Finding the Niche

Finding the niche is the most important part. You can have the best webhost, the best domain name, godlike SEO but no traffic if you pick a niche that no one is searching for. A good niche requires more than just a solid search volume, it should also have medium to low competition. It does not make sense to target the mortgage niche for example because that niche is highly competitive. Targeting medium to low competitive niches requires less work to achieve incredible results. Last but not least it should be a niche that you can make money with which might not be as easy as it sounds.

Low and medium competitive niches have the advantage that you can see results pretty fast. One way to pick a niche would be to choose so called long tail keywords, that is keywords of 3-5 words instead of just 1-2. You could target the niche mortgage broker “pick a town or district”.

This has nothing to do with choosing the domain name yet. If we target a long tail keyword we can still choose a domain name that is consisting of one or two words only.

Another option to choose a niche is to pick one with low to none competition but with enough searches to make it worthwhile. I’m going to show you some way to find out if a niche is highly competitive or not.

Motivation is another important aspect. It is easier to maintain and write for a website that is of interest to you. If you like football it would be a good idea to find something related to football, if you like shoes, do that. It’s in my opinion better to target a specific product than to provide general information.

That’s not necessary all the time though. Money can be a great motivation as well and if you make enough you can outsource the article writing process which normally will not cost more than $5-10 per article.

I’m therefor looking for the following:

  • low or medium competitive niche
  • good amount of searches per day (estimate)
  • no authority sites in the search engines

What I did to find a Niche

One could say that using Google is enough because it presents all the information to you, you only have to interpretate it the right way. Before I researched the niche in Google I had to find it.

A good way to find niches, or possible niches, is to browse online stores, say Amazon for example. I wanted to create a clothing website and decided to browse Zappos to find a brand or product that I would target.

A benefit of this approach is that you can almost be sure to be able to find an affiliate system targeting those products

My first pick was Baby Phat. Funny name, don’t you think ? I know jack about shoes, clothing or Baby Phat but that made it rather interesting for me. I had a name, the first thing was to research Google. I made a search for Baby Phat only to find out that the company was placed on the first and second spot in Google which meant that it was not very likely that I would ever make it higher than the third spot in the search engines.

baby phat google

Thinking of long tail keywords however gave me the idea to target a more specific product instead. My second search was for Baby Phat Shoes and that looked promising. Only online stores in the first three places of Google. Instead of targeting Baby Phat Shoes it would also be possible to target Baby Phat Sandals or Sneakers which would narrow down the competition but also the audience.

As a rule of thumb: Authority sites are bad to compete against, as are websites with double listings and developers / manufacturers of the product that you target. Shops however are most of the time easy to target as well as sites like Wikipedia.

baby phat shoes

Baby Phat Shoes are only one example. I could as well target (no research done on my part) Car Care Kits, German language learning books, external hard drives or garden flowers.

That was more likely to provide great results in no time. I still did not know if my main keyword was having a decent amount of user searches per day which is why I used the following tools to determine that it did.

Adwords Keyword Tool External

baby phat shoes

Here is a selection of tools that can help you determine the daily searches of a keyword, all free to use of course.

My decision was therefor to target the Baby Phat Shoes niche.