This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
Today's caller is planning to jump into the world of affiliate promotion, where you can get paid for recommending products on a website. This is a long running business model. We've featured a number of stories where people are often doing really well for this business model. In some cases, not making huge amounts of money, but making consistent amounts of money over time. Both of those things are pretty good, right?
Making large amounts of money, making consistent amount of money. But this leads to our question, when you're gonna make a website to promote affiliate products, are some niches or topics more profitable than others? Well, the answer, first of all, is yes. There's actually a huge difference. But in this episode, let's talk about which ones might be best, as well as what their characteristics are.
So when you're trying to decide what kind of affiliate products do I promote, what is the industry or niche to go into? Well, this is how you can make that decision. Not just a list of them, but how you make that decision based on what you're into, what might come out in the future, and so on. Stay tuned, a detailed question coming up and my answer. [Music]
Hey, Chris, this is Doug, and I've followed the show for a while, but this is my first time asking a question.
My question is simple. If someone wants to focus on building websites for affiliate income, which niches or topics or industries or whatever are best? I've been learning SEO and how to make websites using a template from Wix. So I've got that part down, but I haven't decided if I should focus on something I already know about or go into something entirely different because that's where the best programs are. What do you think could work?
Thanks. [Music]
All right, thanks so much for being out there. Thanks for the question. Definitely some things we can do here. Here's what you want to look for in this situation when you're trying to decide what is the best niche or industry for my affiliate program, for my affiliate promotion, let's say.
You want to look for an industry with wholesalers or other partners who will pay commissions. This is the first thing, because if you're going to be an affiliate, you need to make sure there's somebody who's going to pay you. There are some industries where the affiliate model is just not really known or not practiced, at least. Next, you want to make sure you have an industry or topic or niche with a high price point, or at least medium. It's really difficult with affiliate stuff to make a lot of money if the products are priced very low.
We have had some people that do it, but those are the exceptions. Most likely, you're going to be much better off with a higher price point. And then next, you want something that isn't super competitive, because if it is competitive, there's going to be lots of other affiliates who have been doing this a while, who have even more experience with SEO, and it's just going to be hard to kind of break in. So as an example, long ago, we did a story of a guy who sold bounce houses, like bouncy castles, like those things that you see for neighborhood parties or restaurant promotions or whatever. And this guy made hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.
I think I called the story like the $300,000 bounce house business. These bounce houses, they are expensive. It's a really small niche, but people do buy them. He found a manufacturing partner that would pay commissions because the partner was really good at making bounce houses, but not so good at marketing. And nobody else was doing this.
Nobody else had thought about this particular industry or that niche. So that's one direction to go in. Find that thing that has a high price point with the right wholesaler and something that isn't super competitive. In terms of general industries, if we want to back away from that a bit, we could say two obvious ones are personal finance and diet or health, broadly speaking. But you really don't want to go broad with this kind of project.
You want to go deep. So if you're starting with one of those, find a way to go much deeper and more specific. It's definitely going to help you along the way. Good luck, let me know how it goes. Listeners, if you've got a question, sidehustleschool.com/questions.
Let me know what you're working on, what's going well, what's not. We have a new episode coming out every single day, short action packed, all designed to help you make extra money without quitting your job. That's it for today. My name is Chris Guillebeau, this is Side Hustle School. [Music]
From the Onward Project.
