
A second approach is to focus on high converting low competitive niches which go along with the current trend. These are generally niches which evolve over a period of time due to awareness or migration trend. An example would be Vegan diets. 10 years back if you spoke to people about a vegan diet, people would have given you a side eye. Nowadays, thanks to media awareness and celebrity endorsement, more and more people and trending towards vegan diets. Hence if you want to start a blog or sell products which cater to the vegan way of life, chances are you will get eyes on your product if marketed correctly.
Finding the Best Niches in 2021 and Beyond
The hard truth of online marketing is - If you don't take the time to research your niche and marketing strategy, you could be one of the unfortunate 90% of online start-ups that struggle endlessly or worse - end up folding
The challenge of finding profitable niches is that it can take time. It takes time to find a profitable product which you can relate to, it takes time to formulate your marketing strategy and it takes time to build your online assets up to a level where they start making money. If your enter into a niche in which you have to compete against the likes of big name brands or a niche which requires too much upfront costs , then you can end up spending a significant amount of time before realizing that you are chasing after a lost cause.
However, you don't have to give up on your dreams of creating a profitable online business. When you use the right approach, it's possible to find not just one, but lots of lucrative niches, with each one adding another level of income to your business.
This post is dedicated to help you find the most profitable niches for 2021 and beyond. In this post we will cover:
What are Niches
How working with Niches can be profitable
How can you make Money from a Niche through Affiliate Marketing
The best Niches, 2020 and beyond
A step-by-step guide to finding the most profitable Niches
Let's get started.
What is a Niche?
When talking about a niche in an online business sense, we are referring to a subsection of a broader market. For example, a site that sells all types of shoes covers the full spectrum of the shoe market. However, a site that focuses only on steel-capped work boots would be considered a sub-niche of the overall shoe market.
In short, a niche is a profitable segment of a broader market.
Why Limit Yourself to a Niche?
You might think that working with a niche might limit your prospects for profit because you're carving out a smaller customer base. However, the reality is the opposite. There's a ton of reasons to consider a niche based business model - here are just a few:
Niche websites are easy to start
The first thing you need to start an online business is a website or a funnel. A website covering a large section of the market requires extensive development, especially if you have a massive range of categories to cover. A niche website has a smaller focus. Further, if your niche business is centralized to a handful of products, you can create a sales funnel to maximise your conversions. Sales funnels are like websites but only cater to one or a limited variety of products. The crux here is, a niche website or funnel is easier and faster to set up than a big category specific website.
You know who your customers are and their footprint
Customers for a particular niche can be found to be members or subscribers of online groups, forums and video channels. More often than not they are also frequent visitors of other websites catering to this niche. For example - if you are building a business around the niche of puppy training, you can be fairly confident that your customers would be part of online Facebook communities and groups for dog lovers. Your customers could also be active subscribers of dog magazines and dog food. Targeting this niche becomes easy when you know where their footprint is. You can divert your traffic or ads to these groups and then make sales without much hassle.
You know your customers needs or what excites them
A dog lover loves to splurge on his dog. If you have a website dedicated to dog training, you can be sure to grab some sales if you push sale of dog toys and treats along with the training product. Also your customers would let you know what they are looking for through reviews and followups. Making repetitive sales through the same customer is not tough once you have the relationship established
Your customers know what they want
A person searching for 'dog training' in Google is most likely researching for knowledge or ideas. However, a person looking for 'Border collie training' is much further along in the buying process, and more likely to purchase if they happen on a website devoted to the subject entirely.
You can rank a niche website faster than broad market sites
Niche websites are more focused on specific keywords that people are typing into search engines. These specific keywords, if optimized correctly, take far less work to achieve the rankings you need for that all-important organic traffic – which is the term used for people who arrive at your site via a search, and not through paid advertisement.
Niche sites have less competition
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) refers to the technology and techniques website owners use to achieve search engine rankings. A lot of resources are devoted to ranking large sites covering many different categories – simply because they have thousands of keywords for which they need to rank. A small business going up against a giant in the industry will stand little chance of outranking them. However, big sites can't possibly target every keyword they cater to, which leaves low competition niches open to smaller sites with fewer resources for extensive SEO campaigns.
How Can You Make Money from A Niche Website?
There are almost as many ways to make money from a niche website as there are niches. Niche sites can be created around your own product, someone else's product, downloadable information, an online course, a fitness site, to name just a few examples. However, most people who build a niche website use it to promote products created by others through a marketing system known as affiliate marketing.
What is Affiliate Marketing?
Affiliate marketers profit by promoting products, services, information, or training created by another party. They create a niche site around a topic, get traffic to the site (or funnel), and refer their visitors to the products and services with which they are affiliated. When people follow the link to the affiliated product and make a purchase, the marketer (known as an affiliate) gets a commission.
The company knows who to pay because each affiliate is provided a unique link that identifies them as the referrer for each product they promote on their website (or funnel). Read more about affiliate marketing here
Amazon is the world's best-known affiliate program. Millions of Amazon affiliates promote Amazon products worldwide. Each time a person is transported to Amazon's site via a link from a third-party niche site and purchases a product, the affiliate receives a small commission from Amazon.
Eight Steps to Finding the Most Profitable Niches
The next eight steps will make finding the best niches 2021 has going for relatively straight forward.
1 - Brainstorming
The first step in finding a profitable niche is to start with a brainstorming session. You could begin by choosing a broad niche you are interested in and then use online tools to drill down into a focus niche.
Another site you can use if you can't think of a niche off the top of your head is Quantcast.com.
Quantcast gives you a bird's eye view of what's popular right now. Scroll through the first two or three pages and browse the industries that are listed. Find an industry in this list that you think might be a good fit for you and use the broad topic in Quora, as discussed above. Just be careful of directly imitating anything on this website since it represents the biggest players on the internet.
2 - Research the Profit Potential
You don't want to spend months building up a niche site where very few people spend money. The preferred way is to research the profit potential before committing to it. If you aren't sure about what the best niches in 2021 are, think about the trending topic now - modern technology, CBD, environmentally friendly products, home gym equipment.
We're all using mobile technology, and people love accessories (keyboard, stylus, protective cover, etc.) for these items.
CBD oil from the marijuana plant is an all time rage right now for pain management. More and more people are becoming concerned about climate change.
The COVID-19 pandemic has reshaped the fitness industry, and more people are now interested in keeping fit at home.
Still not sure what will make the most profitable affiliate niches, here’s a quick list of 50 some of the most profitable ideas to get you started
3. Check the Trends
While it pays off to set up something which has a seasonal demand, the long term way to sustenance is to sell products that have perennial demand or as the industry calls it - evergreen products. An evergreen product (or market) is a term used to describe an industry that people will spend money on all year round, rather than occasional or seasonal purchases. Things like baby products are evergreen, while fidget spinners were a fad that quickly wore off.
It always pays to do your research before going into markets to understand how the demand is trending. You can quickly check trends on a free Google tool at Google Trends. Read more about how you can use Google trend here
4. The Most Profitable Niches Have Pain Points
You will make more sales when you can find an answer to a pain point. For example, an avid traveler might be looking for a lighter way to travel, or portable technology which is compact, light, and robust enough to carry all around the world. A beginning bodybuilder might be looking for foods or supplements that help them bulk up. It would be rare for a niche not to have problems that need solving, but if you're struggling, then fire up Quora and research the questions people are asking, because every question is a potential pain point.
5. Make Sure There Are Products You Can Sell
There's not much point ranking for low competition niches if there are no products to promote. Fortunately, researching the product market for your chosen niche is easy - simply head to Amazon.com's best sellers page and check out the products that are available for promotion in your niche. You can also look in websites like Clickbank which offer 1000s of affiliate based products.
6. Make Sure Your Demographic is Full of Buyers
Now that you know that you have products to promote, it's time to check if people are spending money in your market. Online reviews will tell you everything you need to know. If a product has a lot of reviews, then it's a good bet you've got yourself a hot item that will be easy to promote, provided they're not all one star, reviews, of course.
7. Research the Competition
Google Search is also an excellent tool for researching your competition. Type in the search phrases you are considering targeting and have a look at the top websites. If the top listings are under-optimized for those keywords, you should be able to achieve a high search page position without too much effort.
If they do have decent content, you can still beat them by adding extra value to your website and pages:
8. Check the Ad Spend
Another strategy for finding the most profitable niche is to check the number of Google Ads. Use Google search to see if there are a decent amount of Google Ads on the search page. If no businesses are spending money on advertising, then it's because there are no buyers to produce a profitable return. Facebook is also a fantastic resource for checking the ad spend. Search your niche on Facebook and find a few business pages related to the industry. Review the page transparency option and see if the company is paying for advertisements.
However - there is another side to this coin - if you don't find ads in your niche, may be you have found yourself a niche which is unique. You can bank on being the first entrant and mint money for yourself.
Conclusion - Adding it all up:
Finding the most profitable niche isn't difficult, but it will take some research. When it comes to the best niches, the internet has lots of golden opportunities that are ripe for the picking. Moreover, with COVID, the market is blossoming for online sales. Once you have a niche and the numbers look good, it's time to start setting up your website, building it out with content that solves problems, and joining affiliate programs that have products you can promote.
Once you have one niche website under your belt making money, there's nothing stopping you from repeating the process until you have a sizeable portfolio of niche websites generating profit for you 24/7.
