Are you just starting out as an affiliate marketer and wondering if you should pick a niche that is broad or narrow?
If you are questioning this, then you are not alone. Whenever affiliates are just starting out, or questioning the direction they already took, they start wondering if a broad or narrow niche is the best way to go.
This is actually one of the most common concerns that many affiliate marketers have and it can cause a lot of confusion. There’s actually no right or wrong answer, but you have to know how to tackle the two different strategies.
If you go with a broad niche, it means you have to have fantastic organization of the sub-niches. It’s very possible to do, but it will take time to rank well in the search engines for the broad spectrum of topics.
However, you will likely never run out of content ideas when you choose a broad niche.
So let’s say you decided to tackle the children’s toy niche. You could have a general toy site, but you’d still need to organize the content into things like toys based on age, gender, materials, brands, indoor versus outdoor, etc.
This is not hard to do, especially if you set up your categories accordingly and make it easy for your visitors to locate information on a particular topic.
Or, you could go with a narrow approach in your niche. This makes it really easy for you to rank quicker with an authority site. For example, a website about toys for 1 year old girls, that is fully focused on toys for this age and gender, would probably become an authority site rapidly for those searching for that topic.
The biggest and most common problem though with choosing a narrow niche is that you will run out of content ideas. It can also get very boring writing about the same thing, so this is something to keep in mind.
Either way you choose – broad or narrow – you can work your way back over time. So if you choose a broad niche, you can work over time to dig into the narrow levels and provide expertise there for your affiliate income.
If you choose a narrow niche, like the one listed above, you could branch out and create a bunch of narrow sites and then eventually link them to a main site. For example, you could create a website for 7 year olds, 13 year olds, etc. Once complete, you could then create a main toys for girls website that linked them all together.
This would be a very time consuming approach though and you would be juggling so many websites and have to maintain all of those websites. It would actually be a lot more efficient to have one website and have multiple categories instead.
Don’t worry if you’ve started out the wrong way because eventually, your goal is to have complete domination in a niche. You have to look at this from a long-term perspective, not what will help you make the most amount of money in 30 days.
This is not a get rich quick endeavor anyway, which is something you need to keep in mind.
The great thing about both broad or narrow niches is that you can search for keywords that will help guide you in the type of content that you want to create.
Over time, you may want to move from free keyword tools to the paid versions that give you more information about the kind of edge you can expect to have over the competition if you rank well for them.
The online business community that I belong to actually offers a free keyword tool with their Premium membership and they also offer upgraded versions of that keyword tool.
Pick whichever strategy you feel more comfortable with right now – broad or narrow – and then if you want to move into a new direction, you can do that without any problems down the road.
You are the one calling the shots and can decide what direction you want to take your website long-term.