Usually, when you get a stylish haircut that makes you even more beautiful or try out a new workout plan that makes you even fitter, you would recommend a specialist or an app to anyone you know, mostly even without them asking to:). Ego or guilty pleasure? Rather an affiliate marketing — just the offline old-school one and most likely commission-free.
With evolvent of technologies, affiliate marketing became much more accessible and payable and changed its format. Nowadays, it is great hype. When you have a popular website, blog, or social media account (TikTok and Pinterest included), you can continue referring people to products or services, just digitally and for money. And the beauty of the deal is that you do not have to deliver, develop, manufacture or support anything. You don’t have to be an industry influencer either. All you need to do is get people to visit the advertiser’s website through your custom link.
If done correctly, this low-to-no-cost business effort can shift from a side hustle to a viable online income stream. According to Statista, the affiliate marketing sector is worth around $8.2 billion today, which is huge. And to get the part from that pie, you just need to choose the best niche for affiliate marketing which is both profitable and lucrative.
What is an affiliate marketing niche?
Unless you’re Amazon or eBay, it would be wise to focus your affiliate marketing efforts on something specific. It means that it’s a good idea to tailor your blog or website to a limited number of topics. Can you imagine the reaction of your subscribers who expect to get another portion of free printables with preschool activities for their toddlers, and you send a newsletter explaining what blockchain is?
Well, you might be passionate about both topics, but that won’t probably be the case for most of your readers. Too much diversity on a blog can make your readers feel they are in the wrong place. But you don’t need to change your preference; just consider creating two separate websites for both topics.
So, a niche, a specialized segment of the market, in affiliate marketing implies that you promote a narrow group of affiliate products through specific customers. Specific means those who share identical characteristics, have the exact needs, preferences, and demographics, and are ready to pay an equal price.
What is the best niche for affiliate marketing?
A board niche includes smaller sub-niches and even tiny micro-niches. For example, a broad healthcare niche comprises fitness, weight loss, haircare, skincare, etc. And if you choose skin home remedies for women under 40, it is already a micro-niche. Choice of the niche (broad, sub-niche, or a micro one) influences the number of visitors and conversion rate, as shown in the picture.
In TLDR look, the best niche for affiliate marketing in 2023 are:
- Technology
- Wealth Building
- Health and Fitness
- Fashion and Beauty
- Lifestyle
- Hobby
- Pet Care
- Travel
This list is handy if you want to start your blog or website and are looking for ideas and inspiration to start making money through affiliate marketing right away.
But before we deep-dive into details about each niche, let’s understand why it is so important and how to choose a niche.
Why choose a specific niche for affiliate marketing?
There are several reasons why getting focused on a specific niche, both a macro-niche and a micro-niche, is a good idea. Even more, it’s a key to making money in the affiliate marketing business.
- Well-defined target audience
You can’t chase all customers in the world and be successful. Working with a specific niche helps you better define your audience, their demographics, geography, interests, preferences, and buying habits. The more segmented and learned your audience is, the better chances you’ll turn your visitors into loyal customers.
- Strategy and planning
Affiliate marketing can turn into a full-time business that generates decent profit and therefore requires strategic planning. If you work with a specific niche, you don’t need to brainstorm a new topic every time. You can create a content plan aligned with your strategic goal and follow it.
- Better SEO
The Internet has always been busy and noisy. People practically never step off the first page in Google search results. That’s why you need to make sure that your website can be easily found on that first page. It’s possible with a solid strategy and SEO content plan.
For example, If you publish an article on your geek blog about data integration tools, Google will rank it high within a few days because your blog is a subject matter blog. And oppositely, if I post an article ‘outside’ this blog’s niche, for example, top anti-aging skincare products, then forget about traffic from Google. Google knows that your blog is not an authority in skincare. Getting organic traffic from Google is easier when it is clear to Google and the visitors what your website is about. Target traffic, in return, increases your earnings.
Besides, doing SEO on micro-niche blogs takes less effort, time, and money and can easily earn your page and domain authority.
- Authenticity and expertise
It is impossible to be an expert in everything. Customers, particularly those willing to pay for a product or service, want to read and follow field experts. Every blog post you write around your niche increases the authority within your niche and takes your work to the next level. You can charge more because of your expertise.
Plus, knowing the niche well and being known, you can collaborate with other experts or influencers and increase the range of your product or services.
So, in a nutshell, choose a niche and stick to it.
How to choose the best niche for affiliate marketing?
Choosing the best and most profitable affiliate marketing niche is the challenge faced by almost all newbies. And if you plan to make money through affiliate marketing, it is a long-term and strategic decision. So think well before choosing. Here are the tips to guide you in your thinking process.
- Know your interests. When choosing a niche, get into something you’re enthusiastic about. It’s not wise to jump into a deep end for some trending niche and fail in a month because the product sucks. Do you remember Confucius?
Choose a job you love, and you’ll never have to work a day in your life.
Besides, writing about things you are excited about will make you sound genuine and help you earn expertise in the field. So, before finalizing your niche decision, ensure you have a certain passion for something and that you are good at it.
- Follow other people’s interests. Do not search for a unicorn in the affiliate marketing niche, and do not try to reinvent the wheel. Better learn the latest buzz and research where the trending topics intersect with your interests or expertise. Usually, social media, an authority site, or an industry blogs post discussing the latest trend are good sources of inspiration. For example, Amazon can give you all the information you need to find out what is selling and quickly determine a niche’s profitability.
- Search where the money is. The best niche for affiliate marketing also has to be profitable, unless what all this fuss is about? If you find a niche with many appeals, check that it has high-paying offers. Also, consider dealing with evergreen verticals that do well even in times of recession.
- Evaluate the competition. If the niche seems money-making for you, there is a big chance others think the same. Investigate the competition to understand if you can generate enough revenue for yourself.
- Choose a microniche(-s). Consider defining not only a niche but a micro-niche. It will help your positioning and product selection. Also, working with a micro-niche will increase your chance of being found on search engines.
For example:
- Weightloss is a broad niche. However, Benefits of Paleo diet for treating thyroid disorders is a micro-niche.
- Makeup is a broad niche, but Makeup for mature dark skin is a micro-niche.
- Yoga is a wide niche, but Fly yoga classes in London is a micro-niche.
Tools such as Google Trends can come in handy for finding a micro-niche topic.
- Consider how much time and effort you’re prepared to commit to this new venture. Will you only create PPC campaigns with an affiliate link, or will you also work with social media? Will you run an affiliate marketing website or a blog? Are you going to collect all your visitors’ email addresses and send newsletters? Answer these questions before getting your head into your chosen affiliate marking niche, and it will be clear for you if the game is worth the candle.
- Don’t focus all your efforts on one product. Selling one product through affiliate marketing usually doesn’t end up in much profit, no matter how viral it is in the market. Working with multiple products is something like being on the safe side. If visitors coming to your affiliate resource are not interested in one product, they might get interested in other related products. Besides, if one product is not showing promising results, you may switch to other products. As per Alchemy by Rory Sutherland, maths rules do not quite work here. It’s easier to make $100 from 10 affiliate products than – $1,000 from 1.
To recap, consider the three Ps for choosing an attractive affiliate marketing niche: passion, potential, and profit. Keep in mind that there is no such thing as a perfect niche for everyone.
Best niche for affiliate marketing 2023
Now, after we’ve already taken a look at the TLDR version, let’s check out the complete list of the best niches for affiliate marketing.
1. Technology – the top niche for affiliate marketing
People love using the latest apps and gadgets. So, here you can focus on promoting everything from VPNs and webhosting to smoke detectors or productivity apps. By the way, many SaaS affiliate programs belong to the high-paying and pay referral fees of up to $500 per sale. The same applies to VPN, which helps the visitors surf the web anonymously while also protecting themselves from identity theft and other online security threats.
You can make videos about the latest technology and products trends or share reviews via your site. You could also choose to work with a software technology provider.
Plus, tech is constantly growing and never going out of style, so this is a somewhat evergreen niche. For example, mobile app revenues are expected to be worth more than $935 billion by 2023.
One more sub-niche to consider is No-code tools. Learning to code is hard, and no-code movement helps build amazing applications without huge costs, multiple developers, or long timelines. It helps build new startups or businesses and creates workflow automation with ease, improving business processes, operations, and development.
For example, Coupler.io automates data integrations, allowing users to sync 20+ apps, including Airtable, Pipedrive, Clockify, and Facebook Ads, with Google Sheets, Excel, or BigQuery.
You can share or embed the affiliate link to invite your clients, users, colleagues, or friends to use Coupler.io and get a 50% commission when someone signs up for a paid Coupler.io plan. For every next subscription renewal, you can earn a 20% commission.
And the program welcomes everyone who wants to get the most out of Coupler.io and is interested in seamless data integration.
2. Wealth Building – the most profitable niche for affiliate marketing
Everybody wants to be rich. Many people would like to earn on an investment, hate being in debt, and try to save for retirement, but not everyone knows how to do it right, so they are constantly looking for solutions. They can seek proper advice from trading services, popular financial newsletters, best investment apps, trending on-topic webinars, etc. And you don’t need to be Warren Buffet to publish content in the investment niche. Except for stock portfolios, there are also real estate, precious metals, peer-to-peer crypto loans, etc.
As for cryptocurrencies, with the rise of Web 3.0 and blockchain technologies, the Bitcoin ‘craze’ is far from over, so you can still be an early adopter and yield significant revenue from this niche.
Long story short, there’s a huge market for wealth-building products and services where if you combine a unique angle with hard work, success is guaranteed.
3. Health and Fitness
As well as being rich, everyone would like to be fit and healthy. And for that, people are ready to pay unhealthy amounts of money, which makes the niche lucrative and evergreen.
With more awareness of health issues, which even doubled during the coronavirus pandemic, people take action and buy healthy costly products. Once the user uses a product and likes it, they are sure to keep buying it again and again to maintain results.
Personal care, nutrition, preventative medicine, alternative medicine, aging/anti-aging, fitness, mental health, weight loss, and pregnancy are just a few sub-niches that can potentially interest you.
Another thing to note here is that the global population is getting older. And an aging population has a high need for medical care and products, which leads to the growth of the medical market. Additionally, many people get obsessed with anti-aging activities, aiming to look younger and reverse aging. They keep trying different treatments and approaches.
In addition to aging, also gets fatter, and helping people lose weight is one of the best ways to fetch profits. This or another way, consumers spend US$60 billion each year in this category.
Closely connected to getting fitter are sports fitness, gym at home, and yoga. From yoga mats, training sneakers, sports equipment, and energetic drinks, this niche offers good profit and genuinely passive income feel if approached wisely or by traveling the road less followed in this affiliate niche.
4. Fashion and Beauty
“Oddly” enough, but regardless of the economic situation, beauty and fashion are the verticals that will always flourish. That’s because people want to look at their best even if the rest of their life has gone to the dogs. Humans are vain creatures, let’s admit it:).
And with so many brands and products available, people need advice on what to buy and how to apply the products effectively. That creates an excellent opportunity for beauty bloggers and other affiliates to monetize their content by promoting their favorite brands. You can, for instance, start YouTube videos that show beauty tips, explains style trends and advise fashion products, etc.
This is also one of the niches where repeat purchases for popular products are guaranteed.
Also, many fashion and beauty affiliate programs pay their affiliates beautiful commission rates for every sale they trigger. To give you heads-up, the global skincare market alone is expected to be worth nearly $190 billion by 2025, and the forecast for the cosmetics market is $750 billion by the same year. Besides, this sector is not limited to females alone; nowadays, more and more males are conscious of their looks. This is what makes the fashion and beauty niche so attractive for affiliate marketing.
5. Lifestyle
Lifestyle is a massive niche in terms of sub-niches as all people want to improve their lifestyle and constantly look for ways to do so. This extensive domain includes many evergreen and seasonal sub-domains, like Education, Self-development, Productivity, Marriage, Pregnancy, Home Decor, Digital nomads, Van life, Tiny houses, Ecological products, Sustainable living, etc.
For example, there has never been a more significant demand for online education. When the coronavirus pandemic hit, self-isolated people began to bring the focus to education, seeking online opportunities. Thre are available online courses for any preference and interest, in different languages and levels of complexity. The online education market is forecasted to reach $53.13 billion by 2027.
Lifestyle and self-improvement blogs are also getting more popular nowadays. The niche also includes a myriad of online programs, courses, training, books, videos, etc., which help increase confidence and self-esteem, achieve goals, succeed in their career, overcome obstacles, etc.
Home décor is also one of those evergreen niches severe worth consideration.
People are constantly decorating their homes to sell or renovate a newly bought apartment and spend between $500 and $5,000 on each room.
6. Hobby
If you choose this niche, you can focus on Music, Gardening, Photography, Videography, Fishing, Food, Do it yourself/ DIY, Painting and art, Movies, Writing, Drones, Cars, Books, Cameras, Virtual reality. The choice here can go as far as people’s imagination.
For example, gardening is no more an extended hobby for the weekend or free time.
With the development of urban farming, this micro-niche grew in popularity. The commissions aren’t that huge but relatively decent to make this a profitable niche.
The Food Niche is another attractive blogging topic as everybody needs and likes to eat. There are numerous monetization options, including recipe blocks, fast meals, ethnic or cultural food, Specialities, baking-focused blocks, and many others.
7. Pet care
Well, I’m a dog owner, so I know how much effort pet owners take to care for their furry friends. From food goodies for their pets to grooming services to bathing and travel accessories, not to mention play toys.
People also tend to spend money on medication and do as many surgeries as needed and rehabilitation to make their friends live longer.
You can offer these products and services like pet training or breed-specific programs to your site/channel visitors. People need them to train their small pets for potty and older dogs for security and obedience. If pets are your passion, you can design and sell your information products like e-books, tutorials, and online classes as an affiliate.
8. Travel
The travel market size is estimated to be US$7 trillion. Facing hard times during the first two years of the coronavirus pandemic the industry recovered and is predicted to grow in 2023.
That means it’s one of the most prominent affiliate niches available, and there are plenty of lucrative programs for luxury and economy segments.
The majority of the income for many travel bloggers comes from hotel reviews, flights, city tours, luggage, insurance, and clothing.
Bonus affiliate marketing niche ideas
Although this list is far from being exhaustive, two more niches have the potential to grow manifolds due to the Russian onslaught on Ukraine and its aftereffect. Let’s have a look at them.
9. Security and Survival
Homeowners always cared about home security. But now, many individuals being aware of the increased crime rate, are starting to invest in more advanced technologies. This has increased the demand for home security cameras, alarm systems, and apps that allow people to monitor their houses at a distance.
And until 2020 rolled around, everyone suddenly understood the importance of having extra food and water stored at home and started enrolling in different prepper programs.
It’s also an exciting niche because you can promote everything from hunting gear to a prepper backpack and freeze-dried food.
10. Non-Profit&Charity
Speaking about lucrative niches for affiliate marketing the non-profit and charity sector doesn’t spring immediately to mind.
The phrase “non-profit” is a bit of a red flag to anyone hoping to rake in big commissions.
But in reality, non-profit organizations and charities operate massive amounts of money.
Globally, charities and non-profits are expected to be worth more than $400 billion by 2030.
Plus, you can enjoy the warm feeling of knowing your efforts are helping to support a good cause.
Have I chosen the top niche for affiliate marketing?
If you pick a lucrative niche, are aware of the right keywords, and are prepared to work hard, your niche affiliate marketing effort will succeed. If you want to earn high commissions, always look for new angles and products to promote. The number of affiliate marketing niches is almost uncountable, and the number of micro-niches is limitless. This article listed the most lucrative and money-making affiliate marketing niches, and we hope that this will help you find your gold vein.
How to Choose the Right Affiliate Program
Ivan Burban
Head of Marketing at Coupler.io with over 12 years of experience in digital marketing, SEO, and product management. All these years I've been helping SaaS businesses such as Stripo and Skylum grow fast and build proper workflows to increase company revenue.I believe that marketing is the first driver in business growth, and I'm happy to share my knowledge to help you grow from zero to unicorn status fast.
