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How to Find Niche Website Ideas for Affiliate Blogs

Choosing right niche website ideas is the most critical decision. The topic of your affiliate blog will have huge impact on the outcome of your efforts over several years.
While the process of identifying topic for blog can seem overwhelming, you can make it simple. All you need to remember is that your topic must meet 2 (and only 2) criteria.
  1. You have enough interest and/or passion for the topic to live and breathe the topic for next several years.
  2. You can monetize the blog with buy-able solutions for the problems in the niche.
Simple, isn't it. Now with these criteria in mind, let’s detail out the process.

I.   Generate list of topics with enough interest/passion

At this point, just generate list of topics. The only criterion the topic should meet is that you should be able to live and breathe the topic for next 3 years.
  1. What are your hobbies? Can you research and write about this hobby 10 hours every day? This is important question to answer. It might be one thing to watch movies; it might be completely different thing to research and write compelling reviews on movies every day.
  2. What are you truly passionate about? Just like hobbies, passion areas could be a good choice.
  3. Do you like your job but not your boss? If yes, then your current career could be a good choice. You get to create site on something you already know and love. You already know that you can spend hours working on the topic, and you get to be your own boss.
  4. List down the things you like, but don’t get to spend enough time on. For example, you might love programming, but your current job requires you to spend more time managing people. List down these ideas.
  5. List down things you don’t know today, but have always been willing to learn or do. These could be potential topics. You would be interested as well, because you anyway wanted to learn these topics.
  6. What do you usually read in newspaper (e.g. Celebrity news)? What kind of magazine do you buy (e.g. sports)? What do you usually watch on TV (e.g. Stock Marker news)? These interests can all point to potential topics for your niche site. List them down.
  7. Search for “supplies” or “Accessories” in the keyword tool. Do you see any topic that interests you? You can read more on this interesting method.
One important point, don’t avoid simple ideas. You are not looking for brand new ideas; you are looking for better new ideas. Once you have generated enough lists of ideas (at least 10, but higher the better), move on to judge these topics against next criterion: Can you monetize the website?

II.  Can you monetize the niche website ideas?

Your ability to monetize website is dependent on 3 things:
  1. There are enough problems in the niche.
  2. There are buy-able solutions for the problems.
  3. You can generate enough relevant traffic for the problems.

Are there enough problems in the niche?

To understand if there are enough problems in the niche, you need to put yourself in customer’s shoes. For example, if your blog topic is “Learn to Blog”, you need to think what kind of problems a new blogger might be facing.

Another approach you can take is search on-line on “question and answer” sites such as Yahoo Answers and Quora. Search for your topic and you can see the questions people are asking. These questions are potential problems you can choose to solve.

One important point, when you search for problems, you keep your mind open. You might end up getting new ideas for your niche. Look at the second search result above in Quora, this could be a new topic for niche site. When you find something that interests you, add it the ideas list.

Are there buy-able solutions for the problems in the niche?

In simple terms, here you are checking if there are enough affiliate products for you to market.
  1. You can go to affiliate networks, and see if there are enough affiliate products for you to market. Here is an excellent tutorial for clickbank. You can perform similar research on other popular networks (CJ, Rakuten, shareasale, ebay, amazon, e-junkie, avangate etc).
  2. When you look at affiliate websites, keep your mind open for new ideas. Look at categories or sub-categories. If you find anything that interests you, add it to your ideas list.
  3. Search the web for affiliate products. Not all the products are listed on large networks above.
  4. You don’t need to spend days finding affiliate products at this stage. You are just looking for enough solutions to sell. Look at the products and sales pages though and ask yourself: Is this product solving the problem you identified? Is this something your target audience will be willing to buy?
  5. When you look at affiliate products, you might come up with new problems to solve. If you find anything relevant, add these to problems list.
  6. A quick check you can do is going to Keyword research tools and checking the PPC rates and advertisers competition. Both these parameters should be high. You may not want to use AdSense, but this is good check to see that there is enough advertiser interest.
  7. Another check is to Search Google and See how many ads appear in the search results. Are these ads solving the relevant problems for your target audience?

Can you generate enough traffic to your niche website?

Once you are sure you will have enough monetization options, you need to check if you can generate enough traffic to the site. There are 3 things you need to answer.
  1. Is there enough search volume? Conduct keyword research and see if there is enough search volume.
  2. Who are your existing competitors? Can you beat them? You can do a Google search and see if you can beat first page results. Good Keyword research can be useful here. If niche has a lot of competition, find a sub-niche. Once you start to dominate sub-niche, you can expand.
  3. What is your USP? Do you have a unique angle to the topic? Can you differentiate yourself from competition?
Go through the steps and check that which niche website ideas generated fulfil all the criteria. Pick up one idea that has potential to be most profitable. Then, go ahead and start creating site on the niche idea.


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