Finding niches can be challenging sometimes when you run out of ideas outside of your own personal hobbies. By thinking a little bit outside the box, you can leverage your online marketing skills to uncover some rather interesting niches. My personal favorite way to do this is by using Google advanced search operators to find recent forum threads where people publicly share their latest purchase. Let’s learn how to do this…
Keep in mind that you’ll have to sift through a few forums and pages to find something good. The good news is that these threads exist left and right and are constantly updated. The bad news is that you’ll still need to find a proper affiliate program but at the very least almost everything you find can be most likely affiliated through Amazon.
Head over to Google and type in “latest purchase” in quotes. You can even go more specific by searching for niche + “latest purchase”. You’ll see the results have a mixture of random sites so dial it in by selecting ‘Discussions’ under ‘More’. Discussions will include groups like Google Groups and Yahoo Answers sometimes so filter it again by selecting ‘Forums’ under ‘All Discussions’ which is under ‘Search Tools’. The last thing you’ll need to do is filter the results so it’s a little more recent. I like doing ‘Past Month’ under ‘Any Time’ which is under ‘Search Tools’ again.
You can also click on the link below to have all the filters above applied: https://www.google.com/search?q=%22latest+purchase%22&tbm=dsc&tbs=dtf:f,qdr:m
To dissect the search query URL, here are what each parameter means: tbm=dsc filters for discussions results. tbs=dtf:f filters for forums only. qdr:m filters for the past month.
You’ll be now blessed with dozens of forums with literally hundreds of pages where members proudly show off their latest purchase as you can see below. Some threads in the results are over 1,000 pages of latest purchases!
Let’s just click on one of these threads to see what we can find. You may need to register on the forum first to view threads, pictures, or attachments but that should only take a few seconds anyway. I clicked on the bodybuilding.com link and went back 5 pages (285 of 290) and came across something I had never thought of before: a coffee grinder.
It piqued my interest so I went over to Google’s handy Keyword Tool (enjoy it while it lasts), and put in that root keyword to see what kind of volume it gets on exact match but also what other variations could come out of it. It turns out there’s over 12,000 searches a month for ‘coffee grinder’. Who would of thought?
I’m not interested in the broad keyword like ‘coffee grinder’ but rather MONEY keywords like ‘best coffee grinder’ or ‘coffee grinder reviews’ with very high commercial search intent. The next thing I’d recommend is checking out the competition. You can use the tool of your choice but for simplicity I’ll just use Market Samurai since I have a license. You can compete for almost any keyword if you spend the time. The competition doesn’t look too difficult so don’t let this scare you.
I also want to make sure this is worthwhile promoting to ensure a good return on investment. To calculate this I want to see what the average cost of the product is. Anything above $100 I would consider very good. However, this product retails from $15 to $100 or so.
If we try to target ‘best coffee grinder’ which gets 2400 searches a month roughly, that’ll give us about 960 visitors if we are #1 (40% of clicks) for that keyword excluding any long tail traffic. Let’s say 50% of people click through to our Amazon affiliate link which is 480 clicks but only 25% (120 people) buy a $50 coffee grinder. Amazon starts their commission at 6% so roughly $3 commission on a $50 product. You could potentially earn $360 in a month.
As you can see, your mileage may vary but the bottom line is you should never have an excuse that you can’t think of any niches. I personally recommend going after niches you know best as it makes the process a bit more enjoyable but if you’re struggling to think of a niche or want to challenge yourself with something totally new, give my method a try and let me know how it goes!
