How did you decide on your affiliate marketing niche?

The B2B niche is typically the most profitable.  Businesses are willing to pay significantly more than consumers, so B2B businesses can charge more. Take the website builder market for example.  The cheap consumer website builders pay out a couple dollars per referral while http://profitpress.com, a B2B website builder, pays out $100 per referral. You'll frequently see this trend with most affiliate programs, so always go for the B2B programs.  That's where the money is!

While choosing an affiliate niche you have to ensure that there is an audience market looking for the information which you are going to promote and also find out that you have ability to reach them. For finding your audience- You have to check competition on PPC advertising in the niche,if people are not paying to advertise , it may not be favourable to promote it. Also check the ranking of the niche on different search engines for the keywords in the niche . Isall you see on the search engines is the offcial website ?Or different blogs and reviews of particular niche in rankings Check out how much efforts it will take to outrank the existing competition. You can also choose a niche where you can go narrow with the ability to expand it. Let me explain it with an example. Suppose you want to create a blog or website on 'recipe' niche. You know that its very competitive area to build a brand . So you may focus and choose a specific recipe style like low fat recipes, low carb recipes, Paleo recipes, holiday recipes, dessert recipes. So here you have an opportunity to expand into wider content and can monitize it with different affiliate programs available .Moreover in the same scenario you will get tons of potential to  market variety of products like pans, cooking utensils, cook books, bakeware etc. Ensure that there are multiple affiliate opportunities and advertiser demand in your niche. Here is the blog highlighting the 7 hot niches of 2013  in Affiliate Marketing- http://www.dekh.com/blog/post/7-hot-niches-for-affiliate-marketing-in-2013

I've been doing affiliate marketing full time for 10 years so maybe I can help! To answer your first question, it all started with an ebook back in 2003. I read an affiliate marketing ebook and then did some research on the person who wrote it to see what THEY were promoting. I discovered their main niche and figured "if it works for them, it can work for me." It's been working for 10 years. I think that what you decide to promote should depend partly on HOW you intend to promote. Are you blogging? Are you going to buy your traffic and send it directly? Are you creating your own service or product to promote affiliate links on the side? Maybe social media is your thing? Some niches are going to be more conducive to certain promotional methods than others. Think about deciding on your promotional METHOD first, because that will in part determine your niche. For example, if you don't like writing then a blog is a no-go (unless you hire writers), or if you don't have a tolerance for risk you might not want to become an ad buyer. (Although you did say you're interested in the stock market...). Once you know how you're going to get traffic, you will see that it's going to work better with some niches than others. Another factor that might help you choose a niche are the number or affiliate programs available. It's good if there are multiple programs out there because some are going to convert like gold and others are going to be a waste of time. The more you can compare and test the better. Ultimately, you can sit around trying to decide your niche but the best way is to just choose 2 or 3 different things and test them out. You cannot learn what you need to know any faster than by actually doing. Doing and testing. I have to throw money around quite a bit when looking for something new. (That self-hypnosis campaign was a big loser!) But when you find something that really converts it will be worth it in the long run. Also, don't be afraid of high-competition when choosing a niche. It's high-competition for a reason - it's working for a lot of people! The marketing niche you mention would be one of these. As for the networks, don't focus on what affiliate network to use. Once you choose your niche, find the specific products or services that you want to promote, then look for that affiliate/webmaster link on their site. Some will be using networks such as CJ but some will have an in-house program. Don't let the fact that you only use a certain network limit your choices. Best of Luck!

It's simple. Almost every niche will make you money. All you have to do is pick one, focus on it and then start driving traffic to it. You can do this by usinf various traffic generation methods and tools to help you along the way. Here's a list of some of the best traffic generation tools I've used in the past: http://www.jamie-anderson.com/tools-of-the-trade

Definitely focus on the B2B niche, there's so much more money with businesses compared to consumer products.

How I chose my niche?I asked myself these points: Am I passionate about the subject? If you have a real love for a topic or interest, making a http://www.howtostartworkingathome.com/how-to-build-a-website-step-by-step/ will be that bit more fun. Can I write about it? A niche with many aspects and angles to it will provide lots of topics to write about. Would I find researching the topic interesting and appealing? Having a genuine interest in your niche and reviewing related products related to it is an important factor in choosing the road to go down. Is it Profitable? Depending on how well you can monetize your website will determine whether it is a niche worth pursuing or not. Check out if there are products you can sell or promote, or if there are affiliate programmes or lots of Amazon products available. If you'd like to read more of my article it's here: http://www.howtostartworkingathome.com/how-to-start-working-at-home/best-way-to-choose-a-niche/

I co-founded a company that helps affiliate marketers take a more data driven approach to finding new products and niches to promote. We offer a trends api that allows you to tap into the vast amount of retail sales data driven through our network. You can see which products are selling by region, category, and much more. It's completely free to use. We also offer a product api and several wordpress plugins and tools to help you monetize once you settle on a niche. http://prosperent.com/documentation/api/trends