Please note that affiliate links may be included in some posts.
This niche report is pretty exciting for me.
Why?
Because I'm personally pursuing it. The good news is that there's a ton of wide-open white space in this niche, so you don't have to worry about me eating up all the opportunity.
The niche is ticket sales. More specifically, becoming an affiliate for a ticketing platform like Ticketmaster, Ticketfly (an Eventbrite company) or TicketNetwork.
Video Explainer: Why I Like This Niche
Check out my video walk through below- I examine why I like this niche and discuss strategy. I'd be deeply appreciative if you left a like or a comment on the video. I respond to all comments!
How does this work?
You'll be writing up local event guides for Chattanooga, Tennessee, for example.
You'll be profiling local concert halls, ranking for these low competition terms, and adding your ticket affiliate links to the page.
It doesn't even have to be concert halls- you can profile local sports teams, regional music acts, even business conferences.
For example, since I'm a rabid Knicks fan, you can even be an affiliate for Knicks tickets. You can even niche down and profile the Westchester Knicks- the Knicks G-League team.
Keyword Research
Below, I extracted 1,000 of SongKick's venue category pages.
As you can see below, there's a ton of venues with significant search volume and low Keyword Difficulty scores.
For example, the term "foxwoods concerts" has a KD of 1 with 6,800 searches a month. The term "lincoln hall chicago" has a KD of 0 with 5,900 searches a month.
The point being, there's a ton of search volume, with very little competition, for venue terms.
With a couple backlinks from guest posting, my guess is it'll be pretty easy to rank for these terms and monetize traffic with a ticket, flight, parking affiliate partner.
Why I Like This Niche
- I love SEO + affiliate plays- it's my favorite way to make money online.
- It diversifies me from depending on one affiliate program too much.
- It's interesting discovering local concert halls and entertainment centers.
- It's easy to generate cheap content- having my team of writers rewrite Yelp and Google reviews to generate landing pages that rank for buyer-intent keywords like "[venue name] + tickets".
- Represents an opportunity to get into the ultra-lucrative 'travel' niche.
*If Google Trends doesn't load- just refresh the page.
Ticket Affiliate Programs
- Ticketfly (25% of sale)
- TicketNetwork (12% of sale)
- StubHub (7% of sale)
- TicketMaster (varies by region)
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The Best Part
Some of these websites also partner with Parking affiliate programs, Hotel affiliate programs, and Air Travel affiliate programs. This is an excellent, 'backdoor' way of tapping into ultra-lucrative travel affiliate programs.
Now, imagine you've written up a profile of Bobby Bakala's Chattanooga Bar & Grill- you're ranking on the first page for this imaginary location.
This page will have links to upcoming shows as well as affiliate links for pre-paid parking, flights and even hotels! Out of town attendees will conceivably use your links to buy the ticket, buy a flight, purchase accommodation, and maybe register with a parking garage.
Now imagine you build a content machine that pumps out these hyper-local music hall profiles. There are thousands and thousands of venues across America each with thousands of searches a month.
Some of the ticketing giants like TicketFly don't even bother to create good content for their venue pages. There's just too many of them to cover. For example, check out TicketFly's page for Bowery Electric, a concert hall near me in NYC.
Bowery Electric | New York, NY
for party reservations and general info 212-228-0228
There's no content on it! It has the widget that produces the upcoming schedule. That's it. It currently ranks on the first page for the 9,900 monthly search term "bowery electric".
While your site won't have the same domain authority as a site like TicketFly, you can outcompete them on content.
Write a 1,000 words on Bowery Electric. Hell, write 2,000. See what happens. I'm honestly surprised at how little content there is for pages ranking on the first page...
Using A Ticket Plugin Creator
When I joined TicketNetwork, they link to where you can create customized ticket plugins like the one below that I made for Bowery Electric:
A Great Opportunity For Beginners
This is also a great niche for noobs because these ticketing services are hungry for affiliates. Which means you'll likely be accepted.
(Though the Amazon Associates program is still the best place to start if you're looking for a high-converting, easy-to-join affiliate program.)
It's not like applying to some snooty program that has 'artisinal' standards for their affiliates. Like they're doing you a favor letting you into their program.
The ticket business is cut throat and these ticket platforms are desperate for traffic. No doubt they're upselling the leads you send them on their end- the traffic you send their way is REALLY valuable.
If you buy a ticket from one of these purveyors, you'll have provided both your email and credit card/PayPal information to them.
This means that upselling you going forward is easier now that they've locked in your payment information, they have your email, they know your location and music tastes. You shouldn't have too much difficulty getting into one of the programs.
How I Discovered This Opportunity
I try to spend some part of my day wandering around the internet brainstorming for new ideas.
One of my favorite websites is Flippa.com. It's a place to bid on websites and domains. It's also a great place to get inspiration.
I found an auction listing for a site that uses this ticket affiliate model. It appealed to me straightaway. The SEO --> affiliate offer recipe is probably the most delicious opportunity online, providing the means for true passive income
Ultra Secret Content Tip
I was listening to the AffiliateBuzz podcast recently where a Vinny O'Hare, a successful niche site marker, talked about one of his secret content strategies.
In a nutshell, he'll use the WordPress plugin Gravity Forms to interview people in his niche. The respondents will fill out the survey, submit it back to his site and because Gravity forms integrates with WordPress, the response can be imported as an unpublished Post.
This means that he gets tons of User Generated (i.e. Free) content. Obviously there needs to be an incentive for the survey respondents to do this. In his case, he runs a site in the book niche and he's interviewing authors who are desperate for some added publicity.
Down the line, I anticipate doing something similar- sending out Gravity Forms to music venues and publishing their responses to rake in more traffic.
Breaking Down The Niche
The opportunity
Rank for low competition local businesses (concert halls, convention centers) like this local event guide site does.
Any place that your ticket affiliate partner has tickets for.
Add in your affiliate links using the 'widget' tool that TicketNetwork provides and voila you have a high-converting landing page.
How to get traffic
This is a SEO-heavy opportunity. That said, depending on the quality of your writeups, you could discover some social media traction.
For me, I'm really going to focus on building out these local business landing pages.
If you need writers, check out my UpWork hiring guide. Also to be sure to read my domain name buying guide. It really isn't rocket science- choose a city like Chattanooga, search for it in the ticketing service you've affiliated with, pick some of the venues from the list and writeup your profiles.
Once you've profiled all of the venues in a city, move on to a new city.
How to make money
As I've covered in the intro, you'll monetize by joining ticket, parking, flight and hotel affiliate programs. Traffic comes from SEO.
Don't be impatient!
Especially if you're a beginner, give it a couple months before you start seeing a trickle of profit.
Last Updated on March 13, 2021 by Ryan Nelson
Hi Ryan,
enjoyed your article. I have been trying to promote offers through TicketNetwork via Google organic traffic and Facebook ppc, but have very low conversions, despite sending quite a lot of traffic to their site. Any ideas what I could be doing wrong? Happy to pm my urls.
Thanks- great info.
I am thinking of using fanpages of singers and bands to promote using Ticketmaster as an affiliate product. Are there any other things I can promote?
Your idea of using local event is GREAT as competition is much lower.
But as a person based in Asia, how do I go about finding these places where I can set up a website for that?
Other affiliate products, do you mean? Or other traffic sources? In the post, I also mention using flight/hotel/parking affiliate programs. In terms of finding venues- you can just use Google Maps and search for “concert” or “music” and just come up with a list that way of different venues- keep track of the search volume for each and begin publishing content on them.
Hi
I am curious do you visit the place you write posts on? If not how do you write them and in what way?
Thanks great info
Well, in the context of ‘rank and bank’, you’re just aiming to rank for the terms. For extra authenticity, sure, you could visit the sites, take photo/videos- that would be awesome. But you could also add value by compiling information about the venues that you research- parking information, contact details, etc. You could just summarize what people are saying on Yelp and TripAdvisor, for example.