Finding a great affiliate niche that’s both low competition and profitable can sometimes seem like finding a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow—but it’s not impossible if you know what you’re doing.
In this article, I’ll show you three different methods that make it easier to find your perfect affiliate niche—and as a bonus—I’ll throw in some examples of tried and tested affiliate niches.
The easiest way to discover affiliate niches is to look for the type of keywords that affiliate sites commonly use, like “review,” “best,” and “vs.”
Affiliates often write around these topics using these keywords as they have strong commercial intent.
Here’s how publishers structure these types of keywords within their article headings:
These keywords are known as keyword modifiers—they provide more specificity to the original keyword.
Using Ahrefs’ Site Explorer, we can find all these keywords in just a couple of clicks.
To do this:
- Enter the keyword topic that you’re interested in and hit search. I’ve used “wireless headphones”
- Click on the Matching terms report
- Add an Include filter with the keyword modifiers (like “best,” “cheapest,” or “review”) separated by commas
- Click on Any word, hit Apply, and Show results
This will provide a list of mostly commercial keywords you can target with your affiliate site.
Our example shows that “best” and “review” keywords are the most popular keyword modifiers.
To take things further, click “best” in the sidebar.
Now, let’s add a Keyword difficulty (KD) filter from 10-20 and hit Apply.
Once we’ve done this, we can see that with a bit of work, there are some interesting sub-niches we could explore here that have high Traffic potential and low KD.
If you’re laser-focused on finding a profitable niche and want to know exactly what’s already working, a useful method is to go to a site like Flippa and browse the recently sold listings in the affiliate category. I’ve chosen to look at sites running the Amazon affiliate program, as it is one of the most widely used affiliate programs in the world.
To start, go to Flippa.com and click on Amazon below the search bar.
Once you’ve clicked through to the search results, I continue to personalize the sidebar filters in the following way:
- Revenue generating – Yes – (We need to ensure the niche makes money)
- Asset type – Websites and online businesses – (There are lots of asset types to consider, but for ease let’s just focus on websites)
- Website type – Blog – (Let’s focus our search solely on blogs)
- Age – 0-3 years – (We want to see what has worked recently, not well-established brands)
- Status – Recently sold – (This identifies completed listings that show they were good enough assets to be purchased)
You can personalize the settings however you want, but these are the ones that yielded the most success for me in the past.
Once you are happy, hit Apply Filters—you’ll get a list of Amazon affiliate sites.
With a 30-second search, we’ve found two different Amazon affiliate niches that make ~$300 p/m net profit.
In theory, if we were to target one of these niches, we might be able to make a similar profit. If you don’t like them, just keep scrolling until you find a decent affiliate niche.
The next step is to sense-check what you found on Flippa. This means running the site through Ahrefs’ Site Explorer, looking at the Top pages and Organic keywords reports, and generally auditing the niche.
We know that it makes money, but is it still low competition? Does it still have Traffic potential? These are the types of questions you need to ask yourself when running the sites through Ahrefs.
If we run the term “pickleball” through Ahrefs Keywords Explorer, we can see that the seed term does have Traffic potential, but it is also Super hard in terms of its Keyword Difficulty—meaning it could be hard to rank for this exact keyword without a lot of high authority links.
And if even if the niche doesn’t look that promising from the outset, it’s worth drilling down into the Matching terms report to find a more specific angle that can work.
We can see here that “best pickleball paddles” has a low KD and high TP; it’s also on an upward search trend, and a quick Google reveals that this product can sell for ~$250.
With affiliate commissions at Amazon.com around ~3% for sports, you might want to look at other affiliate programs to get higher rates. A further quick Google reveals you can get ~10-30% commissions from other affiliate programs for this particular niche. This is much more workable.
Another more advanced method to get inspiration for your next affiliate project is to reverse engineer common footprints in affiliate programs.
Sidenote.
A footprint in this context is a fragment of text that is shared by multiple websites.
We’ve mentioned Amazon affiliates already, so let’s continue with this theme. Here’s a real-world example of a typical Amazon disclosure:
This text has to be included on the website. If we cut it down to its essentials, it is basically: “a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program.” We can use this as our main footprint.
But to spice things up a bit more, we can add a further filter with outlinks to amazon.com or amzn.to. This can help to identify sites that are actively using Amazon’s affiliate links and are not just inactive websites that have the disclaimer on them.
We can then paste the following into Ahrefs’ Web Explorer’s search bar.
incontent:a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program AND outlinkdomain:amazon.com OR outlinkdomain:amzn.to
Web Explorer will then find sites that mention the Amazon disclosure in the content and also link to Amazon.com or amzn.to (the shortlink version.) I’ve added a few extra filters below to narrow my search down to the English-speaking headphone niche, but again, you can enter any niche you want—or even just browse the total list.
Scroll through the sites that catch your attention, and once you’ve identified an affiliate niche that you think might work, use Site Explorer and Keywords Explorer to dig deeper and vet the niche properly.
A good thing about this method is that you can find lots of affiliate niches in a single search.
Web Explorer can also be used to identify any other footprints that affiliate programs leave behind—so it’s not just limited to Amazon.
Learn more
Here are 10 examples taken from niches for affiliate marketing that you can take inspiration from.
1. Vacuum cleaners
- Traffic potential – 58k
- Estimated commissions – Affiliates earn 3-8% commissions on vacuum cleaners priced between $50 and $1,000, making even a few sales lucrative.
- Key players – Vacuum wizard, Vacuum tester, Popular Vacuums, Clean Home World
2. Travel car seats
- Traffic potential – 28k
- Estimated commissions – Amazon offers 3% commissions on baby products, and other retailers like Walmart provide higher rates. Commissions can be ~10% with programs like Saferide4kids.com, MiFold, and Wayb.com
- Key players – Travel Car Seat Mom, Safe Convertible Car Seats, Safe Ride 4 Kids, Best Car Seat Hub
3. Golf
- Traffic potential – 35k
- Estimated commissions – Affiliates can promote products from Amazon with a 4% commission rate or higher commissions from specialized golf stores like The Indoor Golf Shop, Rain or Shine Golf, Callaway Golf, and GlobalGolf. Given the high cost of golf equipment, even lower commission rates can be lucrative
- Key players – Golfstead, The Left Rough, Golfer Logic, Golf Influence, Golfalot, MyGolfSpy
4. Earbuds and headphones
- Traffic potential – 20-26k
- Estimated commissions – Amazon offers a 3% commission on headphones, but Target, 1more, B&H Photo Video, Adorama, and Walmart offer higher commissions, ranging up to 8%
- Key players – Headphonesty, Headphones Pro Review, Headphonesaddict.com, Headphone Day
5. Guitars
- Traffic potential – 1.2m
- Estimated commissions – Amazon offers a 3% commission on musical instruments. Other affiliate programs in the music and guitar niche include Guitar Center (6% commission), MasterClass for guitar lessons (25% commission), Thalos Capos (15-20% commission), and Guitar Tricks ($25-$30 per sale)
- Key players – Guitar Space, The Guitar Journal, Guitar Pick Reviews, Your Guitar Brain
6. Woodworking
- Traffic potential – 3.9k
- Estimated commissions – Amazon offers a 3% commission on tools and other retailers like Home Depot, Highland Woodworking, Hardware World, and KC Tool, offering commissions ranging from 1% to 10%
- Key players – Wood And Shop, Build Eazy, Blacktail Studio, Wood Improve
7. Car audio equipment
- Traffic potential – 41k
- Estimated commissions – Scosche or Second Skin Audio. Commission rates vary from 4% (Amazon, Walmart, DS18 Audio) to higher rates like 10% (Second Skin Audio) and 8% (Scosche)
- Key players – Car Audio Now, Bass Head Speakers, Car Audio Wise, Car Audio Lovers
8. Sustainability and zero waste
- Traffic potential – 1-5k
- Estimated commissions – Earth Hero (5%-8%), Etee (20%), JungleCulture (12%-16%), Zero Waste Store (10%), GreenUp (5%-10%), Who Gives A Crap (up to 12%), Cloudpaper (10%)
- Key players – The Good Trade, Sustainable Jungle, Going Zero Waste, Green Citizen, Zero Waste Memoirs
9. Gardening
- Traffic potential – 1.4k
- Estimated commissions – Commissions range from 3% on Amazon to 25% on Seeds Now
- Key players – Bigger Garden, Gardenery, Garden Beast, Joe Gardener
10. Hotels with Jacuzzis
- Traffic potential – 500
- Estimated commissions – Anything from 5%-50% through programs like Agoda, TripAdvisor and Kayak
- Key players – Roomtubs, Excellent romantic vacations, Hotels with hot tub in room
Final thoughts
Finding an affiliate niche is easy, but finding a great niche—one that ticks all the boxes—often takes careful research.
Luckily, you can sense-check your affiliate niche ideas using Ahrefs, meaning you don’t waste time and money on a low-quality affiliate niche.
Got questions? Ping me on X.
