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In today’s article, we’re going to take a close look at how to pinpoint the most profitable niches.

Affiliate marketing starts and ends with finding the right niche to market in. It’s pretty simple, really. You find a hotbed of buying activity and you plant yourself firmly there to market as many hot products as possible to a very active market of potential customers.

It’s worked for hundreds of marketers who have become very, very rich. But, let’s face it – when you’re getting started, nothing is ever quite that easy.

So, I want to delve deeper into the idea of niche research, along with the mistakes that so many of us tend to make over and over again. Because, when you can eliminate those mistakes, life gets much easier and the profits are more consistent.

The Niche Research No-Nos

First up, let’s take a closer look at what so many starting affiliate marketers do wrong. At the very top of the list, and something I’ve been preaching against for years is diversification. Of the super affiliates I’ve met, the vast majority (pretty much all of them, including myself), make their profits almost entirely from one or two niches.

Yup, that’s right, it’s exactly as it sounds. They spend hours a day working on just dog training, or just marriage advice or just weight loss. They find a profitable audience and they hit them up over and over again with different products, sites, and selling points.

Second, as you might have guessed, they stuck to the big niches – the evergreen ones that have always been solid money makers. Sure, they experiment a little bit, but only enough to check out other niches, not so much that they dilute their income from big one or two niches. Which niches are considered the “big niches”?

Weight loss, making money, satellite TV on PC, muscle gain, self help, anti-spyware, forex, and money online. People are always looking for new products in these niches, so you cannot cannibalize your sales, nor can you run out of warm leads. Of those niches, weight loss and fitness are the biggest across the board, with making money coming in at a close second.

Finding Your Niches and Products

Of course, just saying “try out the stuff that works” isn’t very helpful, so I want to go into a bit more detail on what you can promote and how to make your selection. Lucky for you, I have a couple of methods I like to use that have always been highly successful for me.

In terms of finding product ideas, I usually stick to Clickbank and Amazon. On occasion, I will also use Google to review possible affiliate networks in greater depth.

Amazon.com Research

Let’s start with Amazon.com. I start here because I want to first find a niche that has a large buying base. You can always find a product in Clickbank with high gravity, but even before that I want to identify the breadth of a potential audience first. You’ll see why very shortly.

To start with, visit Amazon.com and start reviewing products and topics in niches that you are interested in. This is very important, because you’ll be spending a lot of your time investing in that niche, especially if it becomes one of your big two niches.

So, be sure it’s something you’re willing to write about and market extensively for months to come. If you could care less about weight loss or are afraid of dogs, those might not be the best paths to success.

With that in mind, start searching on Amazon for books, products, and other niche products. Your goal here is to find products with at least 20 reviews. Why just 20 reviews?

Considering the fact that Amazon estimates only 1 in 1000 people actually review something they buy from their site, a product with 20 reviews is likely to have been purchased by at least 20,000 people – that’s a huge market, especially if it’s just one product in an information niche.

If you can find multiple products in the same niche that all have 20