Before choosing a niche for affiliate marketing, we need to understand what a niche actually is. A niche is really a niche market, in other words a slightly specialised market rather than a general one.

You could say that dogs are a niche, but choosing a wide niche such as dogs would make marketing to people who like dogs very difficult. For example someone who likes dogs wouldn't necessarily own a dog, so they wouldn't be in the market to buy any product related to dogs but someone searching for dog training would probably be a dog owner.

You could break the dog market down into dozens of dog niches, for example:

Dog breeding
Dog showing
Dog training
Dog collars and leads
Dog food
Dog grooming
Dog exercising

So you see, these niches are still about dogs but a more specialised area of the dog arena.

When choosing a niche, look at the potential for sales. If you're not a dog breeder then finding products to sell relating to dog breeding could be difficult. However, there are lots of books about dog training that you could sell on your website and there are lots of doggy products with affiliate programs.

There's something else to consider though when choosing a niche for affiliate marketing and that is competition. If you type "dog training" into Google, you get more than five million results so that is going to be a very hard market to compete in. However, if you type in "dog collars and leads" you only get around 37,000 results so that might be a better niche to target.

There are all sorts of expressions such as "starving crowd" used to describe people who search the internet actually looking for something to solve a particular problem. They might want to make money from home or lose weight but these are very hard markets to break into. However, there are other people who want to know how to make their dog walk on a leash or walk to heel, some want to know how to cook a curry and others need information on hair removal.

Believe me, if it's a human problem, people out there want an answer to it and if you can provide that answer, you have buyers ready made.

Choosing a niche isn't that easy but if you get yourself into the minds of people searching the internet then you'll have somewhere to start from.