White Hat Blogging is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, in addition, I am an independent Jasper Affiliate, not an employee. I receive referral payments from Jasper and possibly other affiliates.
This is a quite interesting niche that straddles between bicycling and the backpacking worlds which means it offers a large number of affiliate openings.
This merging of a minimalist approach to travel and exploration will provide many keywords and a large offering of lower competition as it is currently growing!
Why Choose The Bikepacking Niche?
Learning about bikepacking can be rewarding as there are currently only a few major websites covering content. This means there are cracks you can take advantage of to start a website and get traffic fast and start to build your ability to become an authority on the topic.
Bikepacking is an amazing niche due to the vast amount of viable high commission products to review. These products come from both bicycle and backpacking/camping both of which offer high priced items that are always in demand.
Seasonality and Trends
Last 12 Months
Over the last year, bikepacking has continued to grow consistently. The slight downward towards the end of the year to me is due to the end of summer and the transition to work and normal life for most people who had months to take their vacations.
Last Five Years
Over the last 5 years, the bikepacking growth has been pretty impressively consistent, each year looking to gain solid percent growth versus the year previous.
Now that we know the traffic is solid and this isn’t a fad you can start to look into how you can start building yourself within the communities and become that authority figure that people come to for information and help.
Online Presence and Community
When looking for content ideas it can be helpful to join online groups of people who are on the pulse of the topics, including Reddit.
I would recommend joining and starting to talk and discuss within these communities and start to become an information provider and gain a reputation for solid help and details.
Once you become more of a fixture within the groups you can start to use them to start building content by asking them questions and taking their feedback into your article creation and tell them you’ll share it once you are done writing it with that community.
This will help to start the process of building additional reach for you and your website outside of organic results from Google search which can take months.
Forums
There are many forums online around bikepacking which can help get you started in learning more about the hobby and how and what angles appear the most of interest to the crowd.
Quora
Let’s face it Quora owns a lot of the questions and answers which you can take and use to build better posts that can easily outrank them if you put in the time and effort.
Take some time and go through all the information in questions and answers listed in the Quora side and see what posts you can search for in Google to see what is a prime subject.
There is a lot of groups dedicated to bikepacking and bike tourism, I would do my best to join many of these groups and learn the information that social media members find shareable as you want to then start to work on sharable content to drop into these groups to increase your authority.
YouTube
On YouTube the bikepacking scene appears to be pretty solid but it does look like a good search preparation could yield good videos and high rankings.
Online Media For Posts
I prefer to use Dreamstime to maintain licensing for all our image needs and they have over 4 pages of images specifically aimed at bikepacking.
We are an affiliate but have been exceedingly happy with their image options. Below is a showing of the images (Including our featured image on this post).
Buyer Keywords
I view this as a cornacopia of very good keywords for those looking to build out reviews and other buyer intent keywords. There are many options that are underserved including options like the ones I list below.
Buyer Intent Keywords
- best bikepacking sleeping pad
- best bikepacking tent
- best bikepacking gps device
- best bikepacking sleeping bag
Search Analysis
Performing an overall search analysis on the topic of bikepacking yields many easy to rank results for articles over 1250 words. If I was to start a site today I would look to hit these fast informational posts answering questions these visitors would want to have answered.
- What should I look for in a Bikepacking bike?
- What are bivvy bags?
- How far can I cycle in a day?
- What is a good distance for a beginner cyclist?
- bikepacking what goes where
- how to pack your bike for bikepacking
All of these on a quick search yield low-quality results within the top 10 including Quorra or answers which don’t really satisfy the question intent posed by the searcher.
Monetization Options
Monetization of this niche will be easy as it covers many broad areas that allow for simple monetization options. The three that stand out for this niche right away are going to be around products and advertisements.
Affiliate Products
This is a no-brainer as this can pull in a good portion of income for you if you choose this niche.
I wouldn’t limit myself to Amazon, I would start to reach out once your traffic volume grows to get deals with the bike shops and other stores including REI.
This will allow you to get a higher or “better” return on your sales through these instead of Amazons low affiliate payouts.
Info Products
This niche is ripe for the taking if you were to build some quality ebooks and help take care of pain points you hear in the forums and online.
These can easily net you $5-25 or more each depending on the amount of work you put into them they could be your biggest moneymakers!
Ads
Many people have been coming back to ads recently and realizing they are a very effective way to monetize your non-product, informational posts.
I would say to try and not put ads onto your money posts like reviews as you are already aiming to make money and it will help keep the site looking cleaner.
Quality Domains Available
- bikepackhq.com
- bikepackinghq.com
- bikepackfitness.com
- bikepackinguniversity.com
Bottom Line
If you are looking for a niche that you can jump into now then this should be high on your priority list. This niche is built for Amazon affiliates to get commissions and to provide real insightful help and support to an underserved market.
I would approach this one with quality information posts to build up your visitors as this is a small crowd and they may well spread your information onto their friends who also bikepack. This can help you become an authority faster than aiming only at review based content.
As you grow you can start to add reviews of quality products and use this to prove your there to assist the niche and not just sell to it. Given the high price of goods within this niche, you may be tempted to try and sell, sell, sell.
Please comment below if this was helpful to you and if you are choosing to pursue this niche or if there is more insightful information I could add to the next niche review that will help you make a decision on a niche to start your website around.
