Late Night Internet Marketing and Online Business with Mark Mason

Unlocking Profitable Growth: 7 Unique Affiliate Marketing Niches That Set You Apart [LNIM258]

Mark Mason Episode 258

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Ever felt like you're just one in a sea of affiliate marketers? Get ready to break away from the pack as we reveal seven under-the-radar niches that could skyrocket your content and commissions. This isn't your average niche advice; we're talking about unique angles that tap into your personal expertise and passions. As a former electrical engineer turned home automation aficionado, I share how authentic enthusiasm can transform your affiliate endeavors into a magnet for like-minded viewers and buyers. This episode promises not just inspiration but strategic insights into finding and fostering evergreen niches with serious growth potential.

We're venturing into uncharted territory with affiliate markets that are begging for innovation - think drone photography gear, sustainable pet products, and the burgeoning world of RoboAdvisors. Each of these areas comes with its own set of challenges and rewards, from navigating regulations to discerning quality in a market prone to greenwashing. We dissect the appeal of subscription boxes for home bakers and why online coding boot camps could be your ticket to riding the tech wave to success. So, buckle up and let's explore how these unexpected niches can be the key to separating your content from the crowd and opening doors to profitable partnerships.

Announcer:

Episode two five, eight Late night. Internet marketing.

Mark Mason:

This week on the Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast, we're going to uncover seven awesome affiliate marketing niches that no one else is talking about. All this and more on the Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast.

Announcer:

The Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast. You've been working for somebody else, but you want a business to run yourself. You want to know how to start and where to begin. Can you get out your comfort zone, my friend? Yes, you can do it right. When it's late at night, at the end of the day, your dreams burn in your sights.

Mark Mason:

Keep it up and you will find that you're building your business one night at a time and now broadcasting late at night from a little studio in the big state of Texas, your host, your host, mark Mason. Hey, hey, hey, how are you doing? I am your host, mark Mason, coming to you from the little studio in Dallas, texas, where it's so warm. I got a sunburn this week watching baseball in the middle of February. What the heck is going on here? It must be global warming, or maybe it's the fact that I'm in Texas. Either way, you know what they say in Texas if you don't like the weather, just wait a minute, it'll change, and that's certainly what happened. We went to the baseball game. It was a doubleheader. In the morning it was 40-something degrees, and by the end of the second game I had a sunburn, which is stupid and irresponsible, but you know, it is what it is. So I enjoyed the baseball game, but the highlight was definitely the brisket nachos at this particular school, where we were watching my son play. They had really fantastic concessions. In fact, this tournament is famous in Louisville for their concessions, so that was really cool.

Mark Mason:

I want to talk to you about some affiliate marketing niches that you probably haven't thought of today, and I want to do that because I want you to be thinking off the beaten path when it comes to niches. It turns out that everything under the sun can be purchased on the internet and if you can get into a niche where people are buying things, but it's a little bit different and off the beaten path, two things happen. One is you can create fantastic content that people actually need, because in these off the beaten path niches, a lot of times no one's writing about them or the amount of content around these niches is lower than it would be in a normal, what I'll call mainstream affiliate marketing niche. So that's one thing. And the second thing is obviously is these niches tend to be relatively new and growing, and sometimes that means you can do work now that will continue to pay you for years to come. So I want to talk about that, but before we do that, let's talk about what makes an awesome niche. What's the criteria? And I would say you know there are four or five criteria and again they're pretty obvious and you've heard this before. First of all, you need high, or at least growing, demand and interest in the niche, something that is either already super popular or looks like the popularity is growing, and you can tell this by searching in Google, looking and seeing if there are both products for sale and there are people talking about the products and the information around the niche and what kind of goes with that is.

Mark Mason:

I think niches are best if there is evergreen content that remains relevant. I'll give you an example. If you are in a niche like sporting championship gear, so say, for example, my Texas Rangers. They won the World Series back in October and maybe I'm in the niche of selling Rangers World Series gear. That was probably a great niche for five minutes after the Rangers won the World Series, but now it's not completely irrelevant yet, but by this time next year no one's going to be buying Rangers World Series gear. It's not evergreen. On the other hand, if you've got a niche, that's related to something that happens over and over again.

Mark Mason:

One of my favorite things to think about is gardening, the gardening niche. People are going to be gardening from now until the end of time. They've been gardening for the last 3000 years and they'll be gardening for another 3000 years, so that could be a really good niche with evergreen content pun intended there. And then the products in the niche need to have substantial commission rates. I think it's a lot of work to create excellent content, and I tend to focus on products where the commission rates are decent. I don't think it makes a lot of sense, for example, to Work in a niche where the products are three or four dollars and you make 20 or 30 cents a sale. That's just not going to ever really result in something that's going to be meaningful for you. I think you really need products that I like, products in the 50 to 150 and even 200 dollar range and higher, depending on the niche and what's going on there. So you need that in an awesome niche as well.

Mark Mason:

And then we want a unique angle If possible. I always say that it's good to be talking about Something that you care about. So for me, for example, as an electrical engineer, I might choose to have a niche on home automation because that's very Electronics heavy. It may be something that I'm interested in it. It actually is something that I'm interested in, and so for me it gives me a unique angle because I can speak as an electrical engineer in that niche. Maybe your niche has something to do with some employment you have or a special interest that you've developed, and so if you're in the cigar niche. It's probably makes sense, for example, if you are a cigar smoker and you enjoy smoking cigars, and I think not only does that make you more credible, it also gives you the kind of perspective and patience that it takes to build Content in the affiliate marketing space, because it takes time to get traction and make an income. So that's sort of the criteria.

Mark Mason:

So here are the niches that I Came across that I think are pretty interesting and that are meaningful to me. Now, this first one, I Think, is an obvious one, but is different than what you usually hear. So you always hear that one of the great niches for affiliate marketing is weight loss, and there's certainly a lot of products out there around weight loss and diet and exercise and so forth. I Like something a little more specific, and so one of the things that I think is very interesting is keto diet. That continues to go on strong. There are a lot of different angles there, and if you can take an angle inside of keto diet, like clean keto or something like that, I think that's even better, because there's consistent demand for both information and products. There's a lot of community around that and I actually Know someone who's made a living in this space and has affiliate content out there that has paid her over more than a decade, and so I think this is remains a really good Niche for you to focus on, especially if you can get specific inside of keto with something like clean keto. And the other thing that's really nice about keto is there's always new keto products coming out and you can recommend those products and a lot of those programs have good Commissions. Now, the downside of keto related stuff is it's really competitive, and so you're gonna need to do work to stay up to date with the latest research, with the latest products and so forth. So some of this niche is evergreen, but some of it is constantly evolving and a lot of times that can be great, because that means you always have news to report on and new opportunities to generate content. There are also some really high commission products in this space Keto training programs and so forth and so I really like that kind of niche.

Mark Mason:

The other thing that I'll caution you about a little bit is, when you're in those kind of health related niches, you need to be very careful about making sure you do that responsibly. You make sure people understand you're not their doctor. You may or may not be a registered nutritionist and so forth, and so you need to take the appropriate precaution and make sure that people understand what your qualifications are in that niche. Another niche that I already mentioned is smart home automation, but I think you can put a twist on it, because I'm starting to see a lot of content around smart automation for eco-friendliness. So one kind of smart automation is turning your lights on and on. That's pretty cool, but a twist on smart home automation is using automation to be more eco-responsible, and what's cool about that is it combines all this tech innovation, which creates a lot of news and a lot of new content and stuff you can feed on and leverage, and it marries it with sustainability, which is appealing to a subset of people in the world maybe people that wouldn't normally think about automating their home. If they're eco-conscious, they might be willing to do that, so that's kind of interesting, I think. Again, this is another thing where there's a rapid pace of technological advancement. It means products need to be updated constantly, and so you're going to need to monitor this niche over time, but I think this is a really cool angle. Smart home automation is a great niche all by itself it's really cool, but if you combine it with eco-friendly, I think that's really neat.

Mark Mason:

Another niche I think that's like this that's interesting is the drone photography equipment niche. Now, this is super nichey, right. Drones have been a good niche for a long time, but if you niche down into what you tend to do with drones, really there's two things you do with drones you either race them or you take pictures with them. I think drone photography is really cool. A lot of enthusiasts are willing to invest in high quality drones and accessories, so there's some high ticket affiliate opportunities there. What you want to watch out for in this niche is trying to understand how big the photography piece of it is and, quite frankly, it's a little bit hard for me to tell. So that's something that I would want to evaluate, with keyword research and so forth. And then, of course, there's all the issues of licensing and regulation around the flight of drones. But I think generally, people who are spending a lot of money on high end drones with photography equipment, their license commercial flyers I don't think this is a big deal, but stuff like regulations and licensing can impact market accessibility and consumer interest is something you want to pay attention to.

Mark Mason:

The fourth one is around the niche of pets, and you're like, oh gosh, mark, everyone talks about dog training as an example of a niche. That's not what I'm talking about. I've seen a lot of really interesting information lately on biodegradable pet products. Again, this taps into the eco-friendly angle, but it focuses on pet owners, and nobody spends more money on stuff than pet owners. So I think this is a really good kind of idea. Sustainable pet toys, because pet toys are generally made of plastic and they create a lot of nonbiodegradable waste, and so you can leverage this market that's known to spend a lot of money and help them spend money in a way that makes them feel good. I think the challenge here is distinguishing between genuinely sustainable products and those that are greenwashed, where they're made to appear to be eco-friendly, but when you dig in, they're really not all that eco-friendly. So you'd have to be a little bit careful and maybe even a little knowledgeable about the eco-friendly space. But if that's you and you're an evangelist in the eco space, the pet niche could be really an interesting thing.

Mark Mason:

The fifth niche I saw this online recently online coding boot camps. So I think this is kind of cool. So the tech industry is exploding. Ai is fueling this. We need more and more programmers every day, and I think the continuous growth of technology in the world means more demand for coding education, and so I think that creates an opportunity for people operating in the online coding education space, and so that's something really interesting to look out for not just straight up course sales from affiliate content, but you'll also find cost per action offers in these kind of education niches, where sometimes you can pay a buck or two just for sending a lead to a CPA network in this space. So I like this technology coding education space. I think that's something that's generally going to be evergreen for quite some time, and there's a lot of activity in this niche. You know, sometimes you'll hear people argue that AI is going to make programmers go away. I think it's quite the opposite. In fact, ai will help programmers become more efficient, and they're going to be tackling bigger and more important problems. We're going to need more and more people who know how to harness the power of AI, combine it with software and make amazing new things happen. I think this is a real big growth opportunity here.

Mark Mason:

Another interesting niche is this niche of subscription boxes. You know you can buy a subscription and every month someone will send you a box. And there's all kinds of these, but one that I saw recently that I thought was interesting was a subscription box for home bakers, and I like that because it engages this kind of passionate community of people that bake. They're looking for ways to stay engaged with baking and new baking challenges, and a subscription service is great as an affiliate marketer because a lot of those pay on an ongoing basis. It might pay you 10 or 20% as long as the person stays subscribed, and what's cool about that is, if you're a baker yourself, you can be talking about your baking experience, posting your recipes, talking about your tips and tricks and, at the same time, recommending this box. And in fact, one of the ways to really do a great job of promoting subscription boxes is to subscribe yourself and do unboxings every month and break down each item in the box and do reviews of the items and then like, let's say, there's a special jar of something in there that you can sell as an affiliate. You can also sell that product directly as an affiliate, so it's kind of like an autonomous content engine.

Mark Mason:

Every month, the thing that you're selling comes to you. You get to try it out. Unbox it that creates content, and then you can create content around the contents of the box, so it's pretty cool. I think the thing to watch out for here is make sure you choose a great box that's gonna have a long lifetime. One of the things that jumps out to me here is I don't even know if he has an affiliate program, but a guy like me, an engineer I could be an affiliate for Mark Rober's engineering project box. He's got a subscription box. I love that guy. I would be super excited to build a website around his content and promote Mark. That's something I could feel really good about, and so I think you can pick something like that as well.

Mark Mason:

Okay, so here's the last one. This is a weird thing, and I mentioned this last one because I think there's all kinds of things happening, and what I want you to do as an affiliate marketer is keep your eyes open for things that you're interested in that you think you could promote, and find affiliate programs for these things. I ran across these things called RoboAdvisor, so there's a growing interest in personal finance among younger people. There are these things out there called RoboAdvisor Sometimes they're called automated investing services and they use computer algorithms and software to manage investment portfolios and there are commission programs behind these and that can be very interesting and I've seen some CPA a cost per action advertising opportunities too. So if you're interested in the FIN blogger space financial blogging I think RoboAdvisor's, targeted maybe at millennials, is a really interesting space that you can look at.

Mark Mason:

Now, what to watch out for you need a pretty serious understanding of financial regulations. I've done some affiliate marketing in the financial space and there are all kinds of FTC and other regulations and usually the affiliate partner will tell you hey, your content needs to meet these guidelines in order for us to pay you affiliate commissions. Here are the rules for the content that you create, what you can say, what you can say, what disclaimers you have to have on your website. So if you get into this space or any other financial space like this in the FIN blogging space, you definitely need an understanding of what the FTC requirements are for this. So that's seven sort of interesting and a little bit unusual affiliate niches for you to consider.

Mark Mason:

And when you do that, I want you to do your own research, like we've talked about before in the podcast. Open up a keyword tool like Uber Suggest and see if people are talking about this online. What are they searching for? Open up Amazon or whatever is appropriate for that niche, and see if there are products out there for sale. For example, if it's eco-friendly dog products that you're interested in selling, let's make sure that they're eco-friendly dog products on Amazon that are available for sale, and cruise around the internet and make sure there are going to be some affiliate opportunities.

Mark Mason:

Let's ask the question about what we feel inside about this niche, and are we going to be excited about this Six months from now, a year from now, two years from now, when we're needing to maintain the website and create content? It's certainly possible that you can grow these things, and I recommend that you do Grow these things so that you can have a virtual assistant or some other content manager at some future time when you're making that kind of money from the website. But at first, for the first six months or a year, it's going to be on you to do the work, and so I really encourage you, especially if this is your first foray into affiliate marketing, to pick a niche that you enjoy or something that you're interested in learning about. So send me some feedback, tell me if there are some niches that you think are interesting or if you've got a niche that you'd like me to look into and break down and Talk about on the show. I'd be happy to do that. I'd love to hear from you at Feedback at late night. I am calm and speaking of feedback.

Mark Mason:

Thank you to those of you that replied to my various requests and various channels for people who were interested in Complementary coaching sessions. I am stuff, still got a few slots. You know those come and go. I've got a few more slots open at late night. I am Com forward, slash apply and I have not gotten back to everyone. So if you're listening to this and I haven't gotten back to you yet, don't fret, I'm getting back to everyone who contacts me. I will get to you. So be sure and reach out at late night.

Mark Mason:

I am calm forward, slash apply. I'll get back with you if I think there's a way that I can help you in an absolutely Complementary, no strings attached, get to know each other and hear about how I might be able to help you and actually Try to help you sort of session where you just walk away with your mind blown. That's the goal of that coaching session and it's absolutely Complementary. There's no sales pitch at the end of the session or anything like that. So if you're worried about that, please don't be worried about that. Just hit me up at late night. I am calm. Forward slash apply and we'll see if we might be a fit for each other to move your business forward. Okay, that's it for this week. I will see you next week and until next week, just crush it, just go do stuff, take massive action, because that's how you can move your business forward. Ciao.

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Mark Mason:

Be sure to visit LNim podcast calm today to leave feedback for mark. Download special bonus content, access the show notes and more see you there.

Announcer:

Until then, go and make some great progress on your internet business one night at a time.

Mark Mason:

All right. Well, this is the part of the show after the show, so the show is over and Then I usually just talk about whatever I want, and I do this out of respect for people who just want to get to the content. A lot of podcasters they choose to just Chit chat for the first 15 minutes of their show and I personally Find that a little frustrating. So I tend to chit chat at the end of my show, so the people that had something more important to do can go do it, and the people that want to get to know me a little Better, which includes you stick around and they listen to this part of the show, and I get feedback From people that this is their favorite part of the show, so I love that.

Mark Mason:

So I had an amazing day yesterday baseball and Four or five volleyball games. My daughter was was in a tournament and so we did that and they came in third in the tournament, which wasn't the answer they were looking for. My son had some success in the baseball game. In fact, he hit the wall on the fly with the baseball, which is great for him. He's been working hard on hitting because you we have a saying in baseball kids that hit don't sit. And boy, at this level of baseball that he's playing at now at a very large school, he goes to the largest high school in the state of Texas. It's a fight to get a starting spot on the on the varsity roster at these big high schools and you have to be able to hit. I mean, it's just simply not optional unless you're a pitcher that doesn't hit, of course. And so he's on both tracks, he's pitching and he pitched this weekend. He had a decent outing and then he worked at the plate a little bit too, so that was great. We had a good weekend.

Mark Mason:

I have been working on this podcast on the newsletter. By the way, if you're not subscribed to the newsletter and you you don't want to subscribe because you just don't want any more email, I totally get that. But go ahead on over to newslatenightimcom or you can go to late night imcom, forward slash news, either way that works, and instead of subscribing you can see their archived, all of my latest newsletters since the first of the year, and you can just check it out and see if it looks like something that you would enjoy. That's a feature of the autoresponder that I use, which is I've mentioned before is convert kit, which you can find at latenightimcom.

Mark Mason:

Forward slash convert kit and convert gets great, and one of the things that it does is it publishes newsletters to a website publicly so that people that either missed newsletters or just subscribe could go see the archives. Or people like you maybe, who don't exactly want to subscribe but are a little curious about the late night internet marketing newsletter. You can go on over to newslatenightimcom and you can see all the things that are in the late night internet marketing newsletter building internet businesses one newsletter at a time. All right, so that's it for this week. Until next week, have a great one, ciao.

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Late night. Internet marketing.

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