Finding Profitable Niches

Finding Profitable Niches

There are millions of different niches out there.  It can be hard for many to find the right niche for them.  As an affiliate marketer finding a profitable niche is a must.  While many people offer guides to finding a niche I personally use a different method.

The first is to decide how your site will be monetized.  Yes deciding this before you even pick a niche.  Normally we just use affiliate products.  On about half of my sites I do not even use Adsense.  The many reason I do implement this is only after I am unable to convert a product into a sale.  While this is very rare I do sometimes pick a niche that I can not seem to convert anything on.  When this happens I drop the affiliate product or at least ad adsense to the pages as a major focus of the site.

Now that you decided on how you will monetize your site we need to focus in on a niche.  Many people do random keyword searches and the like.  Personally I start with the product.  Yes we don’t even know what we are selling yet.  I go through the many affiliate networks and just site back and browse till I find a product I would then like to promote.  Then I build up keywords around that product using the free Google keyword tool.  A Quick example would be a site I purchased today call transferfiles dot ORG.  I found a product called Laplink.  Then plugged in some generic terms like data transfer, file transfer and the like into the Google keyword tool.   I checked out many of the long tail keywords and found that I have many options for long tail keywords that I can write about and get some very good traffic coming into the site.

I know what your already asking.  So how do I know if this niche is profitable?  Well that answer goes back to the product we are selling.  On each sale of Laplink I should make 20+ dollars on average.  I love to sell software that has a profit of 15 bucks per sale.  At a CTR ( Click Through Rate) of 15% and a CR ( Convertion rate of 3 %) that would mean that for every 1K unqiue visitors I will make 4.5 sales.  Times that buy 20 bucks and I am making 90 dollars off of 1K unique visitors.  So if I build up traffic to the site using long tail keywords and properly optimize my site and get 1K of unique visitors a day I will be making 2,700 bucks a month off of this niche.  It should take me around 6 months to build that kind of traffic over time but once it is there that is 2.7K a month for a long time to come.  This is how I was able to build up my income to the level it is today selling affiliate products.  Now if your CR is less then 3% and it can be depending on the offer you will make far less.  For example if it’s only a 1% CR and your CTR is only 10% then you will be making 1 sale per 1K visitors which equals just 20 bucks a day.  This will sometimes happen and when it does you will need to switch some things around on your site until you get a better conversion rate.  If that fails then it may be time to implement adsense into the site.  You can see that tracking your visitors and sales is the most important factor in finding what products are more profitable.  Once you do this a few times you will start to discover other profitable niches that are related to the one you are already making good money off of.  For instance I am already in the data back niche and that has been converting very well for me.  Because Data back and data transfer are very similar it is safe for me to assume I should have close to the same results.

Hope this quick guide helped.  Be sure to add your comments, tricks and tools for what you do.