How to Find Niche Markets - Affiliate Strategies

One of the easiest and fastest ways to start making money on the internet is by affiliate marketing. Now when I say easy, it is by no means a get rich quick scheme. If you do not know what affiliate marketing is then I shall give you a brief summary.

Basically, a vendor has a product for sale and if the vendor has an affiliate program you as the affiliate can market the merchants' product to a group of interested people. If any of those people you refer to the vendor purchase the product you make a commission on the sale.

Affiliate marketing is therefore the easiest entry to making cash on the internet for beginners as you don't need to create your own product and the cost of entry into a market is very low, and is therefore lower risk.

Now, the purpose of this series of articles is to provide you with the affiliate strategies that are needed if you want to start making extra cash on the internet or even begin your own affiliate marketing business.

So if you're ready we'll get started.

Finding a Niche.

When finding a niche market it is always advisable to begin with something you are interested in or have some knowledge of. It's even better if you can be passionate about the subject because after all you need to apply this enthusiasm when you promote your chosen products. Some of the top niches to consider are Health, Wealth & Relationships. These are very competitive niches to enter in to so my advice would be to find a niche within a niche. For example if you chose Health you could focus on Diet & Weight Loss and could even narrow them down even further and find a niche within this sub-niche like weight loss for the over 50's.

To help you even further to find a profitable niche there are many free resources out there that can give you niche ideas and also help you tell if a niche is going to make you money or not.

My top 3 niche research tools are:

Amazon.com/bestsellers and search through the results. Amazon kindly sorts the results by department so you can easily see the best selling items for each department... this should give you some great ideas for niches but also which products to promote. Amazon.com has its own affiliate program so you can promote their products and start making money within a few weeks. Amazon was where I started out and I make a modest passive income from promotions I set up more than 12 months ago, which I haven't touched since.

Magazines.com/browse. If there is a magazine in your niche then you can be confident there is a market out there for your niche. Magazine publishers don't release a magazine before they spend a lot of time and money to see if there is demand for the information in the first place.

Google.com/insights/search. Google provide a great website that shows the interest in a particular niche. If there is a consistent interest in the niche you have chosen that's a great sign of a good niche to think about.

For example searching for 'dog training' shows that there is a gradual decline in interest using this search term over time, but search for 'training a dog' and you'll see a slight increase. This should tell you that the market is shifting away from taking your dog to a training school towards a more DIY approach.

With these 3 resources you should be able to uncover some profitable niches if you're willing to put in the time and effort to build your affiliate marketing business.

Richard Pargeter specialises in helping newbie internet marketers get started making money online. Grab his FREE REPORT here. If you have a burning question be sure to visit his blog at http://www.RichardPargeter.com.