Series Post #3: Is Your Niche Profitable?

Welcome to another post in the Series: How to Make Passive Income with Affiliate Links as a Writer. We’ve talked about creating your niche and whether or not you’re qualified to write in your niche. 

Today, we’re wrapping up this section on niches before we move on to choosing your site builder.

How do you know if a niche is profitable? Read on and find out.

How to Recognize a Profitable Niche

When you’re researching your niche, put some time into answering the following questions:

1. Are there affiliate programs in your niche?
2. Is you affiliate program a good one?
3. Is there an audience?
4. Are there high-quality members of that audience?
5. BONUS: Does your affiliate program offer high-priced products?
6. BONUS: Will your audience want to buy these high-priced products?

Affiliate Programs

When creating your niche, take the time to research the affiliate programs within your niche.

There are many programs– like Amazon Affiliates and ShareASale– that offer a wide range of products. These programs are a great starting point for niche bloggers who aren’t sure what their audience will purchase.

Is your affiliate program a good one? How do you know?

Here are a few things you should be looking for in an affiliate program.

• the program shouldn’t cost you anything to sign up
• the program should offer high commissions on the products you sell
• the program should promote high-quality products and be reputable

Your Audience

We talked about audiences in the first post of this series. That’s because part of researching for your niche is determining if there is an audience for your content or products.

Another aspect to assuring you have an audience for your platform is to determine how high-quality that audience is. 

This has to do with CTR and conversion rates.

CTR is the “click through rate,” or how often an audience engages with your content. Conversion rates are similar, but are the percentage of the actual sales you make compared to the number of views that page or product gets.

Determining whether or not your audience is high quality may take some trial and error. Often times, though, you can find data on CTRs and conversion rates within a certain niche using a few well-worded Google searches. 

For example, here is a post detailing conversion rates for top e-commerce sites. 

Affiliate Products

Many affiliate marketers preach that you should sell high-priced items if you want to actually make a living from affiliate links.

Since we’re talking about passive income and not necessarily your monthly salary, that adage does not apply here.

Additionally, my goal is to give you ways to make passive income with as little money up front as possible. If you’re purchasing these high-priced products for review (I do not promote reviewing products you haven’t used or tried), you’re forking up quite a bit of cash just for one post.

Some of you still may be interested in marketing high-priced items, like workout equipment. Ask yourself these questions before you decide to market these products on your niche blog or site. 

• Does your affiliate program sell high-priced items?
• Would your niche audience actually purchase those high-priced items?

While you can determine the former with a few clicks through your affiliate program’s product pages, the latter has to do with how high quality your audience is and may require a bit of trial and error.

Case Study

Let’s apply what we just talked about to our case study on book blogging. I recently came across this excellent post detailing why the author thinks you can’t make money book blogging. 

While the author makes sound points, some of which I agree with, she seems to come from the position of wanting to make a living with book blogging. But passive income isn’t about replacing your full-time income immediately.

Earning passive income is about building up different sources of revenue over time to eventually supplement your full-time income. 

Book blogging is a profitable niche for those of you who want to make passive income. Here are three reasons why. 

1. a small audience but high CTRs and conversion rate because books/eBooks are inexpensive and programs like Amazon Affiliates are highly reputable
2. you can get the content for free since many publishers give out free ARCs (advanced reader copies) for book bloggers to review
3. you can build an audience to whom you can eventually promote your own books/eBooks AND earn off them through affiliate links

So there you have it! Leave a comment and let me know how your niche research is going. Happy writing!

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Want More?

Series: How to Earn Passive Income with Affiliate Links as a Writer

Series Post #1: How to Create a Niche as a Writer

Series Post #2: Are You Qualified to Write in Your Niche?