How to Find the Best Niche for Affiliate Marketing (5 Simple Steps)

You've probably heard this a hundred times. Pick a niche you're passionate about. And while that sounds like good advice, it's also the fastest way to waste months making content no one searches for or promoting products with razor thin commissions. If you want to make affiliate marketing content that actually makes money, you need more than just passion. You need proof. That's why I created the NicheFinder Workbook, a free customuilt spreadsheet that helps you find your ideal affiliate niche using real data, not guesswork. And in this video, I'll walk you through how to use this workbook in five simple steps. First, we'll brainstorm your topic ideas. Then, we'll check Google Trends to see if they're growing or dying. After that, I'll show you how to evaluate search traffic and competition using Semrush. In step four, we'll research earning potential by looking at real affiliate programs. And finally, we'll use the spreadsheet scoring system to reveal your best niche ranked by data. This method is fast, beginnerfriendly, and by the end, you'll know exactly what niche to build around. Let's start by copying the spreadsheet and getting everything set up. Go ahead and click on the link in the video description below to open up the niche research workbook. When the page loads, you'll see this view here. Go ahead and click the use template button at the top right to copy the template to your own Google account. Let's take a quick tour of what we're going to work on today. Here's a welcome page that has a little bit of information about what we're going to do and how to start the next step. And then at the bottom, we have steps 1 through five as different tables with different methodologies we're going to use to determine what the best top three opportunities are for your niche. So, let's go back to step one and get started. Here on the tab for step one, we're going to brainstorm topics for your potential niche. I would say the best way to approach this is to think about five to 10 things that you're interested in or enjoy talking about or would like to learn more about. Go ahead and fill in each of these orange cells. Generally, one to two words is good for a broad topic. For example, I might say home brewing or personal finance, maybe even home fitness. Go ahead and fill in the rest of the cells here. Here you can see I filled out each of these 10 cells with 10 different topics that sound interesting to me. Once you've done this, go ahead and click on step two, trend score calculator in the bottom of sheet. Here on the tab for step two, you'll notice that all of your topics have been pulled in on the left side. In this step, we're going to analyze the trends over time using Google Trends. Go ahead and click the Google Trends link up top to get started. Google Trends will open up in a new tab here. Go back to your workbook in the first tab. Single click on your first topic and then command C or control C to copy it. Go back to the Google Trends tab. Paste in your keyword and select the first option it gives you if there's an autocorrect there. I recommend changing the region to the region that you would like to target with whatever content you create. So, if you're targeting people worldwide, you can leave it set to worldwide. Otherwise, you can set it to your country. In my case, I'll set it to the United States. After selecting the region, the next thing we want to do is make sure our time range is set to the past 12 months. It is, so we're good to go there. Next, we want to find the score for the lowest moment of interest over the last year. The highest moment is almost always 100. And the lowest moment here, as you can see on the chart, is 29. Remembering the number 29, let's go back to our workbook and enter the score 29 for the one-year low. Next, we want to find the 5-year low. So, again, let's go back to the Google Trends page. And now, let's change our time range from past 12 months to the past five years. This is a little harder to take a look at because there's a lot more movement, but it seems to me that the lowest moment is right here in November of 2024 with a score of 12. So, let's go back to our worksheet and enter 12 in for our score. The final piece of information we need for this topic is the 5-year trend direction. And if you click the drop down, you can see there are five options. Here are the five major trend types you'll encounter as you do your research. The first type is upward. These start generally low on the left and end high. This is a really clear example of that. Next, you have downward trends. They start high and end low. You can see here it starts around the 100 mark and ends close to the 17 territory. This is a sideways flat chart. And while it's not literally flat, there is some movement to it. It's mostly flat with no major spikes. The highest that any chart can be is 100. And half of 100 in terms of search volume is 50. This has a lowest score of 57, which means there's not a big range there in trend volume. So, it's pretty consistent throughout this 5-year period. Another sideways type of trend is sideways cyclical. This is where there's a repeating regular up and down pattern or just a clear recurring pattern. Here you can see this is the search for gardening which spikes every spring and then declines after that. And lastly, we have sideways random spikes. This is when there are dramatic spikes in search volume, but there's no clear recurring pattern. It's just generally going sideways and occasionally spiking pretty dramatically. As you do your research, you might find pretty clear examples of these, or you might also find charts that don't really fall neatly into any of these clear trend patterns. That's okay. Just select the pattern that's closest to what you found. Let's go back to the Google Trends tab and see which one this is. To me, this clearly looks like a downward trend where the highest moment of interest was early in the chart five years ago and then the lowest moment of interest is within the last year. So, let's go ahead and mark this as a downward trend. Go through and follow this process for all of your topics to get a trend score for each of them. Once you've gathered your data from Google Trends, each topic on your sheet will have a topic trend score. This gives you a quick snapshot of how healthy or promising each trend is. Green scores highlight hot niche opportunities. These topics are either growing, stable, or show strong potential. Yellow scores mean the niche is still viable but might need more strategic marketing or targeting. Red scores indicate topics that are either declining or just too unstable to rely on. For affiliate marketing, we're looking for topics that are stable or growing. Those are the ones that are most likely to bring in consistent traffic over time. So, now that we've got a sense of trend health, let's move on to the second part of our three-part scoring system, search, traffic, opportunity. This next step looks at things like how hard it is to rank on Google and how many people are searching for each topic every month. Click on the step three tab at the bottom of the sheet to continue. To get the data we need for this next step, monthly search volume and how hard it is to rank, we'll be using Semrush. It's a powerful SEO tool that shows you how often people search for a keyword, how competitive it is, and what kind of content is already ranking on Google, which is super helpful for spotting real opportunities in your niche. Samrush usually offers a 7-day free trial, but I've got an exclusive link in the video description and in the spreadsheet that gives you a 14-day trial instead. So, if you haven't already, go ahead and sign up through that link, and we'll jump into the next step together. Once you're on the Seamrush dashboard, open the keyword overview tool in the left sidebar. Then go back to your spreadsheet. You can click the first cell and then hold shift as you click the last cell. Then on Mac, command C to copy or on Windows control C to copy. Then go back to Seamrush and commandV to paste in all the keywords in the list. Hit search. Next, you'll see that we have this bulk keyword analysis results page. We want to take the key stats from this results page and plug them into the keyword overview results section of the sheet. The key stats we want to grab are the intent volume, KD percentage or keyword difficulty percentage, and CPC, which stands for cost per click. You'll notice this list isn't in the same order as it was in our sheet. By default, it organizes it high to low by search volume. So, be careful of that. I'll do one of these keywords with you. So here we have hiking that has an intent that is informational and commercial. So we'll go back to our sheet, find hiking and change the intent toformational and commercial. Let's find our topic keyword volume. Then here we have 135,000. So we'll write that in here. Next, we need our topic keyword KD percentage, which is right here. KD is 86. Then last, we need our topic keyword CPC, 2.48 for hiking. Take some time and do this for each topic on your list. It'll take a little while, but once you're done, then we'll move on to the next step. Here's what it looks like once you've gathered all of the keyword overview results. Once you've finished gathering stats from the keyword overview results page, let's head to the keyword magic tool in Semrush in the left side navbar. It'll already autopop populate the first keyword from the list, which is home brewing in my case. Next, let's change the intent filter right here to only display commercial and transactional keywords. You'll have to hit apply and you'll get a whole bunch of results here, but we're going to ignore these for now. What we care about at this moment for our scoring system is this summary. We have all keywords, total volume, and the average keyword difficulty of all the keywords. So, let's grab the number for the total number of keywords here, 386. And we'll go over to homebrew. Put that in 386. We want the total volume, which is 73,800. And lastly, we'll need the keyword difficulty, which is 25%. The next keyword on my list is personal finance. So, I'll go back to Semrush, and then we'll type in personal finance in the top search bar. And you'll notice the filters stay selected for intent. So now we just have to grab our statistics and copy them into our sheet. Go ahead and repeat this process for every keyword topic on your list. I'll admit it's a little repetitive, but once you get the rhythm, it goes pretty fast. And when you're done, you'll have a traffic opportunity score for each topic colorcoded just like the trend score from earlier. Here you can see my traffic opportunity score. Green means there's strong volume, good intent, and manageable competition, which is a great opportunity. Yellow is still viable, but might need smarter targeting or more effort to rank. And red means low traffic, unclear intent, or high competition, which is not the best use of your time. So now we've got two/ird of our system. We know what's trending, and we know how people are searching for it. So now it's time to bring all of it together with the third piece, earning potential. Because even if something is trending and has great search traffic, it still needs to pay off. So, in this next step, we'll look at how much you can potentially earn from affiliate programs in each niche. Click on the step four tab at the bottom of your spreadsheet, and let's see which topics actually have the potential to make you money. You've seen which topics are trending and getting traffic, but not all traffic pays the same. Some niches have highaying affiliate programs, and others, well, not so much. So, in this step, you'll estimate how much you could actually earn from each topic based on the types of products they promote. It's quick. It's mostly just drop downs and it'll help you focus on the ideas that are most likely to make money. Filling out the step four tab is a little more free form than the earlier steps. You'll need to do a bit of googling to get your answers, but don't worry, I'll walk you through it. For each topic, you'll choose the type of product you'd likely promote, the typical price range for those products, the usual affiliate payout structure, and the estimated commission per sale. Since these are topics you're already interested in, you might have a good sense of what kind of products you'd promote and how much they typically cost. But if not, here's how I'd go about finding that information. Start by googling your topic. I'll start with home brewing here. If the shopping tab appears at the top of the search results, click it to get a sense of what kind of products show up and who's selling them. For example, when I searched for home brewing, I see listings from Amazon, Home Depot, Northern Brewer, and more beer. Take note of the general price range and what types of products are being offered. And then back on the spreadsheet, select the closest product type and price range from the drop downs. If the shopping tab doesn't appear at the top when you do your topic search, just scroll through the regular search results. Look for product listings, courses, books, or even blog recommendations. For example, if I search for personal finance, I see Con Academy, Amazon, and a bunch of blog posts recommending budgeting apps and courses and that sort of thing. Once you've identified a few products, it's time to check if those companies offer affiliate programs. For the home brewing example, I'll Google Amazon affiliate program, and sure enough, they have one. If the commission rates aren't clearly listed on the signup page or FAQ, like they don't appear to be here, try searching for the company name and add affiliate commission rates to the search. And here I was able to find a different page on Amazon's website with a table that has a list of the product categories and the fixed commission income rates for each category. This gives me a really solid idea of their payout model for the products that I would be recommending. You can repeat this for the other companies like Northern Brewer or More Beer to compare and see which ones offer better commissions or if any offer recurring payouts. There's no one-sizefits-all approach here, so bring your best Google food and internet solely skills. The goal is to find a realistic payout type and a ballpark estimate commission for each topic. Don't stress about getting this perfect. You just need a rough idea of the earning potential for each topic for this exercise. One other search you can try is just simply to type in your topic and then add affiliate program to the search. Here you might get some blogs that offer you clear lists of what the affiliate program options are for you as well as commission rate and who the companies are that offer the best commissions. Once you've filled out all four drop downs, your earning score will show up automatically. And just like the last two steps, the color coding makes it easy to read at a glance. Green means there's a strong earning potential with high prices, generous commissions, or recurring payouts. Yellow suggests moderate potential. It might be worth pursuing with the right strategy, but be careful. And red means there's limited earning potential, low prices, small commissions, or unclear payout terms. Now that you've completed this sheet, you've got all three parts of the scoring system: trend health, traffic potential, and earning opportunity. So, let's bring it all together. Now, click on the step five tab at the bottom of the page to see your final opportunity score and get your top three topics ranked automatically. You've just scored all your niche ideas across trend strength, search traffic, and earning potential. Seriously, nice work. This puts you ahead of the majority of people who never validate their ideas before diving in. Now, at this point, don't just go with the highest number. Choose a topic that scores well and genuinely excites you. That's the combo that will keep you motivated longterm. At this point, I'd love for you to drop your niche in the comments. I read every single comment, and it's really cool to see what people pick. And now comes the fun part, building your affiliate marketing website. In the next video, I'll show you exactly how to set everything up from choosing a domain and launching your site with Hostinger to installing WordPress, picking a clean theme, and publishing your first article. If you've never built a website before, don't worry. I'll walk you through the whole thing step by step and by the end you'll have your website live and ready to start earning money. Click the video on the screen to get started and I'll see you