Your Niche Site Theme Isn’t The Keywords Or The Products
This will be a quick article to address an issue a lot of people have.
I get variations on the following question a lot.
“Hi Jamie. I am trying to find a good niche but I can’t find one with good affiliate programs.”
Sometimes, you’ll have a great idea. You might be out shopping or doing something interesting in the real world, and you think, “Gee… I bet there’s an audience out there for this.”
But then you go home, switch on your computer and you’ll find no affiliate programs for the topic.
Or you’ll find that there are a lot of searches for keywords but you can’t think of any products to sell.
Here are my quick thoughts on that.
Divorce The Niche From The Keywords And The Affiliate Programs
I recommend doing your niche selection, keyword research and product research in different stages.
Now, don’t get me wrong, you’ll have to go back to each of these things as you’re researching the other, but here’s what I mean.
Your niche selection = audience with a problem. These are people who are looking to buy products in your revenue range and learning about their problems online.
Your products = the ways you’re going to solve their problems.
Your keyword research = how you get the people in your audience to see your solution.
Here’s where beginners go wrong.
They’ll see a niche. Let’s say “Weight loss for women over 40.”
Then they’ll think, “Right… what do women in this niche need? Weight loss pills!”
After that, they’ll look up “weight loss pill affiliate programs.”
At various points, they’ll go through this process and see a few problems:
- The keywords are very competitive
- Affiliate programs range from OK through to shady as hell through to terrible commissions
- All the domains are taken (Because they’re putting in “weightlosspillreviews.com” or something generic)
- Everything has been written about before
The problem here is that there’s no separation between niche, keyword and product. Let’s use the same example and show how we can treat it differently and create a new site. (This kind of ties in with everything I’ve been writing about recently so far as niche sites go.)
How To Separate Niches, Products And Keywords
Let’s take the above example – women over forty who want to lose weight.
It’s a good audience that you know spends money, buys products and is conscious about how they look and how much they weigh. So there’s definitely opportunity.
But weight loss pills are sketchy and highly competitive.
So let’s take a step back and address the problem.
Why might a 40’s woman want to lose weight?
- They will feel better
- They’ll look better
- Life is tough when they’re overweight. Maybe they can’t find clothes or they’re too unfit to play with their kids or whatever
- They likely have other stuff – stress, poor sleep, bad skin, and so on
Now think about the reasons they might be overweight:
- Pseudo-diabetes
- Poor diet
- Poor exercise regime
- A tough job
- Stress
Both of the lists above are short and could be extended massively. But let’s just concentrate on one, remembering that our niche site is about writing simple sales letters that encourage people to buy stuff, but also appealing to that specific target market.
We think of the problem and solution.
“Does your weight affect your ability to sleep?”
Solutions:
- Lose weight (obviously)
- Get a better pillow
- Take some sleeping supplement
- Get better sleeping habits (via a waking alarm clock, activity tracker or whatever.)
Now, each of these solutions will have keywords to target, products to sell and can be targeted specifically to your audience. You can write the articles with your audience in mind and relate everything back to losing weight or addressing the real issue – the bad feelings the person lives with that will make them act.
That’s just one article for your niche site. Address all of the problems in turn and you’ll have many different options to choose from.
Final Thoughts
Be under no illusion; we’re still doing the same basic thing with our niche sites.
- Find an audience that’ll buy
- Find products to sell
- Write sales letters/reviews for those products that encourage people to buy
- Use keywords that will bring interested people onto the niche site
The only difference is that we widen our initial horizons and do a few minutes thinking about the niche problems and solutions.