Best Affiliate Niches in 2022 (Backed By Data)

Best Affiliate Niches in 2022 (Backed By Data)

- In this video, I'm gonna analyze some extremely rare data to be able to tell you once and for all, what are the best affiliate niches on the planet? My name is Matt Diggity and I make a full-time living off of building affiliate websites through my company LeadSpring. I've teamed up with my buddies at Empire Flippers, the biggest curated marketplace for affiliate websites, to mine some killer data about affiliate niches. Empire Flippers helps affiliate website owners sell their sites to potential buyers. When doing so, they gather a ton of information, information like, what is the niche, how much money does it make, how much content was added to the site, how many links were built, and how many hours per week did it take to run it?

And they've agreed to send me these stats for every affiliate and display ad website they've sold since January 2019.

That's over 300 of them, and I'm gonna crunch these numbers to figure out which niches are the best to get into from multiple perspectives. Here's how I'm planning on attacking this challenge. Sure, we're gonna look at the obvious stuff like which niches on average made the most money, but what I think you're really gonna be interested in is, which niches have the best return on investment, or ROI? Sure, a niche that makes 20K per month is great, but not if it takes 18K per month to attain it, right?

We're looking for the opposite, where a site is making 20K per month, but it only takes pennies to run it. And for that, I'm gonna look at the two most important costs that affiliates spend on when building affiliate websites, and that's content and links. We'll look at how much revenue the niche makes versus how much content needs to be built.

Also we'll look at revenue versus the link investment people need to make, and why the hell not, the revenue versus how many hours per week they put into the site. And let me tell you, the results are eye-opening.

And to cap things off at the end, I'm gonna answer the big showdown question: What makes more money and has better ROI, Amazon affiliate, non-Amazon affiliate, or display ads, and by how much? Now if you appreciate what I'm doing here, let me know by investing in that Like button. The ROI of pressing the Like button is instant. It helps my channel out a ton, plus it makes the YouTube algorithm gods shine a favorable light on this video. Thanks.

We'll start to take a look at this data starting with, which niche makes the most money? Please note though, Empire Flippers is a standup company, and while they supplied me with a ton of data, they obviously didn't reveal the actual sites that were sold, but I got all the data I need to break things down at the niche level.

Here's a list of the top 20 niches in terms of the average revenue of the sites in these niches, and right off the bat, we have some surprising results. Holy (beep), no pun intended, I didn't expect to see the religion and spirituality niche coming up as number one. For those that aren't familiar with this niche, it has a lot to do with horoscopes, spiritual and psychic readings, along with getting your astrological sign plotted out and stuff like that.

And you might be surprised to know that a lot of these affiliate programs are high-ticket, like this one from Psychic Source that pays $100 per customer you send to them.

Second overall, we have the jewelry niche, which can get into stuff like recommending necklaces and rings to buy for your significant other. But instead of sending people to Amazon, I'd be sending them over to someone like this who pays 10%. Then in third, we have the lifestyle niche, which sounds very broad, and that's because it is, but think of stuff like backpacking and digital nomadism, which is extremely popular in this global age. Or even gardening falls under lifestyle, and my boy Kevin be killing it in this niche.

But one thing I wanted to point out: In some of these niche categories, Empire Flippers didn't sell a huge number of sites in the niche, and it's sort of skewing the data. For example, there were only two sites sold in the religion and spirituality niche, and one of them was making $24,000 per month, and the other was making $1,000. So it makes it seem like the religious niche is the bomb when we just really don't have enough data. I've highlighted the niches where we don't have enough data, so let's now remove them to see how things change.

Okay, this looks different indeed.

Now we have news and education in first place with an average earning of about 8K per month. Bear in mind that there's a big spread with the lowest news site making $800 per month, and the largest one making 20K. Sites in the education niche can cover topics like how to prepare for exams and certifications, which I know from experience is very lucrative. News I'm gonna assume is just news and they're going for a display ad monetization strategy here. After that, we have finance, which has always been a huge niche.

Typically finance is all about stuff like personal finance, credit, debt, et cetera, like NerdWallet, which I'm sure you've seen before. And then in third, we have the bed and bath category, which most definitely includes the infamous mattress niche. Enter at your own risk. Just bear in mind that people love to play naughty in this niche, and I'm not just talking about negative SEO here. Even the product manufacturers you're supposed to be working with can play hardball.

Now just for funsies, which niche do you think had the overall number one highest earning site? This one shocked me, but it was lifestyle. A lifestyle site was making nearly $45,000 per month. Whoever that was, good for you, coconut cowboy. If you wanna dive deeper on this data, check out the link in the pinned comment for the full write-up on this study.

Now that we've covered overall earnings, I'm super excited to dig into the return on investment figures that I mentioned earlier.

I mean, revenue is great, but profit is king. Let's look at the first ROI metric, which would be monthly revenue divided by the amount of content invested in terms of published pages. How much money per page do you make in these niches? In terms of content ROI, we have the medical niche on top.

This makes a lot of sense, as offers in this space are gonna have amazing conversion rates. I mean, if you snore like a bear every night and your wife or husband starts to hate you, you're gonna get it fixed pronto. And in the snoring niche, there's probably not an overwhelming amount of content you need to write in order to gain topical authority on the subject. But bear in mind, the medical and health niche is typically reserved for mega-authority sites or experienced SEOs. The medical niche also includes the famously profitable CBD and marijuana niches, which is high competition and high payout.

Get it? High? Okay, whatever. After that, we have of our friend the bed and bath niche in second place.

But in third place, when it comes to content ROI, we have the kitchenware niche.

The important thing to think of here is when it comes to content ROI is that what this really means is simply you don't have to write that much content in order to get a return, which likely means the topics are very narrow. For example, in the slow cooker niche, how much content would you really need to write to become an expert in it? A few articles on how to use, clean, and buy a slow cooker, and then maybe 20 recipes or so, and this applies to probably any appliance in the kitchen.

Start an authority site and just start building out these silos one by one, or you can make multiple micro-niche sites on each appliance. Here's another look at the full content ROI table.

After kitchen, we have apparel, sports, auto, et cetera. And then down here at the bottom, we have the health and fitness niche, which I can definitely say from experience has very poor content ROI. If you wanna become an expert on protein, do you have any idea how many protein topics there are that you have to write? Hundreds. I documented a $600,000 website flip in the health niche in a YouTube video on my channel, so make sure to check it out after you watch this video.

Next I wanna take a look at backlink ROI, namely how much money is made per backlink built, and the formula we're gonna use for this is revenue divided by backlinks, as found by Atris. For the super nerdy SEO aficionados here, bear in mind that we're talking about overall backlinks here, not individual referring domains. Empire Flippers just didn't have that data.

Here we go. Here's the top 20 niches as ordered by backlink ROI.

 

Office supplies are in first place, followed by our friends, medical and bed and bath. When you think of the office niche, we're not talking about paperclips and staplers here. Think of more high-end stuff like gaming and ergonomic chairs, or even standing desks. Ergonomic chairs was the first niche I ever really did well in, so I can definitely agree that the ROI is great. It's also a great niche that will trend upwards over time as people spend more and more time in front of screens.

Just look at how much the best ergonomic chair keyword has surged after the pandemic hit. Here's a refresh of the backlink ROI table. In fourth, we have legal, followed by finance, and then at the very bottom, we have niches like baby care and automotive. So keep this in mind when you get into these niches: People build a lot of links in these categories.

Now the next ROI category is interesting, but it's kind of a throwaway, and that's time ROI, namely, how much money do these niches make compared to how many hours per week are people putting into their sites?

And why do I say this figure is a throwaway? Because everyone and their grandma straight up lies about how much work they put into their site when it's time to list their site. Nonetheless, let's take a look anyways. So apparently when you're in the survival and security niche, you can make $2,860 per hour. Guys, everyone stop what you're doing right now.

The security niche is a money printing machine that only requires your diamond hands to log into WordPress, and your bank account will explode with tendies. As mentioned, I knew the table would be garbage. Let's ignore it, and I'll make it up to you as thanks for smashing the Like button. At the end of this video, I'm gonna give out my opinion on which niche has the best ROI overall. I'm also gonna let you know which monetization strategy is the best, affiliate versus Amazon versus display ads.

But before that, I thought it'd be interesting to plot out some pretty interesting graphs. The first graph is a histogram that shows how much content people are writing for their sites. On the x-axis, we see the amount of indexed content they have on their site, and on the y-axis, we have how many sites are in that bucket. For example, in the 75-to-100-page range, there were 18 websites sold. It seems like the meat of the bell curve falls within the 25-to-250-pages range, which seems about right just based on what I find when I'm doing my day-to-day affiliate research.

Similar to the first histogram, I have another one for backlinks. On the x-axis, we have the number of backlinks that were built to these sites, and on the y-axis, we have how many sites actually fell within that range. You can see here that most sites have between 250 and 2,000 links built to them, with a peak between 250 and 750 links.

As mentioned before, we're talking about total backlinks here, not referring domains. And if you wanna dig down into the niches themselves, here's a scatterplot showing how earnings stack up in the home niche versus how much content was published.

Each of these dots represents a site that was sold in the home niche. On the x-axis, we have the number of published pages. The y-axis represents the average monthly income of the site. As you can see, there's a wide range of earnings per content published, but you can definitely see a trend line here. The more you publish, the more you're likely to make.

Similarly, here's a home niche scatterplot for backlink ROI, and once again, you can see that generally, the more links a website has, the more money it makes, with some anomalies, of course.

If you wanna see scatterplots like these for all the top niches, check out the full write-up of the study, which I've left a link for in the description. Now before I get into which is the best niche overall, let's answer the question, which monetization strategy is the best hands down? And the battle is between straight-up affiliate, Amazon affiliate, and display ads. When it comes to average monthly revenue across all sites that Empire Flippers sold, here's how they all stack up.

Affiliate is on top with about 5 1/2 thousand dollar monthly revenue, followed by display ads with 3.6K, and then Amazon Associates with 2.7K. I freaking knew it, Amazon. You suck.

If you ever wanted to know why one of the first videos in the Affiliate Lab is literally called "Why We Don't Use Amazon," here's your reason.

They suck. Whenever you hear an affiliate marketing guru tell you, "Amazon has low commission rates, "but you make it up because they convert so well," now you know to run away. Let's get back to this table. When we're talking about affiliate affiliate, we're just talking about non-Amazon.

That could be promoting offers through ShareASale or through ClickBank, or even working one-on-one with manufacturers directly, which is my favorite way to operate. Most affiliate programs give commissions in the 10-to-50% range, which makes it no surprise whatsoever that this category came out on top. If you're looking for some recommendations of what are my favorite high-ticket affiliate programs, I left a link to a video in the description, so make sure to check it out after you're done watching this video.

In second place, we have display ads, which I have to say kinda surprised me that they came out on top of Amazon. My recommended display ad networks are AdThrive, Mediavine, Ezoic, and Newor.

Next, let's look at how much content and links are typically built in each of these monetization categories. In terms of content, display ads require the biggest investment, which makes sense. With ads, you're trying to write and rank for as much content as possible so you can slap display ads on it. After that comes affiliate, and after that comes Amazon Associates. If there's one thing to say about Amazon, I suppose you could say that you can build small sites.

Then if we look at the backlink column, display ads is on top again, but this begs the question, are people building more links to their display ad sites, or are they just coming in naturally because the nature of display ad sites causes them to create tons of informational content that could attract more links? Either way, display ad sites have more links, followed by Amazon, and then followed by affiliate.

All right, now it's time to look at ROI for the various monetization types. When it comes to content ROI, (beep) me, Amazon is on top. You'll earn more money per page of content written on Amazon sites than both affiliate and display ads combined.

Why? I can't be totally sure, but I think it's because you can make these hyper-targeted micro-niche sites around a single product, like miter saws, that don't need a whole bunch of supporting content to rank. When it comes to backlink ROI, we have affiliate on top, followed by Amazon, then followed by display ads, again with more ROI than the other two combined. Now based on this data, have I changed the way that I wanna monetize my sites? Not at all.

Traditional affiliate sites make more money overall and still have great ROI. Plus you can diversify your income sources and not rely on a company that doesn't give a doo-doo for its affiliates. So it's time to answer the overarching question, which is the best affiliate niche hands down? We've looked at overall earnings, where the spirituality, lifestyle, and jewelry niches reigned, but we have to consider ROI too, and these niches showed up outside of the top 20. So based on a lot of deliberation, I've decided to give the Best Niche Award to the medical niche.

(children

https://bit.ly/3NCzYyZ