profitable_affiliate_marketCan you tell me with 100% certainty that your affiliate market is going to be profitable?

Why Not? The amazing thing about internet marketing is that it’s not hard to predict how profitable any given market or niche can be.

In this post I’ll give you 3 steps to determine if you have a high potential site.

How to Pick a Profitable Affiliate Market

Step 1: Follow the Money

Before you make any other decision, you need to know there’s a way to get paid.

The good news is that this is true for almost every possible affiliate market you can imagine. You also don’t need to waste a lot of time digging up obscure programs or signing up for any offers you don’t need until your site is actually up and running.

Before you build your site, all you need to do is figure out what types of products are selling in your niche, and what some reasonable assumptions are about commission rates. Can you expect to earn 5% of a $20 product, 50% of a $100 product, or 20% of a recurring $50 product. What would each scenario mean for your business and required traffic and conversion rates? Read more on how to find affiliate product opportunities.

Step 2: Determine Potential Traffic

Once you know you can get paid, it’s time to make sure you can find the customers. Create a list of keywords and figure out what the monthly search volume is for each.

Exactly how much traffic you need depends on your goals for your business and your assumptions about conversion rates, which can vary greatly.

As a general rule of thumb: if I can’t find 100,000 monthly searches of keywords in less than 10 minutes, the topic probably isn’t right for me. Figuring out potential traffic from these searches is an entirely separate ball game.

Step 3: Evaluate Competition

Affiliate competition is not a bad thing. It can actually be a great indicator of success.

But, too much competition can make it incredibly hard to rank well for your target keywords, which can reduce your overall traffic potential. Finding that sweet spot in the middle is where you want to target your affiliate market.

Do a few searches for your top keywords and see what comes up. If all the results return big brand names and extremely professional looking sites, it might be hard to compete. If you can find a few spots on the first page that have small company blogs and personal sites, however, chances are you’re good to go. Read more on how to evaluate competition.

Decide On and Pursue Your Market

Each of these three steps can be done in just a few minutes. It’s what I call “napkin math,” because it’s unofficial and you should be able to do it on the back of a napkin.

The key is simply to get yourself to a point where you’re ready to get started on your site, confident that you can start earning money quickly. The most important steps is to then decide on your market and take action building your site.

If you need help getting going, I suggest you try the step by step beginners course offered by Wealthy Affiliate. It’s free and an excellent first step to building an affiliate business.