Affiliate Marketing 2: Choosing A Topic

about
It’s best to base your affiliate marketing business on a subject that interests you – preferably on something you’re passionate about. It helps if it’s something that many other people are passionate about as well.

Here are some questions to help you choose a topic you could use as the basis of your website:

  • What are your hobbies and interests?
  • Are you a member of any clubs or societies?
  • What sports do you play?
  • Are you an expert at something?
  • Is there a subject you feel passionate about?
  • What work experience do you have?

Go to About.com and look through their list of topics. Write down the ones you find really interesting.

Once you have a short-list of 10 or so topics, you need to find out if other people are also interested in any of them.

To do this, you can use a keyword research tool.  Go to Google’s free Keyword Tool at https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal and try it out.

Choose a geographical region first, then type in a keyword (or a keyword phrase) and click on “Get Keyword Ideas”. Google shows you the approximate number of searches for that keyword per month.

googlekeyword1

In this example, I’ve selected “All Countries and Territories” and typed in “action figures”.

Here are some of Google’s keyword suggestions:

googlekeyword2

You can change the sort order of the columns by clicking on the column heading.

googlekeyword3

googlekeyword4With over 7 million searches a month for “action figure” and “action figures”, there is certainly a high level of demand.

Brand names and categories
You’ll start to see brand names and other categories emerge. Write these down. For example, the list for the “action figures” keywords could look like this:

star wars action figures
transformers action figures
gi joe action figures
wrestling action figures
batman action figures
marvel action figures

and so on. You’ll be building a product page for each of these categories.

It’s difficult to say how many searches a month are needed for a market to be worth entering. If the broadest keyword which describes the market has a million searches a month or more, that’s a good starting point. For categories within a market, I would look for at least 5,000 searches a month.

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