Hey Louise,
I'm a bit unsure as to your situation. Are you saying that you don't have a site yet and are trying to do affiliate marketing for your friend by dropping links in forums or that you are looking for ways to augment your current site's affiliate income?
There's nothing wrong with niche markets, quite the opposite in fact. If you can build a site that has a lot of good information on the topic at hand and get enough traffic then you can post links for your friend's site, and various other ads of the same genre to generate leads and sales. People already interested in finding the information and products you describe are more likely to purchase them from your ads anyway.
I'm going to reccommend that you avoid trying to sell in forums, as you're likely to get blocked and generate bad pr for your friend's site. Many forums, like this one, have a policy against putting affiliate links in posts, and even if you just try to sell people on the idea and have them go to your site and then be redirected to your friends page, many people are turned off by sales pitch type posts. In the end you are likely to generate less traffic by trying to insert links in forums and blogs anyway.
Take a look around this forum, you'll find several helpful ideas on how to market with your site, cloak affliliate links, and find a network that works for you if you want to go that route, but like I said, you're going to need a site first. Good luck!
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