3 Mistakes to Avoid When Choosing an Affiliate Marketing Niche

If you’re new to affiliate marketing then there is a good chance that you’re feeling frustrated and confused and don’t know where to start.  There seems like an infinite amount of niches to choose from and every website you read gives conflicting advice about how to identify a niche market.  In my opinion there are no hard and fast rules about what will work, but there are several things you definitely want to avoid.

The promise of this article is that if you avoid making the 3 common mistakes listed below then you will dramatically reduce your learning curve in affiliate marketing, and are much more likely to see results — sales — sooner rather than later.  You will also save your time, energy and money by not flogging a horse that was never alive in the first place.  Most importantly you will reduce the likelihood that you will be like so many other beginners and give up before you even get started.

1. Don’t choose the “make-money” niche…

This a very common mistake made by complete beginners. They see all the get-rich-quick ebooks and courses, see how much they are selling and claiming to make in profits, and so assume this must be where the money is. If you choose this niche you are almost guaranteed to fail because you are literally relying on fraud to make money, and unless you have a proven career as a fraudster you won’t be able to compete at this late stage.

There are perhaps some ethical considerations here too?! Beginners who try this route often rationalize their behaviour with the belief “I’ll learn how to make money online by teaching others how to do it”, which is of course nothing but a subtle pyramid scheme, reliant on a constant supply of new suckers to keep money flowing to the scammers at the top. In any case, even if you have the best of intentions and genuinely want to help people you simply cannot learn how to make money online by teaching others – you have to learn how to make money online for yourself FIRST! Otherwise you are a fraud just like the rest of them.

When I see these make-money scams I am always reminded of those adverts you used to see in the classified sections of newspapers, the ones that say things like “learn how to make £2k in 1 week, just send £5 and a stamp addressed envelope to the following address…” And then the person would receive a letter In reply telling them to “run an advert in the newspaper saying ‘learn how to make £2k in 1 week, just send £5 to the following address” and on and on it goes, waiting for the next batch of suckers to keep the system moving. And guess what those guys are doing these days? Selling get rich quick schemes online, of course.

One possible exception to avoiding this niche is if you already have proven success at making money online and you think you would enjoy teaching others how you did it. However, in this case what you are actually doing is creating knowledge and systems that others can use to build a REAL online business, not simply showing them how to “make money online” using the latest sneaky trick, with a cash-grab mentality.

DO NOT TRY TO SELL “MAKE MONEY ONLINE” PRODUCTS IF YOU ARE NOT MAKING MONEY ONLINE!

2. Don’t jump on the bandwagon of what is popular right now; avoid “me-too” sites…

Many beginners are tempted to choose their first niche based on what is popular and doing well right now. Examples of these are voucher code sites, cheap flight tickets, huge comparison sites and weight loss. You see the massive amounts of traffic they get, you hear rumours about how much profit they are making and think “gee, that looks like where the money is, I think I’ll start one of those websites.” Then the typical newbie goes on to replicate the exact style of website used by the top few sites in that niche, then copies their marketing and copy, and sits back expecting traffic and sales to come rolling in. And when they inevitably don’t then they give up affiliate marketing and go buy the latest “magic bullet” info-product and probably go on to make the exact same mistakes all over again.

Jumping on the bandwagon and copying one of these successful large affiliate sites is a flawed strategy for a number of reasons. First, they have a massive lead on you as the top sites in every niche will be several years old. By the time you could get to their level of content and links guess what? They’ve spent the last few years growing and expanding and you are still miles behind them in the rankings!

Second, related to this is the fact that what is fashionable today might not be fashionable and popular in a few years time. Something similar happens in the Hollywood film industry. When a certain genre of film becomes popular and does well at the box office, then the studios are inundated with copycat screenplays trying to jump on the bandwagon. However, the time from script to release is usually several years so by the time the movie is in the cinemas the fashion will have changed completely. Writers who go for “me too” ideas invariable are of less quality because they are not following their passion and true interests. The exact same thing is true in affiliate marketing – how passionate are you really about flight tickets or voucher codes?! Dream about them every night do you? Always wanted to be a voucher salesperson when you grew up?

Third, there is simply too much competition! No one has a hope of becoming the authority site in any of these mega-niches unless they have a HUGE amount of money to spend and are happy to wait for several years, or have the capital to buy an existing website and improve it. Most of these big affiliate websites will have a team of people working on creating content and making deals with merchants, and another team of people building links and doing search engine optimization, not to mention huge budgets to spend on things like Google Adwords.

Fourth, the customers in these niches are pretty well served by these websites, many of them are excellent at what they do, so there is very little space for someone new to add value to the industry. In order to make money online with affiliate marketing you need to create value for other people. This means a useful website with useful information, a site that solves their problem. Now unless there is a major problem unresolved in these industries why would internet users not just use one of these long established and proven websites that appear in the top search engine results? And why would other website want to link to you if you are just a “me-too” site with no added value for THEIR visitors.

DO NOT CHOOSE A NICHE JUST BECAUSE IT IS FASHIONABLE AND LOOKS LIKE A MONEY SPINNER!

3. Don’t choose a topic you have no interest in or knowledge of…

The only exception to this is if you are prepared to pay other people to create content and build backlinks for you right from the start.  I will assume that this doesn’t apply to 99% of beginners who are looking to make some money before spending a fortune on outsourcing and hiring staff. If you choose a niche that you have no passion for, no interest in, or no knowledge of then you are likely to give up quite early, long before you start seeing some decent results.

With most affiliate sites, especially content based sites, you are going to have to write massive amounts of unique content on a regular basis (often daily), and you will also need to roam the internet finding similar websites to get links from. In other words you will have to immerse yourself in this topic for months and years. If you pick something you are bored by just because you think it is where the money is, then you will of course bore yourself on a daily basis!

There are VERY few people with the consistent self-discipline to make themselves work on something they have no interest in over the long term. Usually you will hit a plateua, sooner than you think by the way, and if you have no passion for the topic then you will simply give up and do something else. It is a much better idea to choose something you have a genuine interest in, if possible, and try to find the sweet spot between following your PASSION and a niche that could actually MAKE MONEY. Choosing a niche that has these 2 features is an art not a science and with many people it might take a couple of attempts to get it right.

Now, I am not saying that it is impossible to make money in a niche you have no interest in – I do this successfully in the finance niche – but it makes it a hell of a lot more difficult than it needs to be. My website in the finance niche was given up on and left for dead for over a year because I got bored of the topic. It has only been profitable since we started spending money on paying others to build links and write content for us. And even then we only risked spending money on it because we knew from an (expensive) Adwords campaign that it had potential to be profitable in the organic search results.

Some of the most successful affiliate sites are run by people who are passionate about their topic. Many bloggers make money online by promoting affiliate products in their posts and articles. For example, if you have a passion for mixed martial arts then how much easier to write about it every day and make some money on the side by linking to online shops in your adverts, or to specific gear in your product reviews.  You don’t need self-discipline in this case, you will WANT to write about it anyway!

DO NOT CHOOSE A NICHE YOU DON’T GIVE A SHIT ABOUT!

Conclusion

For your first affiliate niche it is vital that you can get some results early on – i.e. get some sales and make some money! – so that you are motivated to continue and don’t give up at the first few problems. There is no bigger incentive than some money in the bank no matter how small and no matter the niche – most beginners have a nagging doubt somewhere in the back of their mind that it might actually all be a load of bollocks and it’s impossible to make money online.  Immediate results are the key to motivation, not complicated systems of time management or ebooks promising the “hidden secrets the gurus don‘t want you to know.”

QUESTION: what is your biggest problem or frustration when choosing a niche?  Please leave a comment below and we’ll see if we can help…