Finding Your Niche (part 1)
The very first thing you need to do if you want to make money as an affiliate marketer – whether you’re going to make money selling other people’s products or your own (best to do both) – is that you need to figure out who you want to work with and what niche you want to be part of.
Who Do You Want to Work With?
One way to figure out the type of people you’d like to work with or help is to look inside yourself to find your interests and passions. If you really enjoy being around certain people and you know about their hopes, desires, and needs due to being part of that audience yourself, that’s one way to do it as you will already have insight.
However, don’t let this give you an excuse not to do your research. Your experiences, even as part of your niche audience, are subjective and real results may be very different than you imagine. Try describing your ideal customer in one or two sentences to help you move forward.
Who Serves That Audience Now?
Once you have identified a potential niche audience, it always helps to look at the competition. After all, if this niche has no competition, is it really a profitable niche? Some people will say that you should go for the low competition niches, but it’s better to go for the niche that offers enough potential customers for you to reach your income goals if your conversion rate matches industry standards.
For example, if there are 1000 potential customers, and according to your research there is a 4 to 7 percent conversion rate, and you know that you can get your materials and information in front of those 1000 customers, you may get at most 70 customers from a campaign. Is your price point high enough for those 70 customers to make you profitable?
What Skills and Solutions Can You Offer This Niche?
Do you have specialized education, experience, or knowledge that makes you particularly suited for this niche? You don’t have to be part of the audience to do well in a niche.
For example, if you have identified a niche that needs someone to advise them on products to use for their love of camping which are different from what’s out there, you can still learn about it and serve the audience even if you have no camping experience or appreciation of camping. Maybe instead of direct experience, you have resources that enable you to pay people with subject matter expertise to create your business.
