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In my last Week In Review I talked a little bit about niche sites. Ryan from SmarterWealth.net asked in the comments about how I go about finding a niche which is worth developing a site for. So instead of just emailing him back with my answer I figured I would provide it in the form of a 2 part series.
What is a niche?
For those of you that may be reading this and are unaware of what a niche exactly is I will give a quick overview. A niche is a topic that is more specific about a larger topic. So as a quick example we can use pizza lovers. The main topic would be pizza lovers and you could have a variety of niches such as pepperoni pizza lovers, supreme pizza lovers, sardine pizza lovers and so on. As you can see, the main topic is about pizza and the niches are about what kinds of pizza that there are.
Market and keyword research
This is by far the hardest part in my opinion because while it doesn’t require the most work you never really know the true results until you get a site developed and published. Finding the right keyword is essential to finding a niche that can make you money. So how do we go about finding a niche that is worth getting into? We do both market and keyword research. Keyword research is a subset of market research, you could even go as far as saying that keyword research is a niche of market research. Market research is going beyond just the keyword itself and analyzing the competition and traffic for that keyword.
Finding a profitable niche
Many people will tell you that you should be building a site around what interests you because ultimately you will be willing to devote more time and energy into it. This is very solid advice and will most likely 99% of the time end up bringing you more money than compared to finding a random topic. While you can make money in any niche you have to decide on how much work you are going to put into it. So lets get into some of the tools and software available to help you in your quest.
Micro Niche Finder – This is a program that I personally use that I purchased about 4 months ago when I first got started in affiliate marketing and blogging. Micro Niche Finder recently updated their software to use Google’s newly released keyword search counts. One of the features that I like best about it is the button called Brainstorm. When you brainstorm Micro Niche Finder gives you a list of 25 random keywords to research. It could be anything from water heaters, garden shovels, refrigerators and glass bottles. It will typically give you one word keywords to give you a very broad field to get into. We want a smaller piece of the results which the program will give us as well. After clicking on the main term you are presented with a list of keywords, the searches per month for that keyword, the exact title matches for that keyword, the CPC for the keyword and a ranking of the competition level for that keyword.
WordTracker – An online keyword research tool that is very popular and widely used. I have never purchased the full program or used it but I have used the free keyword research tool that they provide. They also provide a full 7 day free trial that gives you unlimited access to all of it’s features so that you can see whether or not you would be willing to pay for it. Upon entering your keyword it will give you a table showing the estimated searches per day along with the keyword and a link to how popular the keyword is. Clicking the link will load up a pop up window that will give you some data that WordTracker has come up with. The first is Google Competition which is basically the same as the exact phrase match that Micro Niche Finder provides. WordTracker suggests that the results should be less than 30,000. The 2nd set of results is the estimated number of searches per day which WordTracker suggests that should be over 100. They also provide a Google Trends graph along with some links that you can use to further research your niche on Google.
There are many other tools out there that you can use but I personally have only used these 2 so I cannot give you my opinion or review on others. Now, I realize you might be here because you want to know how to make money because you have none. As you are reading this you realize that I am promoting software that you have to pay for to use. Fear not, there is a completely 100% free tool that you can use that I believe is the most accurate of them all.
Google AdWords Keyword Tool – Coming straight from the horse’s mouth, Google’s Keyword Tool is what many software and programs actually use to compile their own data. The Keyword Tool provides you with quite a bit of data after entering your keyword. It will give you a list of keywords related to your own that Google finds relevant. Since the tool is labeled AdWords Keyword Tool they provide a few options for use with AdWords. We however are only interested in 3 of the options that they provide; Approx Search Volume: Previous Month, Approx Avg Search Volume and Search Volume Trends.
Approx Search Volume gives you the number of times that your keyword was searched for in the previous month. Approx Avg Search Volume gives you the number of times that your keyword was searched for for each month over the last 12 months. Search Volume Trends shows you a graph for each month of the year and the amount of keyword searches during that month. Great for finding out whether or not your keyword is seasonal or has a steady volume of searches. Something like costumes will recieve a lot more traffic during September and October than any other time of the year because of Halloween.