Before you start pursuing various income streams – Kindle, info products, affiliate marketing, etc. – you have to pick a niche and figure out how you plan to monetize it.
There are many broad and narrow niches to choose from, but for many people, it’s difficult to fully understand how it all comes together. The following lesson will show you five evergreen, yet continually evolving niche markets that offer you ample opportunities to promote both digital and tangible items.
We’ll cover the different ways you can research what sells, find what types of digital and tangible items are available to affiliates for promotion, and how you can present it to your target audience.
Mental Wellness
Self-esteem and confidence, stress, depression, and guidance of all sorts (like career or relationship guidance) can fall under the umbrella of mental wellness. The self-help niche is thriving – and it has been all along.
There are no signs of it slowing down, either – as both men and women, from youth all the way through senior ages – seek assistance on how to find happiness and eliminate any troublesome issues.
Let’s take the stress niche. People are always battling an over-scheduled lifestyle – too much to do and not enough time to do it. They need ways to cope, and they’re willing to spend money doing it.
The great thing about the stress niche is that it gives you many content choices – the stress of a job, relationship, parenting, finances, etc. So let’s talk digital product promotions first.
You can find products specifically made for stress relief measures – and you’ll find tons of them on ClickBank and Amazon (in Kindle book form). But you also have the ability to promote products that don’t necessarily mention stress, but they do help the reader better manage a particular area of their life so that stress isn’t an issue.
For example, you could blog about relationship stress and then promote an e-course on saving your marriage. Or you could discuss financial pressure and promote work at home products that could help them alleviate the stress from that part of their lives.
When it comes to the tangible world, you have lots of options. You can find them a couple of different ways. First, go to Amazon and type in your main keyword. For our example, we’ll say, stress.
Amazon will usually show books as their main category, but in the left sidebar, you’ll find more categories where you can search to find tangible items you want to promote.
When we do this, we discover we can promote DVDs, pillows, spa kits, supplements, squeeze balls, and more. Make sure you go down every category because sometimes you’ll find something really unusual.
Another place to go is Ubersuggest.org (or any keyword tool, but this one is free). Type in something where a phrase will help deliver tangible results. Let’s type in the phrase: for stress relief.
Using this strategy, we now add a few tangible promotion ideas to our arsenal, including: crystals, scents, lavender, food, herbs, yoga balls, art products, music, games, journals, massage products, vitamins, essential oils, etc.
To promote these to your audience, you can blog and use email marketing. You can write an article about how arts and crafts help relieve stress and then present them with several options – like painting, knitting, etc.
Promote pages that offer a starter kit to their new hobby. You might make the page on Squidoo and call it “5 Things You Need to Begin Painting for Stress Relief.”
The article can go out on your blog or to your email autoresponder list, and you can Tweet, Google Plus, and Facebook it to an even wider audience who may not be subscribed to you elsewhere.
Diet and Fitness
This niche is another one that’s perfect for both genders and ages youth through seniors. It’s also evergreen – there are always people wanting to lose weight (either because they’re newly overweight or in yo-yo mode), and even if they’re a perfect size, fitness will continue to be a lifelong pursuit.
This is a great niche to be in for both tangible and digital promotions. Not only are there thousands of products for you to promote that are already on the market – but more are being developed each and every day.
Let’s start with digital products. Again, you’re going to go to sites like ClickBank and look for this category. But you should also think of other ways to build on the diet and fitness niche by bringing in a crossover audience.
For example, what are some other reasons people would want to lose weight and get fit? Here are some to get you started:
· Stress relief via exercise
· Anti-aging
· Dating (to look better)
· Energy solution for fatigue…etc.
You can pull an audience in for these topics and then present the best diet and fitness courses and products for them to buy. Your job will be to explain the connection between stress relief and exercise, confidence in dating and fitness, and so on.
When it comes to promoting tangible items, your options are wide open. Start again at Amazon, but in this particular niche, you have many phrases you can look up, including:
· Fitness
· Diet
· Weight loss
· Lose weight
· Exercise…etc.
You might get different product recommendations based on which words you search for. For instance, when I search diet on Amazon, I see diet pills, diet shakes, diet tea, etc. When I search weight loss on Amazon, I see body wraps and corsets.
Many of these items will cross over and be duplicates, but you never know which items will be unique to that particular phrase. Go do the same in Ubersuggest, but looks for phrases like:
· Best way to lose weight (where you’ll find ideas like bikes, Zumba, hula hoops, etc.)
· Best fitness (where you’ll find ideas like watch, bracelets, clothes, earbuds, etc.)
· Exercise equipment that (where you’ll find ideas for vibrating equipment, attaches to door, uses your body weight, space-saving, etc.)
One of the main keys to developing credibility in this niche is to act in the best interest of your target audience. Weight can affect their mindset and their health, so you want to be protective of what you promote to them – and do it for deeper reasons than what affiliate commission it will give you.
Cooking
Everyone has to eat, right? With a crippled economy, and a nation full of obese individuals, many men and women are turning to online tutorials to learn how to cook healthier, or even find recipes for comfort food (Pinterest alone is full of them)!
First, the digital ideas. Off the top of our heads, we can assume that people want cooking lessons for many different reasons, such as:
· To save money
· To cook for one or two people
· To cut down on sodium, go gluten-free, to eliminate sugar, and so on…
If we go into ClickBank, we can find more reasons, such as cooking for diabetics, for a specific diet (like Paleo), to mimic restaurant dishes, and for specific types of cooking like BBQ, vegetarian, etc.
Another great place to look is on YouTube. If there’s a cooking channel for it, you can bet there’s probably a digital course (and if not, how about you make one and keep the profits for yourself)?
You could have a broad cooking blog to promote this kind of stuff on, but in this particular niche, it might benefit you to launch more than one cooking blog and make them specialized for their target audience.
The reason why is you will attract a more loyal audience to your diabetic cooking blog than you would if it was a random site that included diabetic cooking, decadent desserts, BBQ and all sorts of things.
Now let’s start looking at the kinds of tangibles you can promote. Let’s start with the brainstorming. What kinds of things can we hold in our hands or touch when it comes to cooking?
· Books, of course – cookbooks, recipes, etc.
· Aprons
· Cooking utensils
· Pots and pans
· Bakeware
When I go to Amazon, there are a million items we can promote. But try narrowing it down to the ones best suited for your cooking niche. For example, a meat thermometer and grilling tools would be perfect for BBQ cooking, and a sushi roller and rice cooker for the Sushi niche.
Let’s not stop there, though. Go to Ubersuggest.org again and type in some cooking phrases such as:
· Cooking with (where you’ll get ideas like cast iron, pressure cooker, convection oven, etc.)
· How to cook using a (where you’ll get ideas like pizza stone, crockpot, smoker, etc.)
· Best cookware that is (where you’ll see ideas like dishwasher safe, non-toxic, ceramic, easy to clean, etc.)
You can take these phrases and turn them into blog posts and emails. “Top 10 List of the Best Cookware That Is _______.” (Fill in the blank – good for your health, for low-fat cooking, etc.).
Pets
Pets aren’t demanding. Pet owners are demanding. Many people consider pets a part of their family – and they spoil them and show much of their affection by caring for their health, training them, and pampering them.
This niche is great for many living beings – dogs, cats, ferrets, birds, pigs, rabbits, etc. But you’ll want to choose one pet per niche site and not have a broad site (for the same reason as we discussed in the cooking explanation).
If you go to ClickBank, you’ll find a few niche ideas – caring for pet lizards, protection from fleas, grooming, and more. You can even dig down deeper. Instead of just choosing the bird niche, you might want to go into cockatiels.
Usually, the info products you’ll find in the pet niche include:
· Buying guide (or adoption)
· Training guides (potty training, agility, etc.)
· Health issues
· Grooming
Tangible items are vast with the pet niche – and the good news is, much of it turns out to be a repeated purchase. Let’s go with the dog niche since it’s one of the most popular niches.
Remember, our formula is to brainstorm first, then add Amazon search results, and finally a keyword tool like Ubersuggest. Brainstorming, we come up with things like collars, leashes, flea and tick control, and treats.
With Amazon, we can add dog beds, toys, and crates, among others. When we go to Ubersuggest and search phrases like best dog, we can add on things like food, shampoo, brush, car harness, diapers and life vest.
Beauty and Anti-Aging
Just as every day more babies are born, each day there are men and women looking to fight the aging process. Beauty and aging can go hand-in-hand, but they don’t always have to.
For example, someone might be looking for an acne cure – or hoping to cure dark circles under their eyes. Those two issues might have more to do with hormones and insomnia than they do aging.
When you go to ClickBank, you can look up beauty and find topics like natural beauty care, stylist secrets, and even niches as drilled down as plucking the perfect eyebrows!
There are tons of anti-aging guides – some for appearances, and others for mental acuity, physical movement, and optimal health.
Head over to Amazon and you’ll find thousands of products for both niches, so look them up separately. For beauty, you’ll find everything from makeup and fragrances to hair care and skin care. Anti-aging has many books, creams, and other treatments to keep time at bay.
Ubersuggest delivers things like best beauty mirror, vitamins, and night creams. For anti-aging, we get eyeshadow, face masks, light therapy, gloves, sunscreen and more.
All of these niche markets are going to be around for a long time. They’re not fads, even though there might be a trend that emerges from time to time within the niche.
It’s up to you how you’ll handle that – but you can easily build a reputation as the go-to person in one of these niches if you choose quality digital products to review on your blog or email about, and recommend top-notch tangibles to your audience.
