When you read about affiliate marketing, the general advice will be to find a good niche, this is great advice but what does it mean. Many people write this without actually thinking about what is involved and how one can go about finding your perfect niche.
What is a niche?
A niche is a word that is often used, possibly even miss-used. A niche is not just any market that you work in, it is more than that, it is a focused discrete market.
A niche market is not ‘cars’ as this is too wide, this is the general market, but it is ‘echo friendly cars for the family’
Although wikipedia is not always the most reliable source of information I think that the definition there is rather simple and straight forward
‘A niche market is a focused targetable portion (subset) of a market’
Wikipedia
Its interesting to note that when applied to a person a niche means a ‘position particularly well suited to a that person’ i.e. ‘he found his niche in web design’
In terms of affiliate marketing the latter definition suits rather well, a niche should not only be a discrete market, but it should also suit you, your knowledge, interests and skillset. Indeed that is the first key to selecting a niche market for yourself, it should suit you, if it does not you will be quickly out of depth and you will spend your time learning the market rather than promoting and exploiting your niche.
Research is the key, try monitoring the media, looking at the magazine rack at your local newsagent, listen out and see what people are talking about, and of course look at yourself, what are you doing now, what are you reading, what are you buying, what have you seen out there that you would like to buy.
This is all good material when looking for a niche, jot each of these down as rough ideas and then do some research into what is already out there, if a niche is saturated with people already marketing that area, then probably that niche will be difficult to break into, on the other hand if there are is no-one marketing in that niche then there are two possible reasons, either you are a genius and have found a gem that no-one else has thought about or more likely there just is not the market in that niche for you to make any money.
The real niche that will be successful for you is one where there is a balance between, not being too competitive and still being a market to exploit
Look out for a post in the near future about researchin and selecting your niche
