Finding Hot Niches For Affiliate Marketing
This is my favorite part of the process and the most fun. Finding a niche that could potentially pay off handsomely through the Adsense arbitrage method is thrilling. I will be suggesting many sources for niche discovery here. Finding a good niche along with good keywords is the most valuable part of the Adsense arbitrage process. Good niche discovery is the backbone to the business. A group of high paying niches can pay you handsomely. That is why no Adsense arbitrageur will EVER tell you what his niches are so don’t even bother asking. Now let’s get on with the process shall we?
What Are Niches?
Anything can be a niche. A hobby, sports, cars, boats, computers, education, investing, travel, practically anything of human interest where people spend money is a potential niche you can use. From these broad topics you narrow it down to a finer degree.
At this stage you are not overly concerned about whether the topic has high paying keywords. You are brainstorming; mining potential niches to research later.
Online Methods for Finding Niches
There are inumerable sources for nich ideas online and more appearing all the time. All these resources are free too.
Listed below is a list of useful sites for finding niche topic keywords:
Ebay has a truckload of useful sales information and marketing data for their sellers that are easily available to anyone on their Ebay Seller Central site. It’s a goldmine of information you can use to find hot niches.
Ebay’s Seller Central, What’s Hot
http://pages.ebay.com/sellercentral/whatshot.html
Ebay’s sales site for their sellers is free for anyone to access. An excellent group of tools telling you what are the hot categories, buying buzz, etc. Great for finding out what people are actually buying to see if your niche idea fits into buying patterns. Ebay has a monthly PDF report listing all the hottest items by category for the previous month.
Their Ebay Pulse linked from the page above gives you the top 10 most popular searches for each category.
http://pulse.ebay.com/
Ebay Pop
http://www.mpire.com/ebayPop.ivk
A beta site powered by shopping site http://www.mpire.com that acts as sort of a blog of popular trends and current hot pop culture events and trends. Most interesting is the eBay movers and shakers section at the top that lets you find the top 10 selling items for each category.
Merchandise Calendar
http://pages.ebay.com/sellercentral/calendar.html
Upcoming promotions Ebay will be highlighting on Ebay’s home page in the coming months. Guess what? If Ebay is promoting it, you probably should too. If you’re not sure what seasonal items are hot niches during the year, try this page.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers
Try Amazon’s bestseller’s section for top selling items in each category updated hourly. Useful for trends data. Verifies an item or type of product’s hotness if it shows up here consistently.
http://www.shopping.com/top_searches
Now owned by Ebay, giant comparison shopping site Shopping.com has a directory page of product categories you can use for niche ideas. Even better when you click on the categories, a list of the top 100 keyword searches for the category is displayed. This is one of my favorites and hardly mentioned as a source for ideas and keyword research.
Everyone’s favorite search engine offers plenty of data for the Adsense arbitrageur and niche internet marketer.
Google Trends
http://www.google.com/trends
Have you got a hot idea but unsure of it’s popularity? Try Google Trends and see if it’s trending up or down.
Google recently introduced their hot trends section that can give you daily hot topics like Yahoo’s buzz but with 100 keywords.
http://www.google.com/trends/hottrends#
Google Suggest
http://www.google.com/webhp?complete=1&hl=en
Culling data from Google’s own engine, Suggest offers keyword phrases as you start typing a word while displaying the number of results.
Google Zeitgeist
http://www.google.com/press/zeitgeist.html
According to Google “Pulling together interesting search trends and patterns requires Google’s human and computing power together. Search statistics are automatically generated based on the millions of searches conducted on Google over a given period of time - weekly, monthly, and annually.” Google Zeitgeist offers up top 10 queries made last week and month both for the US and globally to help you spot mass trends in various human interest categories.
http://buzz.yahoo.com/
Yahoo Buzz gives you top 10 searches in entertainment categories and overall movers and shakers. Short entertainment articles include the top keywords related to that article.
http://adlab.msn.com/ForecastV2/KeywordTrendsWeb.aspx
Microsoft’s pay per click advertiser network has released a group of beta tools that could be very useful for arbitragers and other niche marketers. Similar to Google Trends is MSN Adcenter’s Keyword Forecaster but it pulls a Nostradamus act by predicting future trend direction. Check out all their other beta tools for webmasters here.
http://adlab.msn.com/
http://hotsearches.aol.com/search/hotsearch.jsp
Somewhat like Google’s Zeitgeist, AOL’s Hot Searches gives you top AOL searches and major celebrity news items for the week.
Lycos Top 50 shows you the top 50 searches from the previous week plus a dash of celebrity news, similar to AOL’s Hot Searches.
http://50.lycos.com/
http://about.ask.com/en/docs/iq/iq.shtml
Ask.com also has hot searches type page of top 10 searches overall, in news and movies for the previous week.
http://digg.com/
If you are interested in niches that appeal to tech savvy crowd go to Digg’s most popular Diggs pages. You can get an idea of what appeals to this crowd by looking at what they think is news organized by sections. At the top of each page beside the “Newly Popular” heading are the top stories organized from top 24 hours to top stories in 365 days.
Mash sites are web sites that combine a group of RSS datafeeds from other sites together and display the top stories from each, typically on a single page. These sites will give you a running tally on what people are interested in. Here are some good mashup sites.
popurls, latest web buzz from social networking sites like Digg, Reddit, Fark, Youtube and others
http://popurls.com
Techmeme, tech related
http://www.techmeme.com/
Viralbabble, similar to popurls
http://www.viralbabble.com
SeoMash, SEO and webmaster based news
http://seomash.com
Snapsheet, investment links
http://www.snapsheet.com
Daily Rotation, hundreds of headlines from a variety of subjects you can choose from
http://www.dailyrotation.com/
Well, I think this is a pretty exhaustive list of sources where you can find niche ideas. You should have no reason to be stumped for ideas ever again. Any time you draw a blank just click on one of these links and jump start your creativity.
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