There used to be a time when figuring out niches was tough for me. But now, it’s easy, so easy in fact that I go out of my way to find weird ones.
And what’s funny is that the following 3 I’m going to show you, will still make you good money if you do the right things. Now I want to put the word “weird” into the proper context. What I mean is, the niches I’m going to give you should give off the following type of reaction:
“You know what, that can actually work, hah, why didn’t I think of this before?”
As long as we keep it within that context, we’ll be fine. I’ve seen some truly strange niche sites that make money over the years, but rather than diving into twilight zone topics and making it too strange, let’s keep it within the context of reasonable…
Before I unveil how to actually monetize these 3 niches, I challenge you to brainstorm how they can make money for a moment. If you’re lost, no problem, I’ll show you how it can be done right now:
1) Selling Game of Thrones merchandise.
- Love the show?
- Love the books?
- Love internet marketing?
Then guess what? This is a weird, yet gigantic niche topic. In fact, here’s some things to consider regarding it:
1) Game of Thrones is arguably the number 1 most popular series in TV history (Unless you count season 8 which as far as I am concerned, never happened!).
2) There are numerous amounts of YouTube channels dedicated to discussing theories on this topic and many of these channels have reached 100K+ subscribers as a result, some have gone beyond a million. Don’t believe me? Here’s an example:
There’s a person on YouTube whose channel is called Alt Shift X and he basically breaks down game of thrones videos:
Keep in mind these view counts that man gets because it’ll be important to showcase what’s possible in terms of making money from it in a moment (I’ll explain).
-There’s who knows how many fan pages on social media and clubs full of people who engage in discussing this show and being die hard fans of it.
These 3 facts alone should be more than enough to understand how big this show and topic is. And with all that, the opportunity to monetize off that popularity as an internet marketer is there.
Here’s just some things you can do to make money with within the Game of Thrones topic:
You can set up a YouTube channel discussing theories on this show, what’ll happen, plot ideas, conspiracy theories, you name it (look up Alt Shift X like I said before and other people like Talking Thrones on YouTube for example, or Emergency Awesome, these guys get 100k+ views on every Game of Thrones video they release).
And remember I told you to remember the view counts Alt Shift X gets? Well he runs ads on his YouTube videos and with a million views per video, I would not be surprised if he gets $5,000-$10,000 in ad revenue. Here is a good YouTube tutorial on how to get started with it and monetize on it with my own personal case studies.
You can set up a blog site discussing these things in text instead of video.
You can set up a fan page on Facebook on social media also discussing this or you can also participate in the many other fan pages which do.
Either way, these things will bring in the traffic, that being the Game of Thrones fan traffic. From there you can market whatever you can imagine that triggers the though of Game of Thrones in people:
You can market things like the actual Song of Ice and Fire books (the true title of Game of Thrones if you didn’t already know).
You can market George R.R. Martin’s other titles (he’s the author of this stuff).
You can market cups that display different icons of Game of Thrones (white walkers, characters from the show, they are out there, believe me).
You can actually find shirts with quotes from the show as well as other things and market those as well.
There’s just tons of opportunities to describe and I would say that marketing them through a personal website or YouTube channel would bring in some amazing traffic numbers in this case.
You can also market to the fan clubs on social media through ads and funnel the traffic to your own fan page, YouTube channel and site.
2) Cosplay costumes.
I credit this idea to an individual who brought up this topic when they were asking me about it’s profit potential. When I saw this, my eyes opened up thinking “Wow, that’s quite the niche topic”. I told that person that YES, this is a great topic to work on.
What is cosplay you ask? Well imagine fictional superheros from comics, anime’s, video games, ect…
Now imagine people making costumes out of these characters and going around showing them off at places like Comic Con. That is cosplay and it is an entire industry with millions of fans in it.
Now where is the marketing for this? Well assuming you understand how to make cosplay costumes, you will have a huge opportunity to work with…
Let’s say you make costumes, create a website or YouTube channel where you give people instructions on making their own costumes.
You can also sell your own costume making services to people looking to dress up and do cosplay. There’s actual professionals who get paid to make these things and they get paid a lot.
Considering how much the anime, video game and comic book world is growing, with it, the branch which is cosplay will also grow, and this will really get you a lot of business should you decide to work in it.
How much potential is there with this “weird niche”? The stats:
I did a simple keyword search for “how to make cosplay costumes” on a keyword tool I use and here’s what came up:
And if you do a regular search for “cosplay costumes”, that gets searched 8,000+ times a month and that doesn’t include the other variations of that keyword, meaning, the topic of cosplay costumes gets 10,000’s of searches a month.
A site dedicated to selling these and teaching people to make it can really make some serious money.
3) Learning to be a spy (Jason Bourne, James Bond, ect…).
Ok I have 2 admissions to make regarding this weird topic…
A) I love watching spy films (Mission Impossible, the Bourne series, the Bond movies, you name it). As such I am very curious about all the spy tech, the martial arts, the intelligence of these guys, how they disappear and engage in their tactics.
And I’m sure there’s many others who understand my amusement in this topic.
B) I actually DID (and still do) have a website where I tested this niche topic out and I was amazed at the results. The whole case study is here, but here are the quick notes:
-I developed a website targeting people looking to FIGHT like Jason Bourne.
-I got 100’s of visits daily.
-I built up an email list of 1,000’s of people and gave them fight advice on this topic.
-To this day, I have NEVER had such an enthusiastic email list of people, it just shows the potential and passion within this niche.
-There was very little to NO competition in this niche so it was EASY to rank on Google. It was even a micro niche if you think about it but so huge that is was a goldmine…
-Unfortunately, I stopped paying attention to this website because I was engaged with other projects, but it shows I was right about it. And I could have truly made some sort of training tutorial videos on how to do this (I train in the arts shown in those movies and I could have set up a YouTube channel that would have gotten tons of views).
But this idea worked, still does and you can replicate it too if you love spy films. I even remember seeing a niche site where a person was advertising the JACKETS spies wore in a movie, yes jackets and they were selling them, that’s how weird, yet realistically profitable it can get!
Let’s hear your weird niche ideas people!
If weird niches aren’t for you, read this:
I can totally understand if the following 3 ideas I gave you aren’t ideal choices. Most people who get into niche marketing tend to stick to more common, popular and well known topics and if this is the category of people you find yourself in, then I can help you, by offering you a list of 100 niches here, that are in most ways, common, but in other ways not exactly well known about either.
They aren’t weird like the 3 choices here, but you’ll be pretty surprised at how you “didn’t think of them” when you read that list 🙂
I can see why Game of Thrones merchandise is a great seller. There are so many people who love watching this show. It is a great show and I used to watch it but I am not able to right now.
I have always thought that number two would be a really good idea. I have a teenage daughter who loves everything anime and often talks about cosplay. These would also work for Halloween costumes.
I never would have thought that people would be interested in being a spy. I know there are a lot of interesting spy shows and movies. A lot of spy gadgets do seem very interesting.
Well regarding the spy niche topic, I was also shocked at how huge that topic was when I experimented with it. Still to this day, I have never had people reach out to me as often as they did when I was running that particular site. My biggest regret is that I didn’t do more with that site and I just left it to decay unfortunately.
Although I’m not a Game of Thrones or a cosplay fan, I can certainly relate to the third niche about becoming a spy (huge fan of James Bond and other spy movies). I can also see how each of these niches would be attractive in terms of the ability to make money. They are all very popular niches with thousands (if not millions) of people interested in them. Great summary for anyone looking for a weird, but potentially incredibly profitable blog niche!
Thank you Tucker! Glad we agree on the spy stuff 🙂
Hey Vitaliy, very cool article. Finding a niche in affiliate marketing is not easy. Your niche really needs to be something you are passionate about. These 3 niches you mention on the article are truly out of the box. Do you think that finding weird or out of the box niches helps when it comes to competition?
Yes, the stranger the niche, the less competition there is because marketers generally don’t think about them and the existing competition in the niche is made up of either very few marketers and/or those who don’t understand how to rank websites, so anyone who knows about the weird niche and knows SEO, will be able to do well in these subjects.
Wow! i didn’t know you could even make money from doing things such as spying, selling games of thrones, and costumes, It’s amazing because in that case making money should be easy for everyone if you can make easy money off any and everything. Great information to take along the way.
Well it’s not easy money, there’s just a lot of options out there, but each one still requires effort and work to become a real business Courtney.
You know what I find so amazing, the many ways you can make money and a business out of so many things. There seems to be a market for just about everything. Who would have thought that you could make money with these niches? I am of the belief that your viewers will find your post to be very interesting.
Yeah as you gain more and more experience, you will find that niches are everywhere and it’s kind of fun to challenge yourself to find ones like these Norman. But I’ll tell you, there’s GREAT potential in these, despite them being unorthodox or weird.