Defining My Next Affiliate Website Topic

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This past week I have been using all of my “out of 9-5 and family” time to try to find a new idea for what will be my next website. I already had a list of possible topics in mind but I wanted to define which one will be both interesting and rewarding.

Here are in short the points I made sure to investigate for each possible topic :

Keywords With Potential: Because I don’t have the time to spend a crazy amount of time doing promotion online (you know all the social networking stuff), I have to rely heavily on organic searches (natural - without paying) to bring traffic to my websites :
- the tools I used are Keyword Elite, WordTracker (15% off promo in December by the way). These tools helped me to find out if there is enough natural traffic in the markets I explored. Also they can provide huge lists of keywords and can reveal some possible sub-niches to tap in the future.
- Also, I like to check my ideas using Google Trend. This Google tool is fun, and I like to use it to compare the volume of searches between 2 niches.
- I like to quickly do a search on Yahoo Answers to find out if people have an interest in the market and what kind of questions they ask : very informative sometimes

Products To Sell : Because I hope to turn my future search engine traffic into sweet rewards, I make sure that the niche I am after has indeed lots of products that could be bought online :
- Ebay and Amazon are the places to go for this kind of investigation. I just do a little search there and take note of “physical” products that would be a fit for my future website niche.
- Also I like to see if there are current bids (for ebay) and reviews (for amazon) for the products I found that are related to the market of study : products + bids or reviews = in high demand market.

Affiliate Programs :
- The existence of several affiliate programs fitting the target market is also a must have. I usually check the big affiliate networks (commission junction, linkshare). Electronic products are more and more bought online, I go check if there are any e-books available for sale on the Clickbank marketplace.
- A google search for “[product] affiliate” reveals sometimes good companies to affiliate with.

My Interest & Content : Because I want to keep these websites for the longterm, it is important for me to choose niches in which I have an interest. When creating the website, it’s important to me that I bring the visitors valuable information, so I keep this paramount when I have the content created.

Well, that’s basically what I did all this week (a few hours per day). I found my next internet adventure ;). Who knows what the future holds for me? I don’t but at least I did the homework and whatever the issue, I always learn something in the process.

You, my reader, are you a 100% “blogger”, an affiliate marketer or a mix of the two ?
How do you search for niches ?