Hi Dave, nice approach. My first niche I abandoned thinking I couldn't become an expert (listening to other's negative comments about it). Having then tried many in between and not got up and running with any of them I'm now back to my first niche and loving it! For me, I needed to hear go with your gut and yes it is a personal interest as that's what I can write about every day without feeling like it's a chore. Good luck choosing your niche. I look forward to hearing more..

Great set of questions.

I had a hard time with niche selection as a young affiliate marketer. I had so many passions and pastimes but 16 years ago there just weren't the millions of affiliate programs there are today. Finally, I realized that since I was learning more about blogging and affiliate marketing each day I should write about my journey as a young affiliate.

Like everyone and I mean everyone at the time I went for the free blogs at blogger which is still a Google company. Yes the embarrassing little blog was a success and yes it made me money, but yes Google owns my content by their contract and could shut it down at any time without warning.

I do still have that blog but other than using it to syndicate an occasional post from my main affiliate blog I haven't used it in years. WordPress is far superior and self-hosted on your own domain name an absolute minimum cost of a serious business online.

My initial expectation was to fall on my face a few times before success and I did but I knew I wouldn't quit and after 3 months I made my first $20 commission through a now-defunct program called Money Train. I still blog about affiliate marketing to this day under the name Affiliate 3 Percent.

You can say it is both personal interest and something I learned to do while thinking I would do well with it. For sure I would have had fewer successes writing on something I just thought I could make money with. No passion is a sure-fire way to sell noting and quit early.

Like I said the site is still up today and was a success making me thousands of dollars but it was a learning experience largely of what not to do. I learned not to program and launch hop there. I learned how to focus on writing for my reader's interest and not for mine, and I learned to build relationships on Myspace and Facebook at the time of operation to promote. I also learned that my best traffic source for niche visitors was through writing articles, not advertisements, and that included off-site as well as on.

My next site MyViralBlog which I lost when I had my nervous breakdown 6 years ago grew to nearly 1 million monthly page views and our search engine and social media hybrid grew to over 3 million monthly page views in part because of what I learned there.

I am now starting a passion project writing about Restaurant management and ownership on a new blog. Passion sells and with millions of affiliate programs and hundreds of millions of products to choose from you can monetize any interest. Be passionate first.

Hi Dave. My first niche, and still my favourite, was in gardening.

Is it a success? Well that depends on your definition of success.

I haven't worked on it for many months , firstly due to illness, and later because I became preoccupied with other sites and other firms of online income.

It was definitely a personal interest.

I learned a lot from building that initial site. I have become clearer on where my future endeavours will take me and what I want to achieve.

I now work on five other websites, two of which are on other platforms.

None of this would have been possible without the training I received here at WA, or the learning experience of that initial site.

All the best. Jim