3 Niches You Can Enter Now to Make Money Online!

One of the most common questions you get from new Affiliates is “What niches can I make money in?”.  The ones that don’t ask about a niche or industry usually end up creating a banner farm (i.e. an online shopping mall) or try to start a coupon site.  Banner farms rarely ever work and if you try to enter into coupon sites, you have a million competitors and it is going to be very hard to compete.  So what do you do?  You go the other route and find a niche.  But how do you find a niche that has room, isn’t crowded and had room for new sites to enter?

In this post I’ll walk you through some of the things that you can look at when entering into a new niche and I go over 3 niches that you can enter in today with a great shot at making money.  I share the reasons why I think it is a good niche, ways to set up sites and some other hints specific for each one.  (I also add shameless plugs for a couple of my clients if there is a good fit for an Affiliate Program).

If you work on your sites and build them out with quality content and build solid and content relevant backlinks to them, these are ones that I honestly believe you can start making money with organically, through PPC and Social Media.

Why Ceiling Tiles Are a Perfect Niche for Affiliates to Make Money.

Ceiling Tiles (here is a program I manage with lifetime cookies and phone tracking).

When this Merchant first came to me I wasn’t sure if it would be a fit.  What I didn’t realize is that there is actually a large search volume (especially on long tail keywords) for ceiling tiles.  There is a very large growing demand with home improvement TV shows using them everywhere from kitchens to mancaves, bedrooms and even outside as accent walls.  There are always new restaurants opening, hotels, bars, office buildings and construction which means people are always looking for ceiling tiles and the orders can be huge.  Besides that, here are some of the selling points on why this is an awesome and easy niche to enter right now.

• Decorative ceiling tiles aren’t usually available in stores (including big box retailers) so many people and companies have to go online to shop making it a perfect Affiliate niche.  If you cannot buy it retail and it has to be purchased online, the sales occur online (sometimes over the phone) meaning you have a better chance at keeping the conversion through a shopping cart, even when people are just researching.
• Sites that rank for some of the high volume terms or high AOV terms like copper tiles are not well optimized for SEO so you can easily move in and start getting their traffic and sales.
• There are a ton of urls still available including exact match domains and brandable domains.
• They can be a fit within many niches including DIY, Home Decor, Interior Design, Photography, Wedding and more.
• There is a ton of long tail search which is also good for PPC since there is little to no competition on longtail PPC.

This is a huge and opened market that is ready for anyone at almost any experience level to jump into.  It’ll take some work writing unique content and building links, but the profits can be huge with this one.  Read my Blogging 101 post for info on how I would do it.

How to Make Money as a Wine Affiliate.

Wine is a very competitive niche, including wine reviews, cooking, etc… are very hard to move into.  What isn’t hard to compete with are cocktail recipes that use wine and variations of classic wine or liquor drinks thanks to sites like Pinterest.  Although you can make money with adsense and banner space for the content, using Affiliate links for monetizing them can be very easy.  Think about impulse buys, cool accessories or supplies needed to make the drinks.  You would make money off of the complimentary products and impulse buys.

Here are a couple of ways to set up sites and then some ideas to help you find products to use to make money with them.

Wine site 1 – Create categories for seasons and then red, white and champagne cocktails that match them.  The next categories in the architecture can break out by the types of liquors, mixers or occasions to serve them at within those seasons.  You can now create cocktail recipes that use wine and also pair them with events, parties and themes.  Once you find winos that like your ideas, building a following should be simple.  There are also not many well optimized pages for these types of recipes and if you take great photos of them and optimize the images well, you can fairly easily get a lot of Social Media traffic.

Wine site 2 – Find popular vacation spots like beaches, parks and other tourist destinations.  Map out the liquor stores that sell wines as well as the places that sell mixers and what times of the year they are opened.  The next thing to do is to find out what local fruits or foods are popular and create drink recipes with them and show people where they can pick everything up.  You can also create wine drinks that match the local foods.  Now you have created a fun resource that you can monetize with hotel reservations, travel supplies and also wine accessories.  You can also use images if you make the foods and drinks to drive traffic from Social Media sites like in the other example wine site.

Once you have your site set up, think about things that people don’t know about that can be impulse buys and also add value to the post.  You have products that can chill wine and numerous options to promote them.   There are manufacturers, party supply stores and comparison sites.  One product I love (I am using my Amazon Affiliate Link for it) are Corkcicles.

Corckcicles are impulse products that look cool, are useful to a wino and reasonably priced so they can be an awesome gift, random purchase and something people may not think twice about buying.  Here are some of the advantages and ways to choose which way to promote these products.

Manufacturer’s site – (Quick side note:  The Corkcicles program is managed by my friend Mike Nunez and can be found on CJ.  Mike has always been very responsive when I needed something and always delivered creative when I needed it.  Click here to join the manufacturer’s program).  The benefit of promoting a single product through the manufacturer site is that the site is built around the product, the media coverage and the uses of it.  This can help generate more ideas, uses and trust for the product which may help to convert sales if it is for a single product and you want the quick and easy impulse buy.

Retailers or Vendors that Carry the Product – This is a new client of mine (announcement coming soon) that carries corkcicles.  If you write about planning a party, needing supplies to go along with the wine dish or ways to have fun at the beach, you can create product grids with the products like corkcicles or even use a product link from it and write underneath that they can purchase the product with the rest of their party supplies in one place at one time to save time, money, etc…

Comparison Shopping Sites – One other option is to promote these products through a price comparison site.  If your copy is all about the product and not about a party, event or how to use it, then you may want to choose a site like Amazon or show multiple vendors that carry the product with the current prices at each including the manufacturer and a few retailers that carry the product.

There are a ton of ways to promote the product so think about which is the right one for your type of site.  If it is all about an impulse buy, try the manufacturer’s site so people don’t lose focus, but make sure there is a clear sales path you can use.  If deep linking is allowed you can bypass branding and get into the actual path.  If you are including it as part of a post, you may want to try a vendor.  If it is an impulse buy or about the product and you want to help your audience find a good deal, try using a price comparison with the manufacturer, retailers and possibly a comparison site or market place.

PowerPoint and Prezi Templates Are an Awesome Affiliate Niche Right Now!

Here is a program I manage that is brand new and about to make a large announcement.  This one sounds weird but the market is giant, there is a huge amount of long tail available.  The longtail PPC is cheap and can convert very well.  Everyone from public speakers to in-house employees from every department in a company give presentations during quarterly meetings at some point and many look online for designs or design ideas.

You also have PTA members, investors, entrepreneurs, students, professors, caterers, interior designers, banquet halls and event studios, hotels and thousands of other professionals that give presentations daily, have to display images within their properties, provide resources for guests or customers that use templates and also professionals that give presentations at tradeshows or even internally to their own teams in strategy meetings, etc…

Many of these people look for designs outside of what is available inside the presentation software and because services like the one whose program I manage always add new and updated designs giving them new options.  Besides having constant updates being made available vs. a template package you can buy at a store, there are numerous other reasons this is a great niche for Affiliates to make money with.

• Instant Gratification – Because you can purchase unlimited downloads or a single design and download it instantly, you don’t have to go to the store, install software and can start instantly with the one you want.
• Saving Time – If someone is in a rush or has to give a presentation soon, they may not have time to go to a store to buy a package of designs.  With this program they can easily log in, download whatever they need and be ready to go with a professional design, charts and graphs that match and not have to spend time going to the store, finding parking, waiting in line at a checkout, etc…  Instead they can start on their content and finish on time.
• It can fit into any type of site – Mommy bloggers can use it as a way for their kids to give better presentations at school or for a way to stand out at a neighborhood association or PTA meeting, any site or blog dedicated to an industry or job like marketing, sales, accounting, etc… can talk about slides for presentations they have to give inside a company and any site about giving presentations at tradeshows or events, to investors or potential clients can talk about what is important to include on a slide and what makes an effective one for their cause.
• Little to no competition online – There is a decent amount of competition for single word terms, but when you get to niche slide designs or for long tail keywords, there is almost none.  Because the commissions are high and there is a lot of long tail in the form of questions, writing posts to answer these questions can easily rank in the search engines and help to build quality traffic looking for a resource.  Because the templates are the actual resource or a complimentary product to the content, this makes them an easy sell.

There are a ton of ways to make money online still and numerous niches you can enter right now that do not have much competition in the search engines which is normally good news for an Affiliate.  Think about what group of people within those niches need a resource that doesn’t exist or isn’t done well, what has little to no competition and if the products aren’t available in stores so people have to shop online.  There is a ton of room to make money online and these are three niches I think have a huge opportunity for Affiliates to make a ton of money in right now.

Photos purchased from Deposit Photos.