Affiliate Marketing Tutorial - Step 2: How to Choose an Affiliate Marketing Topic

Your first decision when establishing an affiliate marketing business is what types of products are you going to promote and sell?  This is an important decision and in order to make it you’ll need to ask yourself three important questions: 

1. What are you interested in? 

2. What are you knowledgeable about?

3. What are you passionate about?

These are important questions to ask yourself before you get started.  Why?  Because you’re going to be spending your working hours eating, sleeping, and breathing this subject.  If it doesn’t interest you, your job isn’t going to be any fun.  You’ll also want your affiliate website needs to have a unifying theme.  You can’t effectively sell dog biscuits and computers on the same website.  

Brainstorm possibilities.   

How many can you come up with?  Take ten minutes and create a list of subjects that interest you.  If you’re passionate about Van Gogh write it down.  If you’re passionate about trumpets, write it down.  It doesn’t have to feel profitable, you’ll research that later, right now just list all of your interests and passions.  What can you spend your days writing about, talking about, and selling? 

Narrowing your list of possibilities. 

Now that you have a list of possibilities, it’s time to get a little more specific.  Let’s assume that you have a passion and extensive knowledge about rock climbing.  Your next step is to narrow your chosen interest into a specific niche or niches – it’s okay at this point to come up with several possibilities. 

For example, you could narrow your interest in climbing with the following categories; climbing with children, rock climbing in Australia, Free soloing (climbing without rope), handicap rock climbing.   

Having a niche, rather than a broad category, makes it easier to reach and target customers.  It also makes it easier for you to provide informative content to each and every visitor.  It also makes it easier to generate profits.

Many people may be searching for information about rock climbing and there are many resources available online for those people, however only a specific group of people are interested in rock climbing with children and you probably don’t have as much competition.  Therefore, the people that visit your site are looking for precisely the information that you provide, and the products you represent. 

Brainstorming again.   

Try to come up with at least three niche categories for each of your affiliate possibilities.  This means that if you came up with 5 possible affiliate marketing interests, you’ll have 15 potential categories to research. 

Research is what comes next!  Why?  Because not every category you came up with is going to have enough demand to warrant and support an affiliate business and you want your business to be profitable, right? 

Next in our tutorial: --> Affiliate Marketing: Researching Affiliate Marketing Topic Demand

RECOMMENDED for Affiliate Marketing Success!: Free Affiliate Marketing eBook by Dr. Ken Evoy of SBI!  Preselling is the number one thing you can do to increase your affiliate commissions, this book shows you how - Click here to immediately download.