Basically said, everything is a niche. There are big niches and small niches, take Politics for example. There is world politics, US politics, Californian politics, Arnold Schwarzenegger politics, New York politics, Manhattan politics and so on. It is generally easier to compete in a smaller niche because there is less competition, if any. It also means less traffic if you compare spots on search engines but most niches provide enough visitors to create a successful website that adds great income.

I would like to write about some of my practices  of finding or spotting a niche. Everyone can do it, it is just a matter of keeping your eyes open. Most of the time I find niches by accident. Really. I search for something on Google only to find out that there is no website giving me the answer. That there is no blog covering the subject. Only general sites like Wikipedia, Video Portals or Shopping websites.

That’s the first step in discovering a niche. One has to evaluate or estimate the traffic that this niche is getting. It would not make sense to build a website for a niche that gets a hundred searches a week from all over the world. That would be a niche that is to small to be profitable normally. Unless you would write about something very very profitable that is with high conversions.

I normally tend to look for niches with a 1000+ visitors on the top spot at Google per day. It can be less if you have a profitable niche but for the average website that figure is fine. You can use Google Adwords or Wordtracker for instance to get a rough estimate of the expected traffic level. More on this in later articles.

Another way that I use is by following news in areas of interest. This could be a game company releasing a new game, a new video console, new software, new gadget. Again, it is not advised to go for the big niche. Instead of trying to fight all the other Playstation 3 news websites out there you could concentrate on PS3 modifications, the PS3 online shop, PS3 game videos or something like that.

I created a website a while ago when the Nintendo Wii was released that dealt with errors that users would get when using the Wii. It’s the authority site since then and getting between 1-2k visitors per day. That’s a great niche and I was happy to grab the best domain name available which is less likely if you want to compete in a big niche.

Besides those two ways of spotting niches I have another way that I like. And that way is actually giving me a lot of information about a niche directly. I’m talking about webmaster forums and website sale threads. Hundreds of websites are sold every day on various Internet forums for webmasters.

The sellers give details that you seldom get otherwise. They post their traffic level, revenue, referrers and many other information that are important to determine the price of a website. You could use that information to your advantage. Lets say someone is selling a website and you are interested in the subject. You search for the main keywords in Google only to find out that this website is the only one dealing with the topic.

This immediately gives you valuable information. It would not take much normally to push a website into the first results page,  you could estimate your earnings with that website and the visitor levels that you could reach.

So, that’s all for today. I hope I was able to give you some insights in how I spot niches. Feel free to add anything that you would like to say.