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3 Best Niches for CPA Affiliate Marketing

By Julia Beyers

Internet-based marketing is an integral part of the modern sales process. With high information delivery speed, wide coverage, and generally lower expenses, online marketing leads the global promotional industry. There are dozens of approaches, obviously, but today we want to focus on the specific one called CPA affiliate marketing. In laymen's terms, “Affiliate” stands for partnership, while “CPA” is Cost per Action or Cost per Acquisition. We will look at these definitions later in detail.

For those interested in online marketing and, specifically, cooperative earnings, we have prepared this guide. Read on and you will learn the key terms, rules for finding the most profitable niche, and examples of the best affiliate markets.

CPA and Affiliate Marketing 101

Anyway, it’s better to start with some basic information about marketing approaches, affiliate campaigns, and CPA. While the concepts may be familiar for some readers, we want to provide newcomers with a starter guide.

Affiliate marketing is all about spreading information about the goods or services of other companies. Suppose, Apple could contact you and ask about a review of the brand new iPhone with an affiliate link in the article. Then, you would get a commission from each purchase made by clients who used your link. In this case, Apple is a merchant and you are an advertiser. Sometimes, there are intermediaries like Amazon Associates – websites which resell products and also invest in ads.

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CPA is a subcategory of the above reviewed marketing approach. As the abbreviation implies, you, as an advertiser, get commissions for specific actions taken by clients. Often, marketers consider purchasing the main goal of affiliate programs, but CPA can include more actions such as views or likes.

CPA affiliate marketing falls under several categories:

• Pay per Sale. You get money, when someone uses your affiliate link and makes a purchase from the partner website.
• Pay per Action. This one includes all other actions: page visits, file/app downloads, video views, price checks, form filling, and so on. Generally, you get money for generating leads.
• Recurring Payments. If you attract new subscribers to your partner website, you can get regular commissions. It means that you receive a certain interest from monthly subscription fees.

So, affiliate marketing itself and its CPA model allow for earning money via online ads without selling your own products/services.

Essential Steps for Finding Niches

Definitely, you want to earn passive income, and affiliate marketing is one of the best ways to do it. But it’s impossible without knowing the pitfalls.

For example, you start promoting smartphone cases priced at $10. From each sale, you get 10% or $1 while spending about half an hour per day on placing links and spreading posts about them. On the other hand, you can cooperate with a manufacturer selling smartphones for $100 (well, a small manufacturer from China, let’s say). The same 10% equals $10 instead of $1. Even spending twice as much time on link sharing, you will get a pure 5x revenue! It’s always better to focus on high-paying niches with enough interested customers.

With this in mind, let’s look at the basic steps for finding your perfect niche:

• Conduct solid research. Be ready to use a lot of tools for generating statistics and analytics. Here are some of the most popular platforms:
  1. Quantcast. Check top-rated websites by a number of visitors. Here, you can find the best projects in any category to define which one is the most suitable for you. Ignore the first page as there are unbeatable giants.
  2. AdWords. Using Keyword Planner from Google AdWords, you can filter niche keywords, check their monthly searches, competitors, and potential profitability as the service highlights costs per click, for instance.
  3. ClickBank. With this CPA network, you will be able to start promoting products and also check the monetization activity. Use the Gravity filter to find out which niches and offers are the best.
• Find an offer. Before cooperating with any platform, explore oDigger and OfferVault that aggregate offers from various networks. Just enter your idea and check which brands need to be promoted. You can filter results by traffic sources, payment models, countries, etc. Choose reputable projects if you don’t want subscribers to leave your own website where you place links.
• Join a network. If a certain CPA system (ClickBank or Amazon Associates, to name a few) looks good, you want to become a part of it. It’s hardly possible to find an offer which doesn’t require joining its parental network.
• Get more traffic. First and foremost, get rid of banners. Trivial banners no longer work. Instead, make them valuable. Look at this affiliate bonus list - the banners here show the customers what they will get if using the website promo codes. This approach to affiliate marketing is more engaging, and thus more profitable. Design native ads and try to integrate CPA links into the website’s content naturally. Place links in relevant articles, or create small widgets which will look like authentic parts of the website. Additionally, use social media tools to attract more users.

It’s not a big deal to start earning with CPA if you know these simple rules. Nevertheless, if you want to make big money, you will have to choose the best niche.

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The Best Spheres for CPA Marketers

It’s barely possible to choose the best niche because there are too many of them. Moreover, even the least known industry can be profitable for you if you know it inside and out, and have great promotional skills.

However, we want to focus on more traditional approaches. That’s why the first thing to remember is: if you are a newbie, don’t dive into markets which have a small target audience. It may be a lucrative idea to enter the space where you don’t have competitors but that’s a delusion as it is.

1. Look for niches which have a lot of followers.
2. Identify topics which are always relevant.

Thus, you will be able to cooperate with vendors or service providers who already have a huge audience. By promoting their products, affiliate marketers can earn decent money.

So, what are these niches? Look no further than this list of potentially profitable sectors/sector types which are the best choices for CPA marketers. They are evergreen because people are always interested in the related products.

1. Health

People are obsessed with their health, so they are looking for extremely diverse information on the Internet. They will keep searching, turning into leads, and purchasing various health-related products. Only the US-based health and wellness industry was worth $171 billion in 2018. Imagine how profitable the worldwide market is!

It’s better to choose a smaller sub-niche to promote more personalized content. Here are some ideas:

• Weight loss
• Smoking addiction
• Healthy food
• Fitness
• Drugs
• Cosmetics

Still, we suggest being more sophisticated in your content, especially if you create articles or reviews. For example, “tips for young women who want to save their beauty” sounds better in terms of customer engagement than “weight loss”, generally.

2. Wealth

According to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, when health is fine, people start thinking about wealth. From popular questions about making millions from home to webinars for new entrepreneurs, Internet users want to know everything about money. Obviously, you can earn a lot in this market. The global e-commerce retail industry was worth $6.5 trillion in 2023!

As for examples, here they are:

• Personal finance
• Investment
• E-commerce
• iGaming
• Forex
• Cryptocurrency

Again, as the niche is extremely large, we recommend focusing on a specific topic. Do you know a lot about crypto trading? Then join the affiliate network of popular Bitcoin exchanges and earn money. Maybe, you are keen on online gambling? Educate visitors about casino tricks or poker strategies, and offer them custom promo codes. You got the catch.

3. Relationship

The critical demand of human beings relates to love and relationship. Topics of interest are diverse because people look for all types of interactions from occasional sex to love of their entire life. There are hundreds of books describing pick-up practices, relationship tips, and family life; movies about love and sex; applications for dating; and so on. This means, you should have no problems finding appropriate affiliate projects.

Look at the examples of sub-niches for affiliate marketers:

• Healthy relationship
• Wedding and divorce
• Romance for youngsters/seniors
• Sex life
• Dating apps

Similarly, the more specific the sub-niche you choose, the more chances you have to engage users. Of course, it’s important to match the promoted stuff with your audience.

A Final Word

Always try to find the most suitable and the most profitable sector for you. If you have a travel blog, try promoting travel-related brands even if this niche isn’t the evergreen leader. Remember that your subscribers are the most valuable asset and you should respect them. Deliver only relevant content which will be useful for your customers, so they will appreciate even promotional CPA links.

Affiliate marketing may seem a pretty simple tool for earning money, but it has many challenges for newbie advertisers as well. Be expert in the industry; use specialized tools/platforms; and know which niches attract your audience. And don’t be afraid to try new approaches. Good luck!