Hey, it's Sam Oh and in this lesson, I'm going to show you how to find and qualify a niche
for your affiliate marketing site.
Now, before we get into the research and qualification methods, let's quickly recap
the four things you should look for in a niche.
And these are:
The level of SEO competition, which will tell us who we'll be up against or even if
we can compete.
Commerciality, which will give us hints into how much money we can make.
Personal interest, which is important to most people because you want to
to actually enjoy what you're doing.
And the breadth of the search market, which gives us an idea of the size of
our addressable market – at least for the type of traffic we'll be going for.
These will help us qualify a niche so we can make an informed decision when it
it comes time to choose one.
Now, the process to find and qualify niches depends on where you are in
your niche selection process.
And you'll probably fall into one of two buckets.
Bucket #1: You already have a general idea of the niches that interest you.
And bucket #2: you don't have a concrete idea yet, but you're open to any and all
opportunities if they seem interesting.
Let's go through the process for bucket #1 first and I'll show you how you can find
information to check off items on your qualification checklist as we go.
Alright, so assuming you already have a general idea of niches that interest you,
the first thing you'll want to do is write them down.
So for me that would be topics like golf, clean energy, and personal finance.
Now, because these are all things that I'm interested in, we can add a plus to
the "personal interest" qualification factor.
Now, for each of these topics, you'll want to brainstorm some broad topics
and products related to that niche.
For example, if we were to do this for the golf niche, I'd jot down ideas like:
"golf," "putter," "irons," and "wedge."
Now, with our subtopics in hand, the next thing you'll need to do is about 3 minutes
of preliminary keyword research.
And you'll need a keyword research tool to do this.
So I'm using Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer and all I'm going to do is paste my list
of subtopics and run the search.
Next, I'll go to the Matching terms report to get a list of keyword ideas.
Now, not all of these keywords will be relevant to an affiliate niche.
We want to find topics where it's easy to naturally recommend different products.
Fortunately, so-called "affiliate keywords" are easy to find using keyword modifiers.
And these are just add-ons to a base keyword.
For example, when a query includes the word "best," it usually means you need to create
a product roundup.
Queries that contain the word "vs" or "review" usually mean you'll need to write a review or
comparison article in order to rank in Google.
We'll get into the details in a later module as this is more related to SEO,
but we're not quite there yet.
But if you can't wait, then you can watch our video on search intent in our free SEO
course for beginners which I'll link up in the description.
Now, because we know we can find "affiliate keywords" by looking for queries that contain
the words "best," "vs,' or 'review,' we can take these words and paste them into
the "include" box in Keywords Explorer.
I'll also hit the Any word tab because we want to see keywords that contain
any of these keywords in addition to one of our searched topics.
Hit Apply, hit Show keywords and we now have a list of mostly commercial topics
that would be valuable to a golf affiliate site.
In fact, the fact that there are nearly two million monthly searches in Google from
just the US alone tells us that the breadth of the search market is quite large.
So we can add a plus to that factor on our qualification list.
Now, some of these are going to be quite competitive to rank for, but we can actually
filter for low-difficulty keywords using the Keyword difficulty filter.
All you have to do is set the maximum KD value to something low like 20.
And right away, you'll see that there's still nearly a million monthly searches
that happen for these low-competition keywords each month.
So both SEO competition and search breadth seem good to me.
Now, to get an idea of commercial value, you can scan through the CPC column
to see how much advertisers are willing to pay for a click for a specific query.
But these values are only for one query which isn't that helpful because you want
to get a full picture of how valuable your traffic would be if you were to rank for
a lot of these affiliate type keywords.
And the way to do that is to find a competing affiliate site that's already ranking for queries
that you'd want to rank for and are not mega authorities in your niche
because they'll be too tough to compete with, at least when you're first starting out.
So to find these competing websites, you can use Ahrefs' Content Explorer.
Just search for something like "best golf" and then set the search mode to a Title search.
And this will show us pages that contain the words "best" and "golf"
in the title of the pages.
Basically, it's going to show us other golf affiliate pages, many that are
from dedicated golf affiliate sites.
Now, because SEO competition is a big part of qualifying a niche, especially for beginners,
I recommend setting a Domain Rating filter to have a low maximum value of
something like 20.
And again, Domain Rating is a metric that tries to measure a website's authority.
Hit Show results, and now you have a list of pages from low authority websites that are
likely posting affiliate content on golf products.
But we don't need to see pages at this point.
We want to know more about how websites are performing as a whole.
To view the top websites, just click the Websites tab.
And now you can see a list of low-authority websites, the amount of total organic traffic
they get, and their traffic values.
Now, traffic value tells us how much it would cost to pay for this amount of organic traffic
if you were to buy it from Google ads.
And the reason why it's a decent proxy to understanding a site's commercial
value is because if advertisers are willing to pay this much money to get this traffic,
then it's likely valuable.
Now, it's important to note that when you're looking at these metrics, you need to make
sure that the sites you're analyzing are actually going to be competing niche affiliate sites.
Just scan the domain names and if it sounds like it might be a niche blog, click it to investigate
the types of content they create.
So for this site, it's clear that it's an affiliate website as the content is primarily based
around reviews and product round-ups.
Now, going back to Content Explorer, you'll see that the site gets a ton of
monthly search traffic and it has a traffic value of around $70,000/month,
while being a low-authority site.
Now, to be clear, it doesn't mean that this site makes $70,000/month, but
it tells us that the topics the site ranks for have clear commercial value.
So let's add a plus to that qualification factor.
Now, it's important to note that you shouldn't use traffic value as the only
means to understand commercial value.
One key component that we didn't talk about here are the affiliate programs
that these sites are using.
And I'll show you how to find affiliate programs for a niche in the next video,
so stay tuned for that.
Alright, now let's talk about finding and qualifying niches if you're not quite sure
of the topics you want to cover.
There are two effective ways to find niches.
The first is to look at the sites that are linking to a big affiliate program like Amazon.
For example, that golf affiliate site we found earlier is an Amazon affiliate.
And if we hover over one of the affiliate links, you'll see that the link points to
a page on the domain amzn.to.
This is Amazon's shortened URL.
So with that domain in hand, let's go to Ahrefs' Site Explorer, type in the URL
amzn.to, and run the search.
Next, head on over to the Backlinks report, which is going to show us all pages that
link to this website.
Now, because SEO competition and breadth of the search market are important considerations
when choosing a niche, we can set some filters to narrow down the results, seeing as amzn.to
has nearly 50 million links.
First, I'll choose "One page per domain" because we're interested in website data and not so much
page-level data at this point.
And then I'll set the Domain Rating filter to a maximum of 20 to filter
for low-authority websites.
Next, I'll set the Domain Traffic filter to have a minimum value of 10,000,
which will help us understand breadth to a certain extent.
Finally, I'll click on More filters and choose Language.
And I'll set this to English.
All looks good, so let's hit Show results.
Now it's just a matter of skimming through the referring page column and using some
common sense to infer what the site may be about.
For example, this one is a stock checker, this one is on headphone reviews, and this
one is on knives.
The knives one is actually pretty interesting because this website only has a Domain Rating
of 6 and gets around 100,000 monthly search visits from Google each month.
So this tells us that SEO competition is likely weak for this niche and the breadth
of the search market, even for low-difficulty keywords will be decent.
So let's add a plus to those factors.
Now, to get an understanding of commerciality, we can look to the traffic value for this site.
To do that, I'll just run a new domain search in Site Explorer for nothingbutknives.com.
And as you can see, the site has a monthly traffic value of around $50,000 which is pretty
impressive for such a low-authority site.
Now, as for personal interest, that's up to you.
Alright, the second way to find niches is to search for "best of" posts in Content Explorer.
To do that, just search for "best" in the search box and set it to a Title search.
Next, we'll set a DR filter to have a maximum value of 20.
And just like we did before, I'll set a website traffic filter to have
a minimum value of 10,000.
We'll set the Language filter to English and then hit Show results.
And this is basically showing us pages from websites that get a lot of traffic,
are low-authority, and are in English.
Now, if you want the summarized version, you can hit the Websites tab to see the top
100 websites in Content Explorer's search results based on their organic traffic.
Then, just skim through the domain names to see if there are any obvious niche sites
that you might be interested in exploring.
For example, this site looks like it's on work boots, which gets a ton of search
traffic, has high traffic value and has very low website authority.
There's a triple plus for our work boots niche.
And for good measure, I'll click through to the site and yes, it is an affiliate site
all about work boots.
Now, that is a niche I would have never thought of.
Now, if you want a bigger list to skim through, go back to the pages tab and
hit the "One page per domain" filter.
Finally, hit the "Exclude homepages" filter, and you'll have tons of results you can
look through along with their SEO metrics to help qualify niches.
Now, the qualification methods we went through are just quick checks,
especially for the commerciality factor.
The affiliate programs that are associated with the niche will often determine the potential
revenue you can generate because different programs offer different commissions.
So in the next lesson, I'm going to show you the best affiliate programs to join
and how you can find niche affiliate programs that are worth exploring.