Choosing A Niche Topic (Part 1)

My big project now begins! As a reminder, the goal is to develop an affiliate shopping type of website that generates $500 per month.

My Criteria for Picking a Niche Topic

The challenge here is to pick a topic that’s not too broad, and also that’s not so narrow that no one searches for it. The overriding qualification factors for the new site are as follows:

1. Am I interested in the topic or product category enough to research it, “live with it”, write about it, and build a site around it over the next several months? For me, this is most important!
2. Is there a suitably sized market of people searching for information on this topic?
3. Are there any affiliate programs on the given topic?

(As a sidenote to #1, I could outsource all the content to writers using Elance.com or Rentacoder.com, but for this new site I want to write as much as possible myself so that the content is truly unique.)

So, how to pick a topic? I’m going to use a variety of techniques to find a suitable topic, and I’ll itemize them here over the next few days.

Topic Selection Method #1: Browse through catalogs of vendors at niche shopping sites and affiliate networks

Affiliate Networks are organizations that handle the affiliate programs for other people and organizations. One of the biggest such networks is Commission Junction and they handle affiliate programs for thousands of vendors. All you need to do is sign up with CJ, browse through various categories, and you’ll find vendors you can associate your site with.

For example, under the category of “weddings”, CJ has relationships with MyWeddingFavors.com, Bachelorette.com (bachelorette party supplies) and KitBiz.com (a site that sells an “Official Bride Name Change Kit”). Commission Junction handles all the link building, link tracking and sale processing on behalf of these websites.

I also enjoy browsing the shops at Netshops. Netshops has over 150 different specialty niche shopping sites. For example, there is a site on bathrobes. Yes, a shopping site focused solely on bathrobes. They also have shopping sites on kitchen pots and pans, patio furniture, and toys that kids can ride. Wow! Promoting any of these alone or in combination, would make for a great affiliate site.

Lots of other affiliates directories, like those at Clixgalore.com, ShareaSale.com, Linkconnector.com and NCSReporting.com and dozens more all are great fodder for ideas around which to build a specialty shopping site.

Steven over at AffiliateMarketingDiary.com has a assembled a great list of over 35 affiliate marketing networks .

Also, Allan Gardyne’s Associate Programs website has a great catalog of different possibilities to browse through.

Picking a topic using this method would satisfy criteria #3 (Are there any affiliate programs on the given topic?) and probably criteria #2 (a market to sell to) as well. After all, there probably wouldn’t be a shopping site for a product that no one is searching for, eh?

The question is, do any of the sites/topics uncovered through this method hold my interest enough to want to research it, “live with it”, write about it and build a site around it?

Needs more investigation, for sure. I’ll start browsing using this method and see what I come up with!