PureBlogging

If you’re looking to start a profitable blog, niche research is important. Depending on your goals and your approach you may wan to seek out a niche that’s currently underserved, or you may want to identify niches that have plenty of income potential. Most of the niches that have a high income potential will also have a good deal of competition from other websites and blogs. However, to make money in these niches you don’t necessarily have to be the biggest, most popular blog in the industry. you can make a decent income in the right niche just by simply getting a small piece of the pie for yourself.

I’m sure you’ve read a lot about the need to choose a niche that has lower levels of competition, but that can be both a blessing and a curse. Personally, I don’t think either approach is right or wrong, it just depends on what you want to do, but if you’re looking for big potential, competitive niches will typically provide more.

Reasons Why You Shouldn’t Shy Away from a Popular Niche:

1 – Huge Potential

As I just mentioned, more competitive and more popular topics tend to come with very high income potential. Choosing a smaller, less-saturated niche may give you better odds of success, but they generally will not have the same potential.

2 – You Don’t Need to Dominate

In popular industries you won’t have to be the biggest or the best to make some money. You can still be profitable while being a relatively small player. In less popular niches you’ll likely have to be at the top in order to really make money.

3 – Huge Targeted Audience

One of the biggest struggles of niche blogging can be finding targeted visitors. Choose a topic that’s too narrow and the amount of potential readers will be pretty small. On the other hand, popular industries will have more competition, but they’ll also provide unlimited potential because of the huge audience.

4 – More Income Opportunities

One of the major benefits of being in a popular industry is the added income opportunities that are usually associated. For example, a competitive niche will have a much larger number of affiliate programs that you can promote on your blog as compared to a small, less-popular niche. In addition to just affiliate programs, there will also be more companies that are willing to advertise on your blog to promote their products and services, simply because there are more products and services available in popular industries.

5 – Proven Money-Making Potential

Most of he popular industries are so crowded in part because others have proved that there is plenty of money to be made. Smaller niches may have potential, but more popular industries can have proven potential.

6 – Chance for a Quick Start

In a smaller niche you’ll probably have to work very hard to slowly build your readership. In a popular niche you have plenty of interested readers out there, you just need to find a way to get noticed. Getting a link from a major website or blog, publishing guest posts, or achieving success with social media can all result in a quick launch.

Easily Find Money-Making Niches with Commission Junction

Researching a niche is a very broad topic that could warrant a series of posts in itself. However, one simple aspect of researching is to find a niche where a lot of money is being exchanged. Generally, if money is being made, there is plenty of opportunity for you.

Commission Junction (CJ) is an affiliate manager, which means they’re a third-party service that provides management of affiliate programs for other companies. CJ connects advertisers to publishers (website owners and bloggers that want to make money by promoting affiliate products and services) and they handle the tracking, payment, and all the other details. You can sign up for an account at Commission Junction and apply to the affiliate programs of hundreds or thousands of companies according to your interests.

As the affiliate manager, CJ provides you with a single place to manage your affiliate programs, rather than needing to login to every program separately, plus you get commissions from all the different programs in one check.

Commission Junction has a wide variety of programs to promote, and they cover all industries, which makes their service a great place for niche research. Once you’re signed up with CJ you can do some quick research to find niches that have a large number of advertisers (CJ categorizes them, which makes this very easy).

Generally, if you see a niche with a ton of advertisers, that’s a good sign that others are making money in this niche. If no one was making money there wouldn’t be so many companies with affiliate programs targeting that audience. As I said earlier, researching affiliate programs doesn’t mean that you would have to use affiliate programs to earn the income through your blog. You can always find advertisers to directly buy ad space, but doing the research this way is much quicker than contacting potential advertisers one-by-one. In a matter of a few minutes you can gauge the potential of a niche.

What to Look for:

As you’re browsing through the affiliate programs at Commission Junction, pay attention to the following:

Variety of products and services – Does and industry have a wide variety of products and services represented through CJ? If so, there are most likely even more opportunities outside of CJ. If the only products and services available through CJ are direct competitors, you may be more limited.

Reputable companies – CJ represents a large number of very well-known companies. Are there affiliate programs for companies that you would be willing to promote?

Commission – Each affiliate program will have its own unique commission structure. Some will give you a set percentage of sales, others a flat dollar amount. Pay attention to the percentage as well as how much money that will actually put in your pocket. Both numbers are important.

Cookie length – Most of these programs will use cookies to track your referrals so that if someone clicks through your link and then makes a purchase on that site a few days later, you can still get paid the commission. Some programs will track cookies for 10 days, some for 6 months.

What is required to constitute a sale? – This may be very simple, or it may be more complex. Most of the time a sale is pretty straightforward, but always read the conditions to make sure there are no important exclusions to what you will be paid for.

Are “lead” programs available? – CJ includes a number of programs where you can make money without the visitor even buying anything. For example, you can get paid if someone applies for a credit card, or if they fill out their information to be contacted about a mortgage. These programs can be very lucrative, and sometimes they’re easier to promote because of the fact that the visitor doesn’t have to buy anything.

Types of ads/creatives available – Each program will provide you with links and different types of ads (such as various sizes of banner ads) If you’re thinking of promoting a program this can make a big difference in your success.

Incentives – Some of the programs will pay higher commissions to affiliates that hit certain levels of sales. If you’re expecting to make a lot of sales this can be extra motivation.

Stats – CJ provides a little bar for each advertiser that shows how much they’ve paid out, called their “network earnings.” Those with higher earnings are producing more income for affiliates. They also provide 3 month EPC and 7 day EPC, which shows how much is earned per 100 clicks. In other words, if you send them 100 clicks to this program, on average you will make this amount.

Why This is Helpful?

Recently I have been researching an industry to see if it would be a good opportunity to start a profitable site. One of the best sources of information was the list of affiliates provided through CJ. Most of them I will never use even when I do start the site, but this proved to me that there is a wide variety of products and services, from many different companies. If there are this many affiliate programs in CJ alone, I know there are plenty of money-making opportunities within the niche. It was very quick and productive research.

Popularity: 19% [?]