How To Find Those Niches That Will Get Plenty of Traffic AND Convert
When creating a product review website to promote Amazon products (or any other products for that matter), you must select the right niche. Finding the best niche market is probably the most important part of affiliate marketing because, if you don’t choose a “buyer” niche that converts well, all the traffic in the world won’t do you any good. To make things easy, always follow these seve criteria before committing your time, energy and resources to a specific niche:
Price
Considering the fact that the maximum commission you can earn from an Amazon affiliate sale is 8.5%, it makes sense to promote products that are on the expensive side, rather than cheaper products. After all, it takes the same amount of effort to write content about and do SEO for inexpensive products as it does for expensive ones, so you might as well maximize your earnings, right?
Our recommendation is to only promote products that sell for over $100 per unit. This way, you are guaranteed to make at least $4 per item bought through your affiliate link. Of course, there are some exceptions to this rule. It is always wise to have one or two websites that promote very inexpensive products that sell in large quantities, like pencils or hair pins, so you can get your commission percentage up each month. Remember, when your percentage goes up to the next level, it is applied to everything you’ve sold that month!
Rating
The average rating of your product(s) should be above three stars. It’s okay if there are some bad products in the niche, but you need some real winners in order to be successful — the kind of products that sell themselves. For example, if you have 20 similar products in your niche, you want at least half of them to have an average rating of four or five stars. On top of that, at least one or two of them should have nearly perfect ratings.
Like I said, don’t worry if there are a handful of “bad” products. It actually helps to review these products on your website and recommend that your readers stay away from them and spend their money elsewhere. This can build trust between you and your visitors and offer some real value by helping people avoid making bad decisions and wasting their money.
Related Products
Some niches just aren’t big enough to pursue. You could find a great product that meets all of your product selection criteria, but if there are only a couple of similar products, it may not be worth promoting. The reason for this is that your product review websites should contain AT LEAST seven or eight reviews. Search engines (especially Google) hate thin websites that only consist of a couple pages and short articles that don’t provide value to visitors.
To rank an Amazon review site on the first page of Google and keep it there, it will need several pages of high quality content. Some very successful affiliate marketers focus on building sites with hundreds of reviews because they believe these types of review sites will hold their rankings better. So you need to make sure you only go after niches with at least five similar products. This is the bare minimum. You’re even better off ditching anything with less than 10 related products.
Number of Reviews
We all know what it’s like to buy something online. Sure, it’s convenient to shop from the comfort of your own home, maybe in sweats and your favorite tee shirt, but you don’t get to hold and interact with a product like you would in an actual brick and mortar store. That’s why customer reviews are so helpful and popular these days. If a bunch of people who bought the same product that you’re thinking about buying likes it so much that they wrote a review and gave it a positive rating, this lets you know that it’s a good product. It instills confidence in the potential buyer. And the funny thing is, we trust strangers more than ever when it comes to shopping online!
For this reason, you should only promote products that have over 10 reviews and/or ratings.
Do People Buy It Online?
No matter how good a niche is on paper, you have to ask yourself, “Do people really buy this stuff online?”. Try to imagine yourself buying the products in a given niche online. If the answer is “No”, you best move on. The thing is, people are comfortable buying a lot of stuff online these days, but some things just require personal interaction before buying.
For me, one of those things is shoes. I have to try on a pair of shoes and walk around the store for a while before I purchase them. The only way I will buy shoes online is if I’ve already bought the same pair (or a similar one) from that same company. That way, I know my size and can predict how they will look on my feet. Always ask yourself if people will really buy what you are promoting online, or if they will go to the store to buy it in person.
Is It Hobby Related?
Whether it’s golf, rock polishing or building model rockets, people are usually willing to spend more money on their beloved hobbies than they would spend on other non-essential products. It is a well-known fact that hobbyist are great target audiences for affiliate marketers because we can connect them with those things that bring them the most pleasure. When you are considering promoting a product that is considered a luxury (i.e., not essential for living), be sure to ask yourself, “Is this niche related to a hobby?”. If it isn’t, you may want to move on. If it is, try to gauge how many people are part of this special hobbyist market and how many related products are in this niche. It may be worth your while to pursue and could even be a contender for an authority that becomes a real earner for your portfolio.
Does It Solve a Problem?
Like hobby related products, things that solve a problem tend to sell very easily. In these shaky economic times, it make take some serious convincing to get your average mom to buy an ice cream maker or espresso machine, but she wouldn’t think twice about purchasing smoke detectors for the entire house or a new ironing board. Whenever possible, try to sell people solutions instead of products. In your product reviews, remind your reader what problem the product will solve, or what annoyance it will remove from their life. Your conversion rate will shoot through the roof!
Conclusion
When you are trying to pick your next niche or group of products to promote, remember to consider these seven criteria:
- Are most of the products in this niche priced over $100?
- Do the majority of products in this niche have 3 star ratings or above?
- Do the products in this niche have at least 10 reviews each?
- Are there at least 5 similar products in this niche?
- Do people buy the products in this niche online?
- Is this niche related to a particular hobby?
- Does this niche solve a problem?
I’m writing to thank you for the great tips on specifically what criteria to use in choosing a niche. Keep up the good work!
Glad you found these tips helpful, Dorothy. Thanks for reading!
Thanks! These are some good hints for beginners with Amazon.
A question –
what’s your experience with the Amazon Best Seller lists? Would inclusion of a single item in a niche indicate that that type of product is actually selling well?
When I drill down into some of their categories, I start seeing some big-ticket items with no reviews listed in the top-20 (for example, I randomly chose ‘milling machines’ and the top one is $1300 with no reviews – I find it hard to believe that would sell too many units in a year, let alone a month.
Nat,
Thanks for reading! The Best Seller lists are a great place to start, but you’re right – you have to dig deep to find those little gems that aren’t too competitive. Remember, lots of us are browsing these lists everyday.
I would look for more than one item in the niche. Milling machines could be a good niche, but I’ve found that the really expensive stuff (1k+) is harder to make money from. I’m sure some marketers would disagree, but I try to stick with $100-700 products…stuff people are willing to buy online.
Good luck, and thanks again for reading!
-Brock
Thanks for your time!
Yeah, I wasn’t thinking I’d try milling machines as a niche, but it seemed odd to me that something like that would sell too well, and I started questioning the validity of Amazon’s list.
After looking around more, I found where they list the ‘Amazon Best Sellers Rank’ – the first in the deep sub-category ‘Milling Machines’ list is at #65,592 in all of Home Improvement.
In the very competitive ‘Drills’ subcat, the top spot in the list is at #174 in all Home Improvement.
They seem like decent indicators to get a feel for what is actually selling. Although I’m new at this, #65,592 seems to indicate a pretty low purchase rate to me!
Nat,
You should also do some Google/Bing searches and see if anyone else is ranking in a given niche.
There are enough IMers these days that most niches are pretty competitive. Rather than being intimidated, I like to find review sites that aren’t ranking well and see if I can outrank them.
-Brock