Affiliate marketing is the practice of promoting someone else?s products online in an attempt to earn commission.? There are merchants accepting affiliates in almost every niche these days, from financial services to video games.? The first thing that many affiliates want to know is, ?Which niche should I choose??.? Hopefully, these tips will make your choice easier:

Approach 1: Promote What You Love?

A lot of people enter affiliate marketing by accident.? They start a blog about a hobby that they love, and decide to monetize this by signing up to related affiliates.? This can be a fun way to learn about affiliate marketing, and if you are lucky you may make some money from it too.

Unfortunately, many of the most popular ?hobby? niches are not ones that are easy to monetize.? If you run a video game blog, or a site about a TV show, you?d be lucky to pay your hosting bills from your commissions.

Approach 2: Choosing a High Paying Niche?

Another simplistic approach is to simply log in to your chosen affiliate network website and sort the campaigns by pay, then start a website about whatever the highest paying keyword is.? If you don?t mind writing thousands of words about payday loans, obscure drugs, or no-win no-fee lawyers then this could be a successful strategy.

There are two downsides to choosing a niche based on pay alone.? Firstly, the high-paying niches change frequently, and if you?re going to try to keep up with those changes it?s likely you?ll burn out. Secondly, the high-paying keywords tend to be high competition keywords too ? do you really want to have to throw resources at trying to outrank a huge number of experienced affiliate marketers?

Competition?vs?Popularity

The best products to promote are:

Choose evergreen products whenever possible, especially for your first few sites.? Once you have gotten the hang of setting up and ranking sites quickly you can try to capitalize on trends (such as major movie releases or popular music artists) if you wish.

To determine whether a niche is popular or not, use the?Google?Adwords?Query?tool.? Make a list of keywords related to the niches you are thinking of using, and run them through the tool.? In the ideal world, you want a keyword with a lot of searches (including long-tail versions of the keyword), and minimal competition.

Don?t fear competition too much ? every niche has competition in it ? after all, if there were no affiliates, merchants wouldn?t bother to keep their programs going.? You want to avoid the very high competition niches, but you should try to establish yourself in a specific area of a healthy niche.

Finding your audience?

The best way to establish?yourself?is to pick a relatively narrow part of a broader niche.? For example, if you?re targeting a male audience and want to sell sports?supplements,?narrow down that audience and run a bodybuilding website, or a site for strong men.? It?s easier to build a reputation as an authority if you specialise in one narrow part of a niche.