How To Find A Niche For Affiliate Marketing And Blogging: 5 Ways to Find Niches Fast

Most people stall before they ever start. They want to build a blog or an affiliate marketing site, but they cannot settle on a niche. They scroll through lists of “profitable niches” someone posted online, feel like every good one is taken, and do nothing. This post is about fixing that problem with five concrete methods Alston walks through in the video above.

These are not abstract suggestions. Each method gives you something physically to do right now, using tools and resources you already have access to, so you can land on a niche idea and start validating it before you write a single word of content.

What You’ll Walk Out With

A mental model for why almost any topic can become a real, profitable niche
Five specific research methods you can run today at little to no cost
How to reverse-engineer a product back to a content niche using Ahrefs with keyword difficulty set to 5 or less
Real income report numbers from live bloggers in niches like knitting, flooring, and survival to show the range of what is possible
How Google Trends filters out niches that will collapse in six months so you do not waste a year building the wrong thing
The one personal test that determines whether you should write your own content or outsource it in your chosen niche
A clear next step for matching your niche to an income model at finder.platformproof.com

Method 1: Walk the Magazine Aisle at Your Grocery Store

Every magazine sitting on a grocery store shelf was built by a publishing company targeting a specific audience willing to pay money for information about a specific topic. That means every magazine is already a niche. Publishers only print and distribute magazines in topic areas with a proven, paying readership. They have done the market research for you.

In the video, Alston holds up an issue of Family Handyman magazine. The cover story is “Better Garage Storage.” That is a niche in its own right. But flipping through the pages reveals sub-niches stacked on top of each other: garage lighting solutions, battery storage systems, charging centers, lawnmower accessories, power tools, and seasonal storage ideas. The magazine even runs a feature called “28 Ideas Under $20,” which is a ready-made blog post format sitting right there on the cover.

To work this method, walk the magazine aisle and look at the cover of every magazine. Do not buy anything. Just write down the cover topics. Each main feature is a niche. Each sidebar or small product callout is a sub-niche. A magazine about watches becomes a niche. A magazine about knitting becomes a niche. A magazine about do-it-yourself home projects becomes a niche with dozens of sub-niches inside it.

Once you spot a niche from a cover, take the specific product or topic to a keyword research tool and check how many people are searching for it. Alston references the M18 Fuel Gen 2 18-volt 18-gauge lithium-ion brushless cordless brad nailer as a specific example. That product has a searchable audience of people comparing tools before buying. A review blog covering the best brad nailers in that product category could rank for dozens of related terms and earn affiliate commissions from Amazon Associates every time a reader clicks through and buys.

The grocery store method works because it is grounded in physical reality. If a magazine has been printing for years and is still on shelves, that niche has a committed audience. That is more reliable than any online list of “trending niches” that may or may not reflect real buyer intent.

Method 2: Mine Your Amazon Order History

Pull up your Amazon account and open your recent orders. Every item you bought is a product someone else is also buying or researching before buying. That makes every purchase in your order history a potential niche entry point.

Alston walked through his own order history live in the video. Two examples came up. First, a toothpaste dispenser he bought for his kids. That single product points toward the bathroom accessories for kids niche, or more broadly, home organization for parents with young children. Second, a tooth fairy pillow he had not even known existed until he needed one. That is its own niche topic: kids milestone products, baby gear, or parenting accessories for specific life moments.

Here is the reverse-engineering process in plain steps:

Pick a product from your order history that you use and understand
Copy the full product name and paste it into Google with the word “review” added at the end
Skip the Amazon listings and find an actual blog or independent review site in the results
Copy that blog’s domain and paste it into Ahrefs site explorer
Click “Organic Keywords” and filter keyword difficulty to 5 or less
Browse the results to confirm there is a real keyword cluster you could build content around

Keyword difficulty (KD) runs from 0 to 100. A score near 100 means established sites with thousands of backlinks dominate the search results and a new site has almost no realistic path to page one without years of authority-building. A score of 5 or less means a new site with quality content can realistically rank. For anyone starting a first or second blog, filtering to KD 5 or less is not optional. It is the strategy that makes early results possible before you have any domain authority.

Alston demonstrated this live using “japan hair dye” as a test keyword pulled from browsing a competitor’s organic keyword list. That one keyword had 105 matching terms in Ahrefs. Broadening it to just “hair dye” returned 225,000 keywords across the broader niche. A single product from your Amazon history can open up a keyword universe that takes years to fully cover. You do not need all 225,000 keywords. You need 50 low-KD ones to get started.

Method 3: Amazon Browse Plus Blogger Income Reports

The second way to use Amazon is to browse its main product categories as if they were a niche directory. Go to the main navigation, choose a broad category like Electronics, then drill into a sub-category like Wearable Technology. Inside that sub-category you will find dozens of product types: smart glasses, body cameras, fitness bands, audio wearables. Each of those product types is a potential niche or a sub-niche within a larger niche.

Alston demonstrated this by clicking into the Echo Frames listing on Amazon, then searching for reviews of that product online. The top results were dominated by major tech outlets: The Verge, Wired, Tom’s Guide. Those are extremely competitive results for a new site. But further down the results page was AndroidCentral.com. When analyzed in Ahrefs, that site’s organic keyword list, filtered to KD 5 or less, revealed beatable target keywords in the same tech niche. The point is not to compete with The Verge head to head. The point is to find the low-competition pockets those major publishers ignore because the traffic volume is too small for them to bother with but large enough for a new affiliate site to build from.

Pair Amazon browsing with blogger income reports and the picture gets sharper. Income reports are blog posts that real bloggers publish sharing exactly how much their site earned in a given month, broken down by source. Alston credited this method to the YouTuber Affiliate Marketing Dude. Income reports matter because they confirm that a niche is not just interesting but financially productive.

To find income reports, search Google for: niche name + “income report” + “per month”. Once you find a site publishing those reports, run the domain through Ahrefs and filter organic keywords to KD 5 or less. Alston did this live with Easy Baby Life, a site in the baby and parenting niche. The filtered keyword list returned opportunities like “what to do instead of watching tv,” which is the kind of long-tail search term a parenting site can rank for and attach to family-friendly product recommendations.

The income reports Alston scrolled through in the video covered niches that most people would never think to build a blog around: food, lifestyle, veganism, travel, Amazon shopping, eBay reselling, DIY interior design, knitting, flooring, survival gear, and a SketchUp tutorial site. All of them were generating consistent monthly revenue. The survival niche site hit seven figures monthly. The knitting site approached $10,000 per month. None of them required the creator to be a celebrity, a professional writer, or an expert with credentials.

Not sure which niche matches your skills and schedule?

Take the free quiz at finder.platformproof.com and get a personalized answer in under two minutes.

Method 4: Google Trends for Validation and Discovery

Google Trends tells you whether people are still searching for a topic, whether interest is growing or declining over time, and what related topics are spiking right now. Every niche you identify with the first three methods should run through Google Trends before you commit any time to building content around it.

The example Alston used in the video was the search term “corona” tracked over the year and a half of the pandemic period. At the time of recording, searches were extremely high. But the question every niche researcher needs to ask is: will people still be searching for this 18 months from now? In the case of corona-related searches, the answer was almost certainly no, at least not at pandemic-level volume. Niches built around temporary events, news cycles, or single pop-culture moments are traps. They spike and collapse. A sustainable blog needs a niche with steady or growing interest measured across years, not months.

Google Trends has two features worth using beyond the basic search bar. First, Trending Searches, which updates in real time and shows what people are searching for at this moment. Alston mentions sports events, film releases, and news stories as examples. The exercise is to ask whether any of those trending topics has an evergreen affiliate angle attached to it, meaning an angle that stays relevant long after the news moment passes. Tennis as a niche has staying power even if the trending search was triggered by a specific match. Second, the Explore by Category feature, which lets you drill from a broad category into sub-topics.

Alston demonstrated the Explore feature by going into Beauty and Fitness, then drilling into Fitness, then selecting Bodybuilding as a sub-category. Within that drill-down, a keyword called “pure health result” appeared as a trending topic. Running that phrase in Ahrefs returned 2,000 matching keywords and 12,000 monthly searches. That is a viable niche candidate discovered inside Google Trends in under two minutes, with a keyword universe large enough to support months of content.

Alston also recommends using the Year in Search feature, which shows what topics dominated search in a given calendar year. This helps identify patterns across multiple years rather than single spikes. Election results, celebrity news, and one-time sports upsets all show high search volume in a given year but are not the foundation of a long-term blog. Garage storage, knitting, bodybuilding supplements, and survival gear show consistent interest year after year. Cross-referencing your niche idea against multiple years of Trends data is a fast way to separate sustainable topics from fleeting ones before you invest months of content creation in the wrong direction.

Method 5: Your Own Search History as a Niche Finder

This method is the most underused and the most personal. Your Google search history is a direct record of every question you have been genuinely curious about or urgently needed an answer to. That is precisely what a niche blog provides: answers to questions an audience is actively typing into a search bar. Your search history and your future audience’s search history overlap more than you think.

Alston scrolled through his own search history live in the video to show this. He found queries about how to start a wedding blog and monetize it, how to start a Christian blog, and gift ideas for five-year-olds. Each of those is a niche or at minimum a strong content angle within a broader niche. The wedding blog query alone branches into wedding planning resources, bridal product reviews, honeymoon travel recommendations, and wedding vendor affiliate programs. A search you ran because you personally needed the information is almost always a search thousands of other people are running for the same reason.

The practical process is simple. Open your Google search history, filter to the past three to six months, and look for patterns. Are you repeatedly searching for solutions to a specific problem? Are you researching products in a category you buy from often? Are you looking up how-to guides for a skill you are learning? Each pattern is a potential content niche. Take the most frequent or most specific queries and run them through Google Trends and a keyword tool to check whether others are searching for the same things.

One important filter: search history works best when the searches came from a real personal need rather than passing curiosity. “Best gifts for five-year-olds” is a practical need with clear buyer intent attached to it. “What is quantum computing” is curiosity without a direct path to affiliate revenue for a new site. Look for the searches where you were trying to buy something, solve a specific problem at home, or learn a skill you planned to use. Those are the searches that signal an audience with purchase intent, which is the audience an affiliate site needs.

The One Filter That Decides Everything

After running through any or all of the five methods above, you will have more niche ideas than you can realistically pursue. Alston’s filter comes down to a single honest question: can you write it yourself, or do you need to outsource it?

If you write it yourself, you need enough tolerance for the topic to keep producing content when results are slow at the start. Alston shared a personal example in the video: his third blog was his most profitable early-on relative to the effort he put in. It was in a niche that had almost no competition and almost no one was covering. He published ten posts, stopped because he hated writing about it, and walked away. When he came back months later, the site was getting consistent traffic and generating daily sales because no one else was publishing in that space. But he could not scale it because he could not force himself to write more. Passion is not required. But some level of tolerance is.

If you outsource the content, the filter changes. You need a niche that is broad enough for a writer in another country to research from scratch and produce quality articles about, and global enough that cultural specificity does not create accuracy problems. The income report niches Alston browsed through in the video, knitting, flooring, survival, and gardening, are all good candidates for outsourcing. A writer anywhere in the world can research “best knitting needles for beginners” and produce a useful, accurate article without local knowledge. A hyper-local niche like “best coffee shops in Nashville” cannot be outsourced effectively to someone with no knowledge of Nashville.

Alston also flagged SketchUp as a borderline case. The site making around $3,000 per month in the SketchUp niche was one he had never even heard of at the time. That is actually a warning sign for outsourcing. If you do not know what SketchUp is, you cannot evaluate whether an article about it is accurate or useful. You cannot maintain quality in a niche you have no baseline knowledge of. Pick niches where you have enough background to recognize good content from bad, even if you are not the one producing it.

What the Income Report Numbers Actually Show

The income report section of the video is worth sitting with because it challenges an assumption most new bloggers carry into their first niche search. Most people believe they need to be in a “hot” or widely recognized niche, personal finance, fitness, or technology, to generate meaningful revenue. The blogger income report data from the video says otherwise.

Here is what the reports Alston referenced showed:

Knitting blog: almost $10,000 per month. Alston noted these figures came from a report published a few years prior to the recording, meaning the same site is likely earning more now given continued content output and domain age.
Flooring blog: approximately $2,000 per month. Flooring is not a topic anyone would describe as exciting. But it has clear purchase intent attached to it. People searching for “best hardwood flooring brands” are often mid-decision on a home renovation project and ready to buy.
Survival niche: approximately $1,000,000 per month. One site in the survival niche was generating seven figures monthly. The survival content world covers gear reviews, prepping guides, emergency food storage, wilderness skills, and more, all with strong affiliate program options and an audience that buys.
SketchUp tutorial blog: around $3,000 per month in a niche most people have never thought to create content about.
Veganism: listed in the income reports as a strong niche because it is specific enough to attract a loyal audience with clear product interests, dietary supplements, cookbooks, kitchen gear, and vegan-certified clothing, all of which have affiliate programs.

The pattern across every one of these: they are specific, they serve an audience with a clear reason to spend money, and they are attached to product categories with real purchasing budgets. A niche that shows up in income reports, has magazines on physical shelves, has active Amazon product categories, and shows stable interest in Google Trends across multiple years is a validated niche worth building on.

Honest Drawbacks to Watch For

Niche research can turn into its own form of procrastination. Spending three weeks running keywords, reading income reports, and browsing Amazon categories without picking a niche is extremely common. The five methods in this video are meant to be used in a single focused session to generate candidate niches, not as an ongoing research marathon. Pick a niche that passes the Google Trends stability test and has at least 50 keywords at KD 5 or less in a keyword tool. Start writing. You can always expand or adjust after your first 20 posts once you see what is getting traction.

Second drawback: Ahrefs is a paid tool, and Alston uses it throughout the video. It speeds up the validation process considerably. If you are not ready to pay for it, Ubersuggest has a free tier that covers the basics. Keywords Everywhere is a low-cost browser extension. Google’s own free tools, including Search Console, Keyword Planner, and Google Trends, can cover most of the validation workflow without spending anything. The process is identical. It just moves a bit slower without a premium tool.

Third drawback: keyword difficulty scores are estimates, not guarantees. A KD of 5 means the current top-ranking pages have relatively few authoritative backlinks. It does not mean ranking will happen instantly. A new domain with quality content still typically takes three to six months to gain real traction in search results. Budget for that runway before you judge whether a niche is working.

Find Your X

Niche selection is personal. No one can tell you which of the five methods above will click for you specifically. Some people see their clearest path by walking through a magazine aisle for ten minutes. Others find direction by scrolling through income reports. The methods exist so you have options rather than a single rigid formula that fits only certain people.

Once you have a niche candidate that has cleared the research steps, the next question is which income model to attach to it. Not every niche monetizes the same way. Some niches are a natural fit for Amazon Associates commissions. Others have high-ticket affiliate programs that pay far more per sale. Some generate strong display ad revenue but weak affiliate income. The free quiz at finder.platformproof.com matches your niche direction, existing skills, and available schedule to the income model most likely to get you to your first $3,000 online without starting over multiple times the way most beginners do.

Frequently Asked Questions

Do I need to be an expert in a niche to start a blog about it?

No. Most successful affiliate bloggers are not credentialed experts. They are people who know enough about a topic to produce genuinely helpful content, or who hire writers who can research it accurately. What you do need is enough baseline knowledge to judge whether the content you publish is correct and useful. If you cannot evaluate quality, you cannot maintain it, and the blog will not grow past its first few posts.

How many niche ideas should I generate before picking one?

Aim for 10 to 15 candidates across the five methods, then filter them through Google Trends and a quick keyword search. You are looking for niches with stable or growing interest over multiple years and at least 50 keywords at KD 5 or less. From that filtered list, pick the one that best combines your interest or outsourcing potential with proven audience demand. Do not try to find the perfect niche. Find the best available one that passes the filter and start writing.

Is keyword difficulty 5 or less realistic to find in any niche?

Yes. Ahrefs data across the income report sites Alston analyzed consistently returned low-KD keyword clusters even in broadly competitive categories like parenting, fitness, and technology. The key is to target long-tail phrases of three to five words rather than short head terms. “Best bathroom accessories for kids” has a much lower KD than “bathroom accessories” even though they are in the same niche. Specificity is how new sites find their opening in competitive spaces.

What if I find a niche I like but the income reports show low earnings?

Income report numbers reflect what a specific publisher earned with their specific content strategy, publishing volume, and time investment. A low number does not mean the niche is unprofitable. It may mean the publisher had a small site or was early in their growth at the time they published the report. Use income reports to confirm that money exists in a niche, not to predict exactly what you will earn. A flooring blog making $2,000 per month is proof that flooring is monetizable. What you actually earn depends on your content output, keyword targeting, and the affiliate programs you choose.

Can I use Google Trends by itself without a keyword tool?

Google Trends shows relative popularity over time but does not display actual monthly search volumes or keyword difficulty scores. You can use it alone to confirm that a topic has lasting interest rather than being a temporary trend. For a complete picture, combine Trends with Google Keyword Planner, which is free with a Google Ads account, or with Ubersuggest’s free tier to get search volume and competition data before committing to a niche.

Why is veganism a better niche than general health?

General health is a category dominated by media brands and pharmaceutical companies with unlimited content budgets. Veganism is a specific subset of health with its own product categories, its own community, and its own affiliate program landscape, vegan cookbooks, supplements, kitchen equipment, and clothing. A new site can realistically compete for vegan-specific keywords where it cannot compete for broad health keywords. Specificity is an advantage for new publishers, not a limitation.

How do I handle income report data that might be several years old?

Alston acknowledged in the video that the income reports he was browsing were published a few years earlier. The purpose of income reports in niche research is directional confirmation, not precision prediction. If a knitting blog was making $10,000 per month several years ago, that tells you the knitting audience spends money and that affiliate and ad revenue are both viable in the space. That structural fact does not expire quickly. Use the report as confirmation that money exists, then verify current demand through Google Trends and a keyword tool before you commit to building content in that niche.

Should I start one niche site or several smaller ones at once?

Start with one. Alston built three blogs before hitting meaningful results, which he describes as the harder path in hindsight. A single site given consistent content output for six months and 50 to 100 targeted posts has a far better chance of ranking and generating revenue than three sites each receiving a third of the effort. Once one site is generating stable income, the lessons from building it make the second site much faster to grow. Spreading effort across multiple sites early means none of them gets the content volume needed to gain search authority, and none provides enough data to learn from.

Sources

Alston Godbolt, “How To Find A Niche For Affiliate Marketing And Blogging,” YouTube, https://youtu.be/pSO4BAueRlE
Ahrefs keyword difficulty scale and site explorer, ahrefs.com
Google Trends, trends.google.com
Affiliate Marketing Dude YouTube channel (source of the income report research method referenced in the video)
Family Handyman magazine (niche example referenced in the video)