To most people who start out from the bottom in affiliate marketing, there is one piece of advice that they will almost always hear very early on: “find a niche market”.

The reasoning behind this is that whilst the biggest commissions, and most searched for terms are usually found in areas such as insurance, mobile phones, holidays or satellite/cable tv packages, there’s almost no point trying to enter these markets and competing for these sorts of search terms, as there’s already a lot of very big movers and shakers with big sites, many sites, teams of people optimising them, and huge budgets to do so. If you do decide to (where the “almost” comes into the above), you probably need to target one specific small part of one of the above (eg rather than just “holidays to greece”, perhaps target “island hopping holidays in greece”). It’s called long tail keywords, and can be an extremely profitable science of its own, but i’m not going to delve into that right now.

With those ruled out, us ordinary folk who might be able to knock up a few simple sites and spend a small amount of time and money trying to push them up the rankings need to find a “good niche”. One where we can still make money through affiliate schemes, there is still some reasonable amounts of searches for this product niche, and not too much existing competition on the first page of the search engines. It’s not difficult to find 2 out of those 3 things, but all three in one niche? It tough, but when you do, it’s the perfect combination to jump into making a site, getting it up there, and hopefully making some good commissions before too many people spot the same niche and it gets all competitive!

Over the next few weeks, i’ll be setting up a couple of sites where I think i’ve spotted just that niche – not huge moneymakers, but ones i hope with a reasonable initial effort of making the site could make a few hundred pounds a month without too much extra work, and once they’re up and running, i’ll be explaining why (i may not be right of course, and will welcome arguments as to why i’m not!). I’ll give data such as how many searches for various terms there are each month, which programs i’ll be initially promoting, and what the existing competition is like.

It’ll be interesting for me at least to see how they go over time – and i’m sure if they’re very successful, i’ll have people reading this and setting up rival sites, which will also be interesting - to see how they fare, and how i manage to cope with the sudden addition of competition who may either be following and copying what i’m doing, or more scarily may be far better at this stuff than me!