While choosing a niche can be hard, not knowing enough about that niche can create roadblocks you weren’t expecting.
In many online courses to become an affiliate marketer, you will hear that you don’t need to be an expert in your niche.
All you need is to know a little more than most people and you are good to go.
Really? Is it enough?
Let’s go through this.
Authority and credibility
The most profitable industries are health, wealth and relationships. If you are not a doctor, a certified financial advisor or a psychologist, it will be harder for you to establish your authority.
Then every other niche can be profitable when you know what products or offers can really help people.
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Again, is creating a pet website when you don’t have pets a good idea? How can you become an authority in your niche if you don’t have experience with what you are talking about?
Unless you have a good friend or a relative that is working in your industry and in your niche, you may find it hard to build your credibility.
And the longer your credibility takes to build up, the longer it takes for you to have any authority, the longer it will take to start earning money.
Of course, you can position yourself as a beginner and teach others as you learn new things.
That is a good alternative, since you will experience some struggles and you will be able to talk about that and share your experience.
It could be a good alternative, but it won’t work for every niche or industry.
Know that Google is making sure that people ranking for the health industry are real doctors or medical associations.
I’m not sure how you can compete with that to rank in the first results on Google.
Before you jump into a niche, you have to do some research and see who is the authority in that niche. If there isn’t any, awesome, jump in!
Having a hard time finding topics to write about
If you are not an expert in your niche, you may have a hard time finding new topics to write about.
As a beginner, you may find it easy to find about 20 topics to write about (or talk about in videos or in podcasts).
But as time passes by, you may find it harder and harder to find new topics to write about. You don’t know much about the industry or niche you chose. You are not aware of all the struggles and the problems people have.
Real experts are fully aware of what their audience needs to solve their problems.
If you are in a popular industry, like make money online, you will soon realize that there are a lot of authoritative websites that already cover most topics.
Some of the articles are very well detailed.
While others would need another approach to really answer the question you asked Google.
The thing is that you may not be able to know what people are looking for in your niche if you are not an expert.
Which leads to the next point.
Spending Countless Hours Doing Research and Learning
As a non expert, you will need to spend a lot of time learning about your niche so you can create relevant pieces of content for your audience.
Giving value to your audience is not an easy task.
You may feel overwhelmed with all the information you are learning and trying to create something that will help your audience with their problems.
Keep in mind that the more time you spend researching and learning on your niche, the less time you have to create great pieces of valuable content.
I wrote an article on creating valuable content. You can read it here.
The less time you have to create valuable content, the less content you have, the less growth you’ll have, the less money you’ll earn.
That is something you may want to consider.
You can learn a lot about writing blogs and creating good Youtube videos in a few hours. What you have to do is to practice to become better at it.
If you are in an industry you don’t know enough about, you will have to spend more time doing research, visiting forums or being active in Facebook groups.
Even though it is part of being an affiliate marketer, you may feel like you are spending most of your time doing research rather than creating content.
That’s also true when the time comes to choose products to promote. It’s hard to promote the right product for your audience if you have never tried it.
Know that you will have to spend more time researching the internet to read others’ reviews and complaints so you gather enough data to create a good piece of content that isn’t something that has already been written.
This is actually one of the biggest problems in the health, wealth and relationship industries. People are doing some research and are regurgitating what everybody else is saying.
That leaves us with a lot of thin content. You know, content that doesn’t give anything to the reader.
I’ve stumbled on that type of content A LOT.
The good thing with that is that you can create better content if you put in the efforts.
You Have a Beginner’s Point of View
Well, there has to be something positive about not being an expert in your niche.
As you are getting started to learn about your niche, you have a great opportunity to write down all the questions that come up.
Then, you can write an article or create a video that answers that question.
This is a great way to get started if you really have no idea what you are an expert in. You pick something you enjoy or something you feel you could develop a real interest in and you dive in.
I mean, look at the experts. Sometimes, or most of the time, it feels like they have forgotten what it’s like to be a beginner.
You can use it to your advantage if you take your beginner’s role seriously.
You might be able to build credibility and authority faster because you will be able to build relatability.
People love to be able to relate to others.
And frankly, can you relate to someone that has over 100,000 visitors on their website (or YouTube channel) every week when you are a total beginner?
This is where you can rise and shine by documenting everything and sharing what you learn along the way.
In Conclusion
Not being an expert in your niche will require you more work to get the results you want.
As a real expert, it is easier to build credibility and authority in your niche.
You also have a lot of knowledge to know what people need to solve their problems.
As a beginner, you have tons of work that awaits you. If you put in the efforts, you can really create something super valuable for your audience and reach your goals faster.
All you need is to be ready to dive in and take this side hustle seriously.
But as you first get started, I strongly suggest you jump into a niche where you already have much more knowledge than most people.
It will make your life a little easier as you will focus on creating content.
Then, you will be able to build something in another niche that you have interest in. You will already be good at creating content.
You will only need to focus to learn and share your knowledge.
Cynthia