A niche is a small sub-section of a bigger market where potential customers have similar attributes. These attributes could include their location, age, gender, hobbies and interests, life events, the problem they are looking for a product to solve and so on.

To reference a popular expression selling ice to eskimos would be a niche (although probably not a very successful one to choose). Rather than trying to sell ice to anyone who may be interested this niche focuses particularly on selling it to eskimos.

If you’re trying to promote everything to everyone in the market then you’ll be competing with those websites that come up when you tried a broad search term into Google. For example the term “weight loss” has a huge number of monthly searches but you’ll be competing with major newspapers, the NHS, wikipedia and other sites with massive teams and budgets to rank.

Choosing to promote a niche within the weight loss market reduces the competition and increases your chances of dominating your niche and being a success.

An example of drilling down to find a niche could be: Weight loss > weight loss for women > weight loss for women who’ve recently given birth (post-pregnancy weight loss)

The further you can drill down whilst still targeting a market with enough customers to make you money, the less direct competition there will be and the more you’ll be able to connect with your potential customer using your content. If you are clear on the type of person you are trying to sell to, you can use examples that resonate with them and provide information that is relevant to them.

But, maybe you heard niche marketing is dead?

Some articles online have said that it’s no longer possible to make a success of niche marketing because of how Google’s algorithm now works to rank websites. It makes a good headline doesn’t it - “Niche marketing is dead!”. But fortunately it couldn’t be further from the truth.

So, why have people said it? Well because their idea of a niche site was an affiliate site with just a few pages of poor quality content. These were easily able to rank in days gone by, often by choosing exact match domain names which boosted their rankings, and with some spammy links. These are what Google has worked to crack down on (although they haven’t got it perfectly right so far, and maybe never will with people always looking for the next way to get around their algorithm). Google describes these sites as “thin” affiliate sites that don’t provide additional value for users.

What Google is looking for can absolutely be provided by a niche site, described by terms like quality, relevancy and authority.

So, for example, say you chose post-pregnancy weight loss for your niche site. To create a quality niche site rather than a thin affiliate site, it would be a case of researching in detail all the different questions, concerns, problems and needs a women would have when trying to lose weight after having a baby, and carefully and imaginatively creating a content plan to cover all these topics in your site and social media.

  • Make sure each piece of content gives detailed, useful information to cover off the quality requirement. Don’t forget, as well as simple articles, you could create videos, infographics, checklists, guides, diet plans and ebooks.

  • Make sure each piece of content is highly relevant to women looking to lose weight after having a baby. Include relevant examples (and keywords) throughout. This will mean Google considers your site whenever someone searches for something related to weight loss and pregnancy - that’s exactly what your site is about and with a niche site and all that relevant content you should have something that very closely matches the user’s search.
     
  • Doing the above is going to make you an authority on post-pregnancy weight loss. And being an authority it’s going to be easy to get other quality sites to link to your site, and for your site to get shared by mums and friends of mums on social media and in communities. And that’s going to give Google independent proof of you being an authority.

That’s just an example and there are thousands of different niche ideas you could target (there are even niche websites dedicated to explaining about niche affiliate marketing).

Why choose a niche network?

So as an affiliate why should you choose a niche network?

  • You’ll find a number of relevant products for your niche website all in one place You’ll be able to decide which of these is best to promote to your website visitors, by looking at which is the best fit, and also by comparing commissions and conversion rates for these programs.

  • Niche networks often offer high commissions compared to affiliate networks offering a broad range of products. Instead of sub-10%, commissions can be 30, 40 and even 50% of the sale value.

    The network has chosen to set up in this niche, because it is profitable. Affiliate programs relating to health, weight loss, making money and dating / sex are often referred to as evergreen niches as people continue to want solutions relating to these problems.

    By focussing on content affiliates creating niche sites, niche networks are able to show their merchants the huge amount of value added to the merchant’s business and persuade them to offer affiliates these huge commissions.

  • Work with affiliate managers with experience in the niche

    With a niche network, affiliate managers work with products in those markets day in and day out, which means they can really help you include the right information on your site to maximise your conversion, sales and earnings.

 

By Catherine Day, Senior Affiliate Manager at Moreniche.

Find out more about niche and affiliate marketing at the Digital Marketing Show 2015! Book your free ticket here and check out the agenda here! 

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