How to Pick Your 1st Niche

[Linda Buquet]

Just found a GREAT blog post about how to dig deep inside yourself, which is a good place to start - to find a good niche. It's about finding a good niche for your 1st blog but the same thing applies if it's your 1st affiliate site.

Then again your 1st affiliate site might be a BLOG -
so see - it all fits together no matter how you cut it!

7 Steps To Choose A Niche For Your Blog

"The first step to get solid traffic to your blog is to choose the right niche.

There is no surefire way to pick a profitable niche. Even professional bloggers admit that they sometimes choose a niche that doesn’t get enough traffic or make enough money to make it worthwhile. So don’t worry if the first blog you start flops. Just try again. Perserverance is the key to success."

Read the rest and if you are smart you will do the exercises suggested to find the best 1st niche for YOU.
7 Steps To Choose A Niche For Your Blog

[Dorian]

The blog has an excellent point. Passion marketing or personal economics marketing comes to mind.

Don't find a product in order to...find a product you love is my philosophy.

[Linda Buquet]

Here's another look at how to pick your 1st niche,
with some slightly different but very valuable ideas.

6 Steps to choosing a niche

1. Write a list of everything you like to do, care about or gets you excited. It can be anything: golf, knitting, baby products, the ocean or even the color blue. What ever it is write it down. Try to create a list of thirty things that interest you.

2. Look at your list and begin to cross out the ones you dont feel as passionate about. You may like sports cars but you are only slightly interested in home electronics. Narrow your list down to your top 10

It goes on to explain how to further whittle down your list to the best niches and how to check to see if they'll be profitable.

Go read the rest: Choose a Niche That Earns You Cash
Then come back and discuss it!

[Linda Buquet]

Also wanted to mention I really like the test tip #3 puts you through.
Write down WHY you like the things you picked.

If you have a hard time coming up with reasons why you like a topic,
imagine how hard it's going to be to get up the enthusiasm to build a site,
write articles and try to drive traffic to it.

I recently re-read an older article from Ros Gardner about how she once built a financial lead gen site for loans and insurance - she was in this niche purely for the money, not due to any personal interest. She talked about how boring it was for her and how it took so much effort for her to work on the site because it was not a topic she was interested in - so it was just plain WORK!

[Linda Buquet]

There were some questions added to this post that got off-topic.
They were from an affiliate who had 2,000 clicks on a product link and no sales
and he was wondering what's wrong and if he should give up on the product.

I split off and started a new thread in the newbie forum.
Bad Conversions? When to Give up on a Product?

[gmanty]

I just joined your forum to thank you for mentioning my blog post. Glad you enjoyed it.

I am kind of swamped right now working on developing a product, but I will try to visit more often when I get a little extra time.

Thanks again for the mention.

- George

[Linda Buquet]

Hi George,

Welcome to 5 Star. We're always glad to link to great blog entries.
Look forward to you coming back to see us when you get the time.

[GettingRicher]

Excellent way of finding the right niche. This article made me think about changing my niche... It's really hard to write articles to submit to article directories if you don't know that much about what you are selling.

Thanks for the link.

[Linda Buquet]

Here's another good blog about how to pick your 1st niche.

Ask Kirsty - How Do I Find My First Affiliate Niche?

Good points - thanks Kirsty!

[Linda Buquet]

Here's a good new thread that's developing about the reasons to find a small targeted niche when you are new instead of going after the biggies or going with a broad market category.

http://affiliate-marketing-forums.5s...html#post28227

Some really good stuff! (then again I wrote most of it and I'm biased!)

notaprettysite wrote: "Linda, that post was like a little mini-course all in itself! It was awesome! And it finally sheds some light on the whole overcrowded niche/high-paying keyword thing I've been wondering about for ages."