Finding a great affiliate niche that’s both low-competition and profitable can sometimes be like finding a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow – but it’s not impossible if you know what you’re doing.
In this article, I’ll show you three different ways to make it easier for you to find the perfect affiliate marketing niche – and as a bonus – I’ll provide some examples of tried and tested affiliate marketing niches.
What makes a good affiliate niche?
A good affiliate marketing niche has high paying affiliate marketers, high traffic potential, low competition, and it helps if it’s a topic that interests you.
That’s why it’s a good idea to consider these things when choosing an affiliate marketing niche.
- Traffic Potential — Ahrefs’ Traffic Potential shows the total organic traffic a page ranking #1 for your target keyword would receive from all the keywords it ranks for.
- Competition is low – With so many sites vying for the top spot on Google, if you’re lucky enough to choose an affiliate niche, you can pick the easiest battles – increasing your chances of winning.
- High Paying Affiliate Programs – Look for high paying affiliate programs that make your job easier. The higher the commission percentage, the fewer conversions you need to achieve.
- Topics You’re Interested In – Hopefully this goes without saying, but it really helps if you’re a subject matter expert in the area you’re writing about.
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Just looking for examples of affiliate marketing niches? Click here to jump to them .
If you’re lucky enough to find an affiliate marketing niche that covers all of these, then congratulations, you’ve made it. But what if you don’t know where to start?
Here are three different methods I use to identify good affiliate niches.
If you are new to the world of affiliate marketing, then it is best to start with the first two methods below.
However, if this isn’t your first attempt, you might want to skip to the third way of finding affiliate niches using affiliate program footprints, as it might help bring some new inspiration for affiliate niches you haven’t considered before.
1. Use keyword modifiers to find affiliate keywords (easy)
The easiest way to discover affiliate marketing niches is to look for the types of keywords commonly used by affiliate marketing websites, such as “reviews,” “best,” and “comparison.”
Since affiliates have strong commercial intentions, they often write articles around these topics using these keywords.
Here’s how publishers build these types of keywords into their article titles:
These keywords are called keyword modifiers – they provide more specificity to the original keyword.
Using Ahrefs’ Site Explorer, we can find all of these keywords in just a few clicks.
To do this:
- Enter the keyword you are interested in and click Search. I used "wireless headphones"
- Click on the Matching Words Report
- Add an Include filter and separate keyword modifiers with commas (e.g. "best", "cheapest", or "reviews")
- Click on any word , click "Apply", and then the results will be displayed
This will provide a list of mostly commercial keywords that you can target on your affiliate website.
Our example shows that the keywords “best” and “reviews” are the most popular keyword modifiers.
To learn more, click Best in the sidebar.
Now, let’s add a Keyword Difficulty (KD) filter with a range from 10 to 20 and click Apply .
Once we have done this, we will find that with a little effort we can explore some interesting sub-areas that have high traffic potential and low KD .
2. Use Flippa to find profitable markets (Medium)
If you’re focused on finding a profitable niche and want to see exactly what strategies have worked, a practical approach is to visit a site like Flippa and browse through recently sold items in the affiliate marketing category. I chose to focus on sites that run the Amazon affiliate marketing program because it’s one of the most widely used affiliate marketing programs in the world.
First, visit Flippa.com and click Amazon below the search bar.
Once you click on a search result, I’ll go ahead and personalize the sidebar filters in the following ways:
- Generate income – yes – (we need to make sure the niche makes money)
- Asset Type – Websites and Online Businesses – (There are many asset types to consider, but for simplicity, we’ll just focus on websites)
- Website Type – Blog – (We will focus our search on blogs)
- Ages — 0-3 years old — (We want to know what products have worked well recently, not well-known brands)
- Status – Recently Sold – (This means completed listings indicating they are good enough assets to be purchased)
You can personalize this if you want, but these have been the most successful for me in the past.
Once you are happy, click on “Apply Filters” – and you will get a list of Amazon affiliate sites.
After 30 seconds of searching, we found two different Amazon affiliate marketing niches that made a net profit of about $300 per month.
In theory, if we target one of these niches, we might be able to achieve similar profits. If these niches don’t appeal to you, keep looking until you find a suitable affiliate niche.
The next step is to check what you found on Flippa. This means running your site through Ahrefs’ Site Explorer, looking at the top pages and organic keywords reports, and doing an overall audit of your niche.
We know it makes money, but is the competition low enough? Does it still have traffic potential? These are the questions you need to ask yourself when running a website with Ahrefs.
If we run the term “pickleball” through Ahrefs Keywords Explorer, we can see that the seed term does have traffic potential , but is also very hard in terms of its keyword difficulty — meaning it might be difficult to rank for this exact keyword without a ton of high-authority links.
Even if the niche doesn’t look that promising from the outset, it’s worth diving deeper into the match terms report to find more concrete and actionable angles.
We can see that “best pickleball paddles” has a lower KD and higher TP ; its search trends are also increasing, and a quick Google search shows that this product costs around $250.
Amazon affiliate commissions for sports products are around 3%, you may want to consider other affiliate programs to get higher commission rates. A quick Google search will reveal other affiliate programs that offer around 10-30% commissions in this specific niche. This is more feasible.
3. Use Footprint to find affiliate sites (Advanced)
Another more advanced way to get inspiration for your next affiliate project is to reverse engineer common footprints in affiliate programs.
Side note.
In this case, a footprint is a snippet of text shared by multiple websites.
We’ve already mentioned Amazon Affiliates, so let’s continue with that topic. Here’s a real-life example of a typical Amazon disclosure:
This is the text that must be included on the website. If we strip it down to its most basic parts, it basically says: “Participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program.” We can use this sentence as our main content.
But to make it a little more interesting, we can add a filter that includes external links pointing to amazon.com or amzn.to. This helps identify sites that are actively using Amazon affiliate links, rather than just inactive sites with disclaimers.
We can then paste the following into Ahrefs’ Web Explorer 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 Amazon disclosures in their content and link to Amazon.com or amzn.to (short link version). I've added some additional filters below to narrow the search to the English headphone field, but again, you can enter any field you want - or even just browse the full 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 Keyword Explorer to dig deeper and vet that niche properly.
The benefit of this method is that you can find a lot of affiliate niches with just one search.
Web Explorer can also be used to identify any other footprints left by affiliate programs – so it’s not just limited to Amazon.
10 Examples of Profitable Affiliate Niches
Here are 10 examples from the world of affiliate marketing that you can get inspired by.
1. Vacuum cleaner
- Traffic potential – 58k
- Estimated Commission – Affiliates can earn 3-8% commission on vacuum cleaners priced between $50 and $1,000, making even a small number of sales very profitable.
- Key Players – Vacuum Cleaner Experts, Vacuum Testers, Popular Vacuum Cleaners, Clean Home World
2. Travel car seat
- Traffic potential – 28k
- Estimated commissions – Amazon offers a 3% commission on baby products, while other retailers like Walmart offer higher commissions. Programs like Saferide4kids.com, MiFold, and Wayb.com offer commissions up to 10%.
- Major players – Travel Car Seat Mom, Safe Convertible Car Seats, Safe Ride 4 Kids, Best Car Seat Hub
3. Golf
- Traffic potential – 35k
- Estimated Commissions – Affiliates can earn a 4% commission rate for promoting Amazon products, or receive higher commissions from golf specialty stores like The Indoor Golf Shop, Rain or Shine Golf, Callaway Golf, and GlobalGolf. Given the high cost of golf equipment, even lower commission rates can be very profitable.
- Major Players – Golfstead, The Left Rough, Golfer Logic, Golf Influence, Golfalot, MyGolfSpy
4. Earbuds and headphones
- Traffic potential – 20-26k
- Estimated commissions – Amazon offers a 3% commission on headphones, but Target, 1more, B&H Photo Video, Adorama, and Walmart offer higher commissions, up to 8%
- Key Players – Headphonesty, Headphones Pro Review, Headphonesaddict.com, Headphone Day
5. Guitar
- Traffic potential – 1.2 million
- Estimated commissions – Amazon offers a 3% commission on musical instruments. Other affiliate programs in the music and guitar space include Guitar Center (6% commission), MasterClass (25% commission), Thalos Capos (15-20% commission), and Guitar Tricks ($25-30 per sale).
- Key Players – Guitar Space, Guitar Magazine, Guitar Pick Review, Your Brain on Guitar
6. Carpentry
- Traffic Potential – 3.9k
- Estimated commissions – Amazon offers commissions ranging from 1% to 10% for tool and other retailers such as Home Depot, Highland Woodworking, Hardware World and KC Tool
- Major players – Wood And Shop, Build Eazy, Blacktail Studio, Wood Improve
7. Car audio equipment
- Traffic Potential – 41k
- Estimated commission – Scosche or Second Skin Audio. Commission rates range from 4% (Amazon, Walmart, DS18 Audio) to higher rates like 10% (Second Skin Audio) and 8% (Scosche).
- Major players – Car Audio Now, Bass Head Speakers, Car Audio Wise, Car Audio Lovers
8. Sustainability and zero waste
- Traffic potential – 1-5k
- Estimated commissions – Earth Hero (5%-8%), Etee (20%), JungleCulture (12%-16%), Zero Waste Store (10%), GreenUp (5%-10%), Who Gives A Crap (up to 12%), Cloudpaper (10%)
- Major players – The Good Trade, Sustainable Jungle, Going Zero Waste, Green Citizen, Zero Waste Memoirs
9. Gardening
- Traffic Potential – 1.4k
- Estimated commissions – Commissions range from 3% for Amazon to 25% for Seeds Now
- Major players - Bigger Garden, Gardenery, Garden Beast, Joe Gardener
10. Hotels with Jacuzzis
- Traffic potential – 500
- Expected commissions – 5%-50% through programs like Agoda, TripAdvisor and Kayak
- Key factors – room bathtubs, great romantic getaways, hotels with hot tubs in rooms
Final Thoughts
Finding an affiliate marketing niche is easy, but finding a great niche (one that ticks all the boxes) usually requires careful research.
Luckily, you can use Ahrefs to check your affiliate marketing niche ideas, which means you don’t waste time and money on low-quality affiliate marketing niches.
Have questions? Leave a comment below.
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