Finding a great affiliate niche that’s both low competition and profitable can sometimes seem like finding a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow—but it’s not impossible if you know what you’re doing.

In this article, I’ll show you three different methods that make it easier to find your perfect affiliate niche—and as a bonus—I’ll throw in some examples of tried and tested affiliate niches.

A good affiliate niche has high-paying affiliates, high Traffic potential, low competition, and it helps if it’s a topic you’re interested in.

Here’s why it’s a good idea to consider these things when picking an affiliate niche.

• Traffic potential – Ahrefs’ Traffic potential shows the total organic traffic the #1 page for your target keyword receives from all the keywords it ranks for.
• Low competition – With so many websites vying for the top spot of Google, if you are in the fortunate position of choosing an affiliate niche, you can pick the easiest battles—increasing your chances of winning them.
• High-paying affiliates – Make your life easier by finding high-paying affiliate programs. The higher the percentage of your commission, the less conversions you’ll need to make.
• A topic you’re interested in – Hopefully, this should go without saying, but it really helps if you’re a subject matter expert in the area you are writing about.

If you’re lucky enough to find an affiliate niche covering these things, congratulations, you’ve hit the jackpot. But what if you don’t know where to start? 

Here are three different methods I use to identify good affiliate niches.

If you’re new to the world of affiliate marketing, then it’s best to start with the first two methods below. 

However, if this isn’t your first rodeo, you might want to skip to the third way of finding affiliate niches using affiliate program footprints because it might help surface some new inspiration for affiliate niches you hadn’t considered previously.

The easiest way to discover affiliate niches is to look for the type of keywords that affiliate sites commonly use, like “review,” “best,” and “vs.” 

Affiliates often write around these topics using these keywords as they have strong commercial intent. 

Here’s how publishers structure these types of keywords within their article headings:

These keywords are known as keyword modifiers—they provide more specificity to the original keyword.

Using Ahrefs’ Site Explorer, we can find all these keywords in just a couple of clicks.

To do this:

• Enter the keyword topic that you’re interested in and hit search. I’ve used “wireless headphones”
• Click on the Matching terms report
• Add an Include filter with the keyword modifiers (like “best,” “cheapest,” or “review”) separated by commas
• Click on Any word, hit Apply, and Show results

This will provide a list of mostly commercial keywords you can target with your affiliate site.

Our example shows that “best” and “review” keywords are the most popular keyword modifiers.

To take things further, click “best” in the sidebar.

Now, let’s add a Keyword difficulty (KD) filter from 10-20 and hit Apply.

Once we’ve done this, we can see that with a bit of work, there are some interesting sub-niches we could explore here that have high Traffic potential and low KD.

If you’re laser-focused on finding a profitable niche and want to know exactly what’s already working, a useful method is to go to a site like Flippa and browse the recently sold listings in the affiliate category. I’ve chosen to look at sites running the Amazon affiliate program, as it is one of the most widely used affiliate programs in the world.

To start, go to Flippa.com and click on Amazon below the search bar.

Once you’ve clicked through to the search results, I continue to personalize the sidebar filters in the following way:

• Revenue generating – Yes – (We need to ensure the niche makes money)
• Asset type – Websites and online businesses – (There are lots of asset types to consider, but for ease let’s just focus on websites)
• Website type – Blog – (Let’s focus our search solely on blogs)
• Age – 0-3 years – (We want to see what has worked recently, not well-established brands) 
• Status – Recently sold – (This identifies completed listings that show they were good enough assets to be purchased)

You can personalize the settings however you want, but these are the ones that yielded the most success for me in the past.

Once you are happy, hit Apply Filters—you’ll get a list of Amazon affiliate sites.

With a 30-second search, we’ve found two different Amazon affiliate niches that make ~$300 p/m net profit. 

In theory, if we were to target one of these niches, we might be able to make a similar profit. If you don’t like them, just keep scrolling until you find a decent affiliate niche.

The next step is to sense-check what you found on Flippa. This means running the site through Ahrefs’ Site Explorer, looking at the Top pages and Organic keywords reports, and generally auditing the niche. 

We know that it makes money, but is it still low competition? Does it still have Traffic potential? These are the types of questions you need to ask yourself when running the sites through Ahrefs.

If we run the term “pickleball” through Ahrefs Keywords Explorer, we can see that the seed term does have Traffic potential, but it is also Super hard in terms of its Keyword Difficulty—meaning it could be hard to rank for this exact keyword without a lot of high authority links. 

And if even if the niche doesn’t look that promising from the outset, it’s worth drilling down into the Matching terms report to find a more specific angle that can work.

We can see here that “best pickleball paddles” has a low KD and high TP; it’s also on an upward search trend, and a quick Google reveals that this product can sell for ~$250.

With affiliate commissions at Amazon.com around ~3% for sports, you might want to look at other affiliate programs to get higher rates. A further quick Google reveals you can get ~10-30% commissions from other affiliate programs for this particular niche. This is much more workable.

Another more advanced method to get inspiration for your next affiliate project is to reverse engineer common footprints in affiliate programs. 

We’ve mentioned Amazon affiliates already, so let’s continue with this theme. Here’s a real-world example of a typical Amazon disclosure:

This text has to be included on the website. If we cut it down to its essentials, it is basically: “a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program.” We can use this as our main footprint. 

But to spice things up a bit more, we can add a further filter with outlinks to amazon.com or amzn.to. This can help to identify sites that are actively using Amazon’s affiliate links and are not just inactive websites that have the disclaimer on them.

We can then paste the following into Ahrefs’ Web Explorer’s search bar.

incontent:a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program AND outlinkdomain:amazon.com OR outlinkdomain:amzn.to

Web Explorer will then find sites that mention the Amazon disclosure in the content and also link to Amazon.com or amzn.to (the shortlink version.) I’ve added a few extra filters below to narrow my search down to the English-speaking headphone niche, but again, you can enter any niche you want—or even just browse the total list.

Scroll through the sites that catch your attention, and once you’ve identified an affiliate niche that you think might work, use Site Explorer and Keywords Explorer to dig deeper and vet the niche properly.

A good thing about this method is that you can find lots of affiliate niches in a single search. 

Web Explorer can also be used to identify any other footprints that affiliate programs leave behind—so it’s not just limited to Amazon.

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