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4 Little-Known Tactics to Conquer Evergreen Niches And Make Money Online as An Affiliate

When starting a niche business, everybody wants to pick a stable, evergreen niche that will make them money for a long time.

But challenging established businesses with million-dollar marketing budgets seems impossible for a newbie.

Many first-time affiliates settle for jumping on a trending product (i.e., fidget spinners) to make a quick buck.

Unfortunately, these trends don’t last, and very few affiliates succeed in making significant income.

But it doesn’t have to be that way.

With the right strategy, even a beginner, bedroom affiliate can conquer evergreen niches and create a healthy stream of passive income for the long term. (How does an extra $90,000 per year sound?)

In this article, we’ll cover what separates an evergreen niche from the rest, how to find them, and give you real tactics to start your very own evergreen niche business off right.

What Is an Evergreen Niche?

What Makes it Different from a Trend-Based Niche

An evergreen niche is a narrow market with a high consumer demand that’s remained stable for a long time. It will likely remain stable or grow further in the future.

Generally, these niches are tied to core human desires like health, wealth, and security.

For example, think of how vital a niche, like weight loss, is too many people.

Evergreen Niche vs. Trends

An evergreen niche is fundamentally different from a trending one, and it’s’s easy to spot the difference.

A steady level of high demand over the long term sets them apart. For example, take a look at the Google trend for back pain:

Not only is the demand steadily increasing from year to year, but it’s’s almost equal throughout the year and from state to state.

If you started a business around educating people about back pain in 2015, you’d be doing better than ever in 2020.

Compare this to a quick trend like fidget spinners, and you can see the stark difference.

The trend came out of seemingly nowhere, with demand dropping down to next to zero after a few months.

If you went into fidget spinners at their peak, chances are you might not even have sold a single product before the trend disappeared.

If you are researching a potential niche product, and it seems to have “come out of nowhere” in the last months, don’t jump the gun. You may want to think twice before committing yourself to start a business around it.

In the next section, we’ll jump into how you can avoid trends and flukes and find your evergreen niche.

How to Find an Evergreen Niche

While Google Trends is a useful tool for separating trending products from evergreen products, it’s not a great tool for finding evergreen niche ideas when you’re just starting.

And for a simple reason — it’s’s designed to identify sudden trends rather than stable demand.

You won’t get much use out of the “trending” or “rising” sections.

But there are many other free tools available online that you can use to find the right niche for you.

We’ve already covered how to find a niche in-depth, so here we’ll focus on finding precise evergreen niches with growing potential.

Everyone tells you to start with your experience, skills, and interests when looking for a niche.

When looking for an evergreen one, you must add a few additional questions to the mix:

  • Does your idea tie into a person’s desire for health, wealth, happiness, or status?
  • Is there a sizeable existing evergreen market of products that consumers happily buy?

Once you’ve settled on a general industry or topic suitable for your skills and experience, it’s time to narrow it down.

You can find evergreen niches by looking at different marketplaces and online communities to evaluate demand.

For example, a Udemy search for “career” reveals courses for sub-topics that have thousands of paying students:

This is a great place to identify real niche needs for information and thought leadership. Since they are paid courses, there’s a clear demand (people are already paying) for information on the topic.

In the search above, we can single out careers in data science, Linux, and job-hunting specifics like resume writing, interviewing, etc.

If you have a relevant background or strong interest in any of those fields, there’s potential for building a business.

Of course, this isn’t the only way to find niche ideas on the internet.

You can also search Facebook, Quora, and Reddit for thriving sub-communities with thousands of members.

Searching for “photography” in Facebook groups brings up niches like mobile photography and cosmic photography.

You can also try searching for specific niche audiences you want to target, like “over 50” or “retirees.”

You may find that a specific group like “sports over 50” or “dating for retirees” already exist. Or, you could join a general group for that audience and see what they are buzzing about.

For industries where physical products play an essential role, you want to check marketplaces to confirm that popular products are relevant to your niche.

For example, if you choose the niche of studio photography, you’d want to check out Amazon and other eCommerce sites.

With plenty of relatively expensive products sold well, with good reviews, it makes sense to go ahead at this point.

Make sure that you search for a logical product category name. If you’re targeting an audience of seniors, “cameras for seniors” won’t necessarily show any logical results.

Instead, you can explore competing sites by Googling “easy-to-use cameras.” If the results include a lot of well-priced, popular products to promote, that’s also fine.

An evergreen product has stable demand over many years and a stellar customer reputation.

For more ideas, check out our list of 2,531+ niches for affiliates for you to test.

Traditional vs. Emerging Evergreen Niches

While the overarching evergreen industries haven’t changed in decades, many little niches within each industry see significant changes in demand.

You might even find some that have rocketed (or plummeted) in popularity over the past few years.

For example, within the job and careers (wealth) industry, the most prestigious and high-paying careers are slowly shifting.

The old reliable choices like law and mechanical engineering are slowly tapering off.

And new, cutting-edge technology-related fields like machine learning are rapidly growing in popularity.

The changes in the space are making way for a new evergreen niche, machine learning career advice, recruitment, and job boards.

But when you’re making niche decisions, you mustn’t just look at the trends. You need to confirm the actual volume of the demand.

Looking at the trends above, it’s’s easy to think that machine learning careers are the bigger niche market.

But if you look at the real search volume in Google Keyword Planner, you’ll see that that’s not the case.

Mechanical engineering jobs related keywords have over 25,000 monthly searches on average, versus under 10,000 machine learning.

And yet, the up-and-coming niche of machine learning has higher competition and bids for the keywords.

In other words, more niche businesses are specializing in that area, even though the overall demand is still lower.

Upcoming evergreen niches can often be more crowded with competitors, despite an overall lower volume of demand and potential consumers.

Don’t choose an emerging niche because it’s the fashionable choice, but because the numbers (demand and competition) and your experience make it the best option.

Next, we’ll cover real-life tactics you can use to conquer evergreen niches for yourself.

01 – Focus on Winning Specific Keywords with High Commercial Intent

When you start, don’t try to win the “big keywords” in your niche. Instead, aim for small wins that will help you earn money right out of the gate.

Search for keywords like “best” product lists, reviews, and other phrases that indicate someone’s ready to buy.

The search volume is typically much lower, and for fringe products, there won’t be much competition at all. And the best thing is, the users that find your site this way, are already almost ready to make a purchase.

So there’s a much higher chance that you’ll end up with an affiliate commission, even from just a few visitors.

By focusing on specific keywords with high commercial intent, rather than generic industry keywords dominated by industry magazines and even Wikipedia, you give yourself a much better fighting chance.

To showcase just how powerful this can be, let’s go through a real case study.

An experimenting niche marketer decided to create and upload 20 high-quality articles focusing on commercial intent keywords like “best …” and “… review”. That’s the only content he added to his site that was just starting to make a few dollars.

In under a year, the affiliate earnings from the site increased from $26.97 to $1,836 per month.

(via KeywordsBlogger.com)

For example, if you decided to create a niche site dedicated to hiking, you could use Google search autocomplete to quickly find ideas.

By just typing in “best hiking”, I’ve instantly found the potential for more than six different blog posts to promote niche products.

02 – Out-EAT Your Competition

To beat out your competitors, it’s no longer enough to gather generic backlinks and write long-form content.

Google’s new EAT (Expertise Authority Trustworthiness) principle was designed to cut low-quality results from the rankings.

Think of it like this:

  • Expertise: Education and industry experience of content author.
  • Authority: The reputation of your site and the author (backlinks).
  • Trustworthiness: Are the site and author reliable?

Without a degree, it might sound like it’s impossible to get started.

But niche site owners shouldn’t despair. You should look at this as an opportunity.

With the recent major Google Algorithm update in May 2020, smaller sites got a fighting chance, as long as they follow the EAT principles.

A medical information site saw its traffic boosted to the levels it had before the first implementation of EAT.

(Image Source)

Medical information is a typical YMYL (Your Money or Your Life) category. Google singles out sites like this because bad information could directly impact the user’s health, safety, finance, or happiness.

Basically, EAT is an even bigger deal for YMYL keywords. Google prefers to rank and highlight content written only by recognized experts in their field.

That’s why this medical information site, run by an actual MD, aka expert in their field, saw such a nice boost.

Other major winners of the May 2020 update, like Parents.com and Everyday Health, include expert opinions from real doctors/psychologists in almost every article.

(Image Source)

For example, Everyday Health’s post on type 2 diabetes includes a video interview with an MD, along with personal anecdotes from patients who have the disease.

(via Everyday Health)

No wonder their content got such a nice boost.

If you’re targeting YMYL keywords, you need to invest the necessary resources to create high-quality, trustworthy content with expert sources. Simply interview experts if you don’t have the required credentials yourself.

But even if your niche leans more towards hobbies or sports, getting the EAT principles right will help you rank faster.

This is just one of the key digital marketing strategies that will help your site stand out in 2020.

03 – Build an Email List

It doesn’t matter what niche you’re in. The vast majority of first-time visitors don’t end up buying a product through your recommendations and simply leave your site.

If you want a second, third, and fourth chance to market affiliate (or your own) products to visitors, you need a way to reach them.

Email marketing is the secret ingredient that helped us generate over $90,000 in JVZoo commissions.

Need more convincing? The average email marketing ROI is $42 for every single dollar invested.

There are many ways you can build your email list, but the gist of it is this:

Give visitors a free offer that they can’t refuse, as long as they sign up with their name and email.

There are many free and paid tools that can help you along the way, but all you really need is an email autoresponder like ActiveCampaign or GetResponse.

Once you have that, you can create sign-up forms and include CTAs throughout your site and landing pages.

If you need inspiration, just look at how we do it right here on this site.

A relevant CTA to a compelling report that gives away five profitable niches for free.

The free offer solves a pressing pain point for many of our new readers (finding their first niche to get started).

If you implement this strategy throughout your own content, you’ll start attracting your first subscribers without issue.

04 – Diversify and Optimize Your Monetization

Finally, when starting a new niche site, you won’t be able to earn a significant amount of money with inefficient monetization.

If you just use Google Adsense ads alone, you could be leaving hundreds, if not thousands of dollars on the table each month.

Instead use a diverse monetization strategy relying on ads, affiliate marketing, and even your own information products.

There’s an upper ceiling to how much organic traffic a niche site can generate. That’s the double-edged sword of going niche — less competition, but smaller overall target market.

But that doesn’t mean you need to start hundreds of different niche sites to make a living.

If you focus on monetization, you can make a full-time income, even without massive traffic numbers.

For example, look at this niche site making over $2,000 per month with around 20,000 monthly visitors.

(Image Source)

At first, the earnings graph followed the trends in traffic. But after making a few changes, the revenue increased even as traffic decreased.

(Image Source)

That’s the power of improving your monetization.

The niche site, OwnTheYard, uses a mix of publishing ads and affiliate products from Amazon Associates.

(via OwnTheYard)

By highlighting top picks at the top of the article, as well as using multiple affiliate links and CTAs for each reviewed item, the site guides as many visitors as possible to affiliate products.

Critical Considerations

  • Pick an evergreen niche market with a healthy, stable consumer demand and an active marketplace of products.
  • Don’t jump on emerging market bandwagons, focus on niches with good numbers that match your expertise and interests.
  • Don’t give up because established sites exist in your niche. Use our marketing tactics to establish your website and start generating revenue fast.
  • Use a diverse mix of affiliate programs and advertising to increase your revenue.

Conclusion

Starting a business in an evergreen niche might seem like a pipe dream, but it doesn’t have to be.

If you follow the steps outlined in this article, you can find your very own niche market, and establish your niche today.

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