How to find a good niche

If you’re interested in making money online, then having a well target niche can make a big different to how difficult it is to gain search engine rankings and web traffic.

A niche, when thoroughly researched, is the key to not only great website traffic and a top search engine result, it’s also the key to profits. Therefore, the first step when considering any online business is to discover your online niche. Here are a few tips to get you started.

1. Make a list of topics you’re interested and/or passionate about. You’re going to be working and planning in this business almost every day, and so it really helps to enjoy what you’re working on.

2. Once you have a list of topics you’re interested in, you must check if there is a demand for that area. If there’s not a greart demand for your niche, then unfortunately it’s unlikely to succeed. To determine the demand, the first step is keyword research. This involves using a few keyword sites like the Google AdWords tool and Wordtracker to discover two key things:

You want to see if there is a lot of demand for your topic(s) and you want to see if there is a lot of supply for your chosen topic(s). What you’re looking for are topics with high demand and low supply. This means that lots of people are looking for your information and  few websites are providing it. That said, if you find that absolutely no one is providing any information on your topic then you’ll want to investigate why. It may mean that it isn’t a viable topic.

Each keyword tool operates a little differently but you’ll see numbers that represent the number of people searching for that topic or keyword and the number of sites or pages that are optimised for that keyword. So if you see that 1000 people are searching gingerbread cookies each day and there are only 20 pages that are optimised for that keyword, it may be time to dig deeper.

3. Research your competition. Using those same keyword tools and a few keyword tools that help you dig deeper into the keywords your competition is using to market and optimize their site, you will spend some time visiting potential competitors to explore what their niche focus is.

For example, you may visit those website pages optimized for gingerbread cookies and find that only five of them are cookie recipe sites. The others may be parenting sites or just random blog posts. So, you now know that you really only have five competitors and can position yourself amongst them by perhaps narrowing your niche even further.

You could, for example, choose to have a website devoted entirely to cookie cutter cookies rather than all cookies, assuming there is high demand and low supply for that topic.

4. Finally, analyze your topics based on profitability – which topics have the potential to make the most money. For example, a website based on cookie cutter cookies may be great fun for you but are there many moneymaking opportunities? A website based on a high-end luxury product, like Italian Espresso Makers, may have more income opportunities.

Choosing your online niche is a process. It can take a little while to find a topic that meets all of the criteria we mentioned however, it is time well spent.