So my goal is:

  • $250 a day
  • from affiliate marketing
  • by the beginning of the Fall 2016 semester (about three months from now).

This inherent difficulty here is compounded by the fact that I have no idea what I am doing.

What should I be doing?

As far as I can tell from the literature, I should:

  1. Choose a niche
  2. Find a product in that niche.
  3. Figure out how to sell it.

Right. This post is about my thought process trying to find a niche, market, or cultural group to sell to.

What niche/products to focus on?

There seems to be two general schools of thought on this:

  • Find products that have a high conversion or Click Bank gravity score (or some other measure of income potential), and promote those, regardless of your own personal interests.
  • Find a niche/topic that you have personal interest or expertise in.

It seems like the first option is not ideal for (at least) the following reasons:

  • If everyone did this, everyone would gravitate to a very small set of products, eventually eliminating profits.
  • If I sell something I don’t really know anything about, how do I know if it is any good? That presents some ethical problems I’m really comfortable with.
  • If I’m not really interested in the subject, my only motivation will be money. Besides potential ethical problems with that, I don’t really think that I will be able to martial myself to focus on something I’m just not that interested in.

So… what am I actually interested in?

Here is a list of things I have some real amount of interest in (in no particular order):

  • Music, specifically church music
  • Singing, vocal technique
  • Songwriting
  • Theatre
  • Liturgy/Ritual
  • Theology
  • Philosophy
  • Libertarianism, Anarchocapitalism, Classical liberalism
  • Economics, Investing, Markets
  • Bitcoin, cryptocurrency, cryptography
  • Open source, open content, Free software movement
  • Computer science
  • Typography, typesetting, book publishing, LaTeX
  • Writing, blogging
  • Affiliate marketing, making money online
  • Knowledge management
  • Pop psychology
  • Learning to code (especially Python)
  • Technical writing
  • Education
  • Children’s books
  • Web design

Wow, that’s a lot of things. And there’s probably more. (Yes, this is part of the general problem of my life — being interested in so many things makes it difficult to focus.)

And which one(s) might be profitable?

Well, let’s start eliminating some things:

All the church and theology related ones seem like bad choices to me right now. I do have some ideas for creating my own products and services in this area, but the only affiliate marketing programs in this area are either really terrible or completely out of line with my beliefs (or, mostly, both).

There are plenty of music-focused products, but they tend to focus on pop music, which I have nearly zero interest in. If there were some good affiliate programs for gregorian chant or choral music, maybe that would work — but I haven’t found any.

I think that the “make money online” niche is at least 90% scammy crap. Unfortunately, I don’t really have any idea how to know which products are crap and which could actually be useful. Mostly, though, I think that making money by teaching people to make money, when you don’t know how to make money any other way is a little… sketchy, at best.

Some of the good coding schools and bootcamps have affiliate marketing programs, but that area is so intensely saturated right now that I don’t really think I can make much headway. Maybe this is wrong, but I cannot currently envision a way to overcome the noise here. On a related note, I am so much an amateur on the CS front.

The Open Source and Free Software movements don’t strike me as a good place to sell proprietary information products. The dissonance here seems much too high.

I’ve seen a few products related to acting, but that was never the aspect of theatre that I was much interested in. And I don’t care at all about Hollywood, TV, movies, or getting into commercials.

So that leaves…?

I’ll skip a few other issues, and focus on positive opportunities.

There are decently healthy affiliate programs in the following areas:

  • Libertarianism, etc.
  • Investing and Economics
  • Bitcoin, cryptocurrency
  • Book publishing, especially self-publishing (which I am very interested in)
  • Children’s book writing

I would love to spend some personal time learning more about self-publishing. So that’s an option. Combined with any kind of focus on children’s books would be neat too. And I own two domain names that might work well in this area. And I’m a parent.

But I’m much more interested in publishing my own books than I am with selling affiliate products that teach other people how to do so. Maybe I’ll circle back on this.

The first three… that’s an interesting nexus. It’s actually a bunch of different, intersecting markets.

Libertarianism, Investing, and Affiliate Marketing

Libertarians and Anarchocapitalists have a non-mainstream view of economics (one I share), and so they have an unusual view of investing, currency, and similar subjects. They’re into gold, and bitcoin, and other alternative assets. They don’t trust the government, or most mainstream information sources, so they tend to seek out alternative sources of information.

There’s a long-standing culture of newsletter sales within the libertarian community, along with a lot of other information-product buying. There are a bunch of high-quality affiliate marketing programs in this general area.

There’s opportunities here to make recurrent income, both in newsletter subscriptions and also commissions from investment platforms.

And besides my own personal interest in this topic, I have some personal “assets” that could help:

  • I am friends with a bunch of libertarians, including one who has made a living selling information products (books and newsletters).
  • I have an existing, if mostly neglected, blog on a well-trafficked libertarian blog network.
  • I am on the writing staff of a well-trafficked traditionalist religious blog. There isn’t a perfect overlap here, but a lot of those readers lean libertarian.
  • I own a couple domain names related to this topic.
  • I used to work in financial services, and have a fairly decent understanding of the relevant concepts.

Any problems with this niche?

There are some issues. None of them are deal-breakers, but they are worth thinking about.

  • As with all money-related topics, there’s a lot of scammy, spammy crap. Fortunately, I believe I have enough knowledge in this area to be able to avoid the worst offenders.

  • Even the good content is often sold with no small amount of paranoia and fear-mongering. I object to this approach, but it can be difficult to know where to draw the line. Some things are legitimately worth being scared about.

  • Outside of libertarian circles (for example — many reader of this blog), a lot of this stuff sounds like quackery and scams. I legitimately worry that being publicly associated with it might damage my reputation. On the other hand, Peter Thiel encourages dangerous beliefs, so maybe I should just get over my concern for other people’s opinions.

Finding products

My next post two posts will discuss:

  • products in this intersection of niches and
  • an initial plan for getting started and moving towards $250/day.

As far as products go, I am looking for:

  • Newsletters and membership programs
  • Investment platforms
  • Investment advice, plans, strategies

I’m hoping to find products that pay either:

  • at least $250 per sale (meaning I only have to sell one a day to reach my goal);
  • on a recurring basis, so that I can build up an income stream.

Anything that does both will rise to the top.

For a strategy/plan, I am trying to:

  • find things that cost little or no money, or
  • can be bootstrapped from a very small initial investment
  • build an asset of some sort so that over time each sale gets progressively easier, cheaper, or more valuable.

Can you help?

Do you think this is a good niche? Any ideas for improving it? Do you already know of products or other resources in this area that could be helpful? Ideas for a plan?

Please share. Thanks.