Finding Your Beginner's Affiliate Marketing Niche

Choosing your affiliate marketing niche isn't easy. It gets made even harder by all the contradictory advice you're going to get from the gurus. Self-proclaimed gurus, at that.

Much of the advice you'll get centers around picking a marketing niche that you already know something about. If you're a dog lover, set up a dog site; if you love knitting, set up a knitting site and so on. You know the kind of thing. Well, that's okay if you want to spend your day talking about knitting dogs or whatever. But what if, now this is a radical idea but bear with me, what if you want to make money from your website? Told you it was radical. Pass the smelling salts, grandma, lady over here just came over all unnecessary.

I'll illustrate the point with how linoleum is better for you than bananas. Won't take a minute. Put your feet up.

When I left school, one of the many jobs I took while waiting until I was old enough to join the military was as a truck driver's assistant. On a banana truck. The truck driver and I worked for a wholesale fruit and vegetable outfit that specialized in bananas. We spent our days driving to fruit stores in various towns, selling bananas to the store owners.

We covered more than a hundred miles a day in that big, noisy truck, a different route every day of the week. Sometimes the store owners bought, sometimes they didn't. This was important to the driver because he got paid commission. I didn't, I was just a boy.

We worked hard, got up early and had the truck loaded and out of the depot by 6.30am to get to the first town just as the stores opened. The wooden crates each held 28 pounds of bananas and we carried two crates at once to save time. The cheap wood cut our hands and now and again a big spider would run down the back of our necks.

One day, just after we made a delivery, I got back in the cab and the driver wasn't there. I could see him down the street outside a carpet store. He was leaning against the wall, smoking. A smartly dressed man came out of the store; sharp suit, briefcase, hair slicked back, you know the type. The smart-suited guy got in an even smarter car that was parked there and drove off. My driver, in his dusty, green warehouse coat and scuffed shoes, came back to the truck. He didn't say anything when he climbed in, he just looked thoughtful as we pulled away.

My driver wasn't at work the next day, so I spent my time unloading bananas from the trains that came right into the warehouse depot. He was there the next morning but only to collect the pay he was owed. He came over to say goodbye and he told me his reasons for leaving.

As a salesman/truck driver he had spent ten years driving his truck from town to town, carrying heavy crates and trying to sell bananas. Bananas were cheap and his commission on a crate was very low. He had to sell a lot of crates just to feed his family. Then he saw the carpet salesman.

The carpet salesman didn't deliver anything, a truck driver would do that later. The carpet salesman didn't go around in a noisy old truck, he was given a brand new car. The carpet salesman sold expensive goods and made a much higher commission per sale than a banana salesman ever could. Selling carpets is no more difficult than selling bananas. My driver decided to sell carpets.

Things didn't turn out quite as he had expected. There weren't any vacancies for carpet salesmen in the wholesale carpet warehouses nearby. However, just as he got turned away from one, the boss there suggested he try a linoleum warehouse across town. And that's how he got a job as a linoleum salesman.

Of course, linoleum was going out of fashion and vinyl was coming in. So his warehouse sold vinyl floorcovering. Then parquet flooring. Then ceramic tiles. Even carpet tiles. They sold what the people were buying. All expensive items with a better commission than bananas.

The point to all this, if we can find it, is that you don't need to know much about something to sell it. You don't even have to like it. I don't think my old driver was any fonder of linoleum than he was of bananas but who cares? He didn't have to carry it and he made more money. It's the commission that counts, not the product.