Niche Selection Cheatsheet

Igor Kheifets: I’m Igor Kheifets and this is the List Building Lifestyle, a podcast for anyone who wants to build a wildly profitable email list working from home. If you’d like to make six figures, travel the world, and help people improve their lives in the process, then this podcast is for you. I also invite you to attend a free workshop at Igor.ac, Where I’m teaching how I made $21,779.45 in affiliate commissions by sending just 481 clicks to my affiliate link in one day.

I’m also explaining why I walked away from ClickBank and I don’t promote ClickBank offers anymore, as well as the five things I look for in the perfect affiliate offer. I’m even going to show you the one page website that I used to make over half a million dollars in affiliate commissions this year and I’ll even bribe you to attend this workshop by giving you a $497 value course that shows you how to share your big high converting affiliate offers for your next affiliate promotion.

In addition, I’ll even give you the three offers I’m promoting right now that are making me money as we speak. All that and more at Igor.ac. And now it’s time to claim your List Building Lifestyle.

Welcome back to another edition of the List Building Lifestyle with your host Igor Kheifets. After flirting with affiliate marketing for a couple of years, I finally decided to create my own product. I figured anyone who ever made a name for themselves online had one, so I should get one too. At the time, I was a law of attraction junkie reading anything I could find about attracting things with my thoughts.

So I decided to sell a mindset product. I locked myself in a room with nothing but my laptop and a bunch of law of attraction books. And I ethically stole their best ideas, repping them into my own flavor so they taste different. 72 hours later, I had an 83 page book. I hired a graphic artist to create a cover. I wrote a long form sales letter. I bought a domain and a slick warp was template. I connected PayPal. Next, I created a capture page where I gave away a free chapter of my book to collect email addresses.

Anyone who claimed that free chapter immediately got up sold into the full book at $47. Over the course of the next two month, I gave away 122 free chapters and sold two copies of my book. I did not give up though. I created a different lead magnet and rewrote my sales page. It didn’t help at all.

After running dozens of split tests, I finally consulted a friend who asked me if there were people who successfully sold these products to the public. I couldn’t think of anyone besides the lady who created ‘The Secret’ who was selling her book for a few dollars on Amazon and people like Bob Proctor who were talking about the law of attraction in their free videos on YouTube.

That’s when the penny dropped and I realized I was selling a product people didn’t want to buy. They say the best lessons are the ones you learn in the university of life. Now, I had a PhD in how to sell something that people didn’t want. I consider myself lucky though because it took me just six months to realize my mistake. Niche selection is challenging and that’s why today I’m hosting Aiden Booth, ClickBank’s number one vendor and record earning affiliate who specializes in niche selection. Aiden owns thousands of sites, half a dozen companies, and cooks a decent asado. Aiden, welcome to the List Building Lifestyle.

Aiden Booth: Great to be here. Thank you so much for having me.

Igor Kheifets: My pleasure. And I’m really excited because one of the most common questions I get both from people who would like to sell affiliate products as well as people who would like to sell their own products is, what is the best way to pick a niche? Because until you pick one, you can’t really go and create a product or pick a product to promote.

So, I’m really, really curious. In your experience, because you’ve been teaching people how to do this for about five or seven years or so at this point. What do you see as the most common mistake people make when it comes to selecting a profitable niche market?

Aiden Booth: I think something that a lot of people get wrong here is they either go too broad from the outset or too specific. And I think it’s vitally important that you find that sweet spot. So I’ll give you an example. If you’re starting an affiliate website, you could do something about fitness and some people would build a website about fitness and that’ll be doing all kinds of information about fitness. And other people would go to the other extreme and say, “look, I’m going to build a website recommending different yoga mats.” And that would be too specific. So a website about fitness would be too broad. A website about yoga mats would be too specific. That sweet spot would be a website about yoga.

You could even go one level more granular there and say, “yoga for woman.” Or something like that and have the whole thing themed around that. But I wouldn’t want to go any broader than that. So I think you have to find the sweet spot. And you can also use this to eliminate some ideas that you might have because you can do some research and there’s tools out there that will help you with this to find how many people are searching for certain keywords and types of content. And if you’re not getting enough, then that means you’re too specific. And on the other hand, if it’s too broad, then that’s also not going to work for you. So I think you need to find the sweet spot.

Igor Kheifets: And what would be like that enough number? What’s enough when it comes to searches?

Aiden Booth: I think it really depends on your traffic plan. So this is another thing most people dive in without having a plan in mind of how they’re going to get the traffic. They’ve got great ideas, but they don’t know how to get the traffic. So if you’re going with paid traffic, you don’t need that much. I mean, if you were able to get 100 visitors a day, you’d probably be able to get a couple of sales and you’d be able to make you a hundred bucks a day or something.

If you’re going with organic traffic, then you do need to still have an idea of where that organic traffic’s going to come in from. If it’s coming in from Google, then you can tally up the search volume of all the different keywords that you might be targeting. And just take yoga as an example. You might have articles and content on your site about lots of different aspects of yoga and you could tally up the amount of search volume that those get and Google AdWords will give you this information. And then take a fraction of that as yours.

So let’s say you’d tallied up all your keywords and it came to, let’s just say for argument’s sake, it came to 50,000 potential searchers per month. You might assume that you’ll be able to get 5% of that. So that would be two and a half thousand people that you’d be able to get, and with two and a half thousand people coming, conversion rate of 1% that might get you 25 sales. So you can back into it that way. And the Google AdWords tool is still really the best place to gauge the amount of traffic that’s out there.

Igor Kheifets: Yeah. And then, when you say yoga or goal for any broad… Well I guess it’s specific enough, not too broad, but any one of these big niches. The concern is like… And I know because a lot of people express it is, it’s too competitive. Like there’s probably at least a couple of dozen sites out there writing about yoga. How am I supposed to competitor rate that?

Aiden Booth: Yeah. Well I think you can get into the yoga nation. It doesn’t mean that you have to dominate yoga. You can still get a foothold by talking about yoga mats, which on its own would be too specific to build a website around. But you can still have a really good page reviewing the top 20 yoga mats. In fact, you could even get ranked for the names of the brands or styles of those yoga mats.

So, you just have to get a foothold to begin with and a trickle of visitors coming in and then you can build up on that. So yeah, you’re not going to overnight go to having a well ranked, really successful yoga website. But you can get there by feeding off the crumbs of some longer tail keywords and get traffic that way. And then over time, hopefully you’re building an email list and things like that. You can really start to do well in a niche like yoga.

Igor Kheifets: Yeah. You know what comes to mind is a phrase that I heard from Dent Kennedy at some point. He said that most people believe that the market is just a bunch of people sitting in a room and listening to someone present about a product, when the reality is the market is a moving parade of interest. So even if you think that it’s crowded, it’s saturated and it’s stale. Therefore you’re coming in into a world or a market or a vacuum where everything is static.

The reality is that it’s not static at all. Because just like you just mentioned, you can bring up a site on the top 20 yoga mats or rank for specific yoga mat brands. Then what this means is that as long as you’re on the lookout for new brands, new products or new problems or new emerging markets, like if it’s yoga for dogs, you’ll go for a Jews. I mean you can probably spin it any way you want.

I’ve seen actually someone sell a book which was, ‘Yoga for cliff climbers.’Like people who climb cliffs. Yeah, so all they’ve done is they took the same exercises you would otherwise have in regular yoga and just gave him a cliff climber related names. So instead of calling something an upside down cow, they called it the cross hold or something. So again, they got creative about naming it, but they specialize in that particular category.

Aiden Booth: Yeah. When you start talking the language of your target audience, it makes conversion so much easier as well. So if they are really going out there targeting rock climbers, then that’s going to be enormously helpful. Just going back to one of the things you mentioned, it’s a really, really good strategy and an easy way that you can get quick runs on the board and make quick money by targeting either, create names of different courses or products that you might be selling, author names of different books or again, courses that you could be selling and product names.

Because not many people really do that, but that was one of the ways that I got started online was getting rankings for those keywords. It’s still very doable these days and quite an easy way to get money coming in.

Igor Kheifets: Yeah, absolutely. I mean an example with books is perfect because yesterday I picked up, The Checklist Manifesto. A great book about creating checklists and just overall sells you in the whole idea of how checklists are truly powerful and they improve your productivity and your ability to grow a bigger team.

And the reason I was looking into it is because I’m creating a product where I’m including a checklist or actually six checklists for creating landing pages and lead magnets as a part of the product. So I wanted to understand, what does one look like and how do I create it?

And so what I’ve done is first, I went on Amazon, found the book, but then I realized the book is really long and I’m really looking for just the footnotes of the book and maybe an example of what a checklist looks like. So I got on Google and I searched for the checklist manifesto summary and I landed on a website which ranked number one or number three that offered just a bullet point summary of the book. Someone who read the book had just quoted some particular things from the book that they liked and showed that example of the checklist manifesto.

And so they also had… Which I think is brilliant on their part. They had a lead magnet or a giveaway for the top 10 productivity books and the notes on those books. So again, in other words, they offered me an opportunity to get a very quick and easy way to get the bullet points summary of books that can help me become more productive. Because obviously from looking for checklists, there’s a good chance that I am looking to be a little bit more productive with my life and now I got on their list. So all of a sudden now I’m a part of their audience and they can market books, productivity stuff, courses, any maybe devices that may help me out and things of that nature.

Aiden Booth: Did you find them by… I think you said you found them by doing a Google search for-

Igor Kheifets: For the book title.

Aiden Booth: That’s a great example.

Igor Kheifets: Yeah. Well, when you brought up the book and the author names and stuff like that, if you get on YouTube and you search for the book titles, you often times find people who posted an audio readout on the book or they would post their opinion on the book or the summary of the book. So you can do that about pretty much anything.

If you ever took interest in photography for example, that’s a really big niche where you have so much content on YouTube and so many review sites and comparison charts and just all kinds of content. And you would think that they’ve created… Like if there is a camera, there’s probably a bunch of videos about it. If there is a lens, there’s probably a bunch of articles about it. If there is a purpose to photography, like shooting up clothes or maybe shooting portraits or maybe doing nature shots, there’s probably a guide for it.

Yo, it’s Igor. If you’re loving the content, hop on over to listbuildinglifestyleshow.com for more free training and a free transcript of this episode. Oh! And I’d really appreciate if you logged into iTunes and rated the show. It really helps. Thanks.

But even though there is content about all of these topics, there’s new content coming up every day and if you just go in and take a peak and try to templetize it, meaning see the strategy behind the content rather than content itself, all of a sudden you realize this is not as static as one might think.

Aiden Booth: Yeah. And just something else that I think is really important is, when you are working out what your traffic plan is going to be. If you can include a way that you’re going to capture people or get them coming to your website who are through the along the path of the buying cycle. So that’s why product names are so good because if someone is looking for a summary of a product name or a rating of a product or an opinion about a product, they’ve already done that pre research.

Whereas if someone is just starting out, they don’t know what the names of the products are. They don’t know who the authors or the creators or the influencers in that niche are. So again, targeting those keywords that are a little bit more developed a little bit further along the buying cycle is a really, really good idea. The conversion rates for those keywords. And a conversion could be a sale or it could be just getting someone on the email list. Like what I think you mentioned, you got on the email list for The Checklist Manifesto. You know, those conversion rates skyrocket when you target, there’s more targeted keywords essentially.

Igor Kheifets: Yeah. Well, we’re talking about the maturity of the prospect in the marketplace, right? So somebody has been taking an interest in a topic or a hobby for the first two months. They’re looking for broader keywords and the more they dive into it, the more specific the keyword get, the more they zero in on particular products in the market.

And this brings me to another question and that is, I understand how we gauge the volume of the market. However, what is your way to gauge the buying power of the market? Because there are markets out there that are pretty vast. However, there’s no money in them. So I’m a really curious about that.

Aiden Booth: Yeah, so I think Google is also a good resource for that because it will give you an estimate of what you might pay to get a click. And the more that you would need a pay to get a click, that’s normally a good indicator of competition. And if there’s more competition there, that’s for a reason. That’s because there’s more money to be made. And not just Google, but other platforms like Bing and even Facebook.

You can run… Something we’ve done a lot of over the years when we’re assessing new markets or niches is, just run a $10 test on Google and send traffic to someone else’s website just to see… Well to see two things. How much it actually costs, because the estimate is always different to the reality.

And then also just say, well for those $10 how many clicks can I really get to? How many impressions am I going to get? And that’ll tell you the exact value of that keyword almost in terms of what you’re paying anyway. And you can make some assumptions about conversion rates and start to map out, back of the napkin what a keyword might be worth, just by knowing a couple of those things.

That’s I think the main way that we’ve done it, at least in the most accurate fashion in the past. And then there are some niches that you just know from the get go are going to be [inaudible 00:16:30] with this a lot of money to be made. So health and wellness is great. Self-improvement, anything to do with investment or loans or finances, beauty, fitness. I don’t know if I’m into fitness, but that’s a good one. Pits, anything people are passionate about. Health and also some pretty obscure health issues.

So I’ll share a bit of an embarrassing story with you here, but I think it ties in really well with what we’re talking about. So over a decade ago, one of the first or early websites that I made, it was actually about the health issue called hemorrhoids, which is, well the nicest of topics. But people that have got this issue, they want a solution and there a bunch of different hemorrhoids creams, natural treatments and stuff out there.

And I would target the names of these creams and treatments and the people behind them and the companies behind them. And that really converted amazingly well to the point where I was making about $5,000 a month just off this one little mini site really back in the day. But before I got into this space, what I actually did was I tested sending Google AdWords traffic to someone else’s website to see what kind of volume there was. So that was how I validated the whole thing.

Igor Kheifets: Yeah, that’s brilliant. And when we talk about like hemorrhoids or for example back pain, I went through the back pain part of it. Like when you have the problem you will do almost anything to fix it. And in the society where people pay their way out of problems by either using tools or coaching. That’s a really powerful place to be in. And you’re also get to help people actually fix the problem, which is pretty cool.

And of course, there’s always emerging markets. Like you said, anything people are passionate about. For example, I got a buddy of mine who recently found a passion for drones. So he bought three of them at this point and he’s been upgrading from one to the next. And then from the just having the drone, you upgrade to having the one with a better camera. Then so… Like there’s just a whole industry now and it’s been created around drones even though you can’t fly them in half the places, right? Because it’s illegal. But still people buy them anyway and they’re really passionate about them and it’s not a cheap toy.

Aiden Booth: They look pretty cool on a shelf.

Igor Kheifets: Oh, they look amazing on the shelf and they’re pretty dangerous. I heard someone in Russia actually took on of the advanced drones that attached a gun to it, and then flew in front of someone’s balcony and shot the guy. Now he didn’t kill him, but he hurt him. So drones are really dangerous and I think they should be banned. But anything that people are passionate about, especially irrationally passionate, goal and everything else, it’s always a great market.

Aiden Booth: Also just to share another market with you there. I had a website that’s still up online and people want to see it. It’s for people that want to get a commercial driver license. And if you want to get a commercial driver license to drive big trucks and things like this, there’s different rules for different States. And it’s almost like a whole community of people that are out there doing this. And there’s kind of an obscure niche, which actually has made me quite a bit of money over the years by providing training and resources to these people.

So the long tail example of keywords that was easy for me to target there was, how to get a commercial driver license in Texas and how to get a commercial driver license in Alabama. How to get a commercial driver license in California and so on and so forth. So you can imagine I could have a keyword like that for every single state. And then there are commercial driver license costs for Texas, job opportunities in Texas and a whole bunch of other things like medical requirements and so on and so forth. And so that’s another example of a probably quite obscure niche that I got into and made a lot of money from.

Igor Kheifets: Yeah, that’s crazy. So what I’m hearing is there’s a ton of opportunities out there and then the market is big enough for everyone, especially considering the fact that most people have no idea how to do this. I mean there’s people out there trying to rank websites of course, but for the most part there’s a little strategy behind what they do. Which makes me really appreciate what you do, which is you’re on a coaching program where you teach people from the get go, how to pick that niche, how to create content around it, how to select the products or create their product maybe later and how to dominate these little niche markets.

So, then you can either create passive income or passive income streams or you can just flip the whole thing and maybe walk away with a good payday. Just flipping down the website the same way you would flip an investment property. And I know you give away an infographic, which sort of sums up the things we’ve chatted about today as well as the things we didn’t have the time to cover. So where can we go to claim that infographic?

Aiden Booth: Yeah, you can go and check out the infographic at onlinemarketingclassroom.com/info. It’s a pretty beasty infographic, but it does cover a lot of what we’ve spoken about here today and just continues down the path of what you could do to get started with an affiliate marketing specific business. So yeah, check it out.

Igor Kheifets: Yeah, so it’s onlinemarketingclassroom.com/info and I highly recommend you grab the infographic and start understanding the process of niche selection. Whether or not you’re interested in affiliate marketing or creating your own product, which of course most people would probably be interested in starting out with affiliate marketing just to get a proof of concept.

And I also highly recommend you check out Aiden’s full coaching program at onlinemarketingclassroom.com where he teaches again the whole process. Because this is a process and this is like starting a business. Now, what I love about starting an online business, ranking for keywords and going into all of these different niches is that the cost, both time, costs, energy costs and money cost of you attempting to start a business this way will be significantly lower than if you were to attempt to start an offline business.

It’s truly, truly the boot strappers way to start an online business. So if you’re still wondering, how do I get started in affiliate marketing, then this is a really cool way to do it without risking a whole lot. So go ahead and check it out at onlinemarketingclassroom.com and grab your free infographic at onlinemarketingclassroom.com/info.

Now, before I let you go Aiden, I would like to ask you, if you could go back in time and meet yourself in the past, and right around the time when you were getting started, what would you tell yourself?

Aiden Booth: I think one of the things I’d tell myself is, don’t delay in starting to build up an email list. And a lot of people will tell you this. For the first couple of years there was building online websites and stuff. I didn’t worry about integrating email lists and building up subscriber bases. And not just email lists but just getting more present in your niche.

So it could be building up a Facebook group or a social profile of some kind. Because if you can really capture that audience, you don’t need that many raving fans to make a lot of money. Even with just 100 or 1000 people in your sphere of influence, that’s valuable and it doesn’t take long to get there. And I could have shortened my path to ultimately being able to quit my day job if I’d focused on that as one of my objectives from the get go.

So I would recommend that anyone starting any kind of niche website or any kind of business online really, then make sure they’ve got a way to capture leads of people who are interested in what they’re talking about.

Igor Kheifets: Well that’s the name of the show, the List Building Lifestyle. Right? It’s not the niche lifestyle. So build your list and if you want to find out more about how to do that, go ahead and rep a copy of our book. Go to igorsbook.com or get on Amazon and search for List Building Lifestyle confessions of an email millionaire. And that would start you off on the right foot. So this is Igor Kheifets and Aiden Booth. Thank you so much for tuning in for another episode of the List Building Lifestyle. And until next time we chat, have a good one.

Thank you for listening to the List Building Lifestyle. Get access to previous episodes, the transcription of today’s show as well as other exclusive content at listbuildinglifestyleshow.com. Also, don’t forget to claim your free seat at the workshop I’m hosting this week where I show the two step system that made me the top affiliate for people like Matt Bayside, John Crestani, Richard Legg, Michael Cheney, and many, many others.

In fact, on this workshop, I’m going to show you the exact approach I take whenever I promote in the affiliate offer, the exact offers I promote, as well as how I was able to make over half a million dollars in commissions using my small list of just 18,000 people promoting a weird type of product that almost no one else promotes. All that is yours at Igor.ac. So go ahead, claim your seat right now and I’ll see you there.