How To Find Great Niche Website Ideas
The first step to creating any business is planning. And before you can plan, you must have valid research data to make your plans with. So the very first step in creating a solid, profitable business Website Asset is to research the niche market for your site.
Now I have to warn you from the start: Like most things related to making money online, there are MANY ways to do it. This is just one…
What is a Niche?
In it’s most basic form: A niche is simply a target market. It’s a group of people who have similar desires and/or interests.
Now, niche markets can be broad… which means they’re huge. Or they can be medium sized, or they can be quite tiny.
A common example of a broad niche market is “Health”. A subset - or smaller - example of a niche within the Health market is “Weight Loss”. And a much smaller niche might be “Low Carb Dieting”. If you wanted to go even narrower, you could select another sub-set niche such as “The Atkins Diet”, or even try a tiny one like “Vegetarian Low Carb Diets”.
How Do You Find Niche Markets?
This is a very common question online, and most people make it much more difficult than it has to be. The basic answer is honestly: Open Your Eyes.
That’s really not too helpful by itself though, so I’ll explain…
1. Common Online Methods - The most common method of finding niche markets is to use keyword research tools online. There’s usually complicated formulas and rules you’re supposed to follow when finding a niche market, and to some extent these guidelines can be useful. Other times however, they can be misleading. Let’s dig into that for a minute…
Most books and courses tell you to try and find niche markets which have little to no competition, but which also have plenty of people looking for something in them.
Now, the numbers vary from one book to another, but they generally sound something like this:
- There should be less than 5000 competing websites that show up in Google when you search for your niche word or phrase using quotation marks.
- There should be at least 100 people searching for your niche phrase each day according to [insert keyword research tool name]
- There should be less than 10 people advertising products with your niche words or phrases
- There should be plenty of good products with high commission rates for you to promote
If you’ve ever tried to follow guidelines like the above, you may have already learned it’s quite difficult to do. And that’s because many of the statements contradict each other in some way.
If there aren’t many web pages optimized for a given keyword or phrase, then that might be an indication that it’s not a profitable niche. The same applies to advertisers: If there are very few people advertising for a given niche word or phrase, that might mean there isn’t much traffic, or it’s unprofitable. It could also mean there is little to nothing worth promoting as an affiliate, thus trying to find plenty of good products with high commission rates might be an exercise in futility.
2. Better Ways to Find Niche Markets - The best way to find a great niche market is to simply look around you. Look at yourself, your family, your friends, and more.
- What are your personal buying habits?
- What are your hobbies?
- What do your kids constantly bug you for?
- What does your spouse, mother, or father love to spend money on?
- What passions do your friends have?
- What magazines are lying around your house? Theirs?
And if that’s not enough: What magazines do you see lots of at the store?
3. More Ways to Find Niche Markets - These are often overlooked but they can be really powerful ways to find lucrative niche markets:
- What’s on TV? You’ll find niche markets just by watching the news, but you can also find them by watching the commercials, and paying attention to trends in current TV programming.
For example: Have you ever noticed the increasing number of pharmaceutical ads on TV in the last couple of years? Has it occurred to you that a huge percentage of public TV stations are constantly running reality TV shows? Have you seen the shift in both TV shows and commercials towards being environmentally friendly?
And of course the news alone is a goldmine of opportunity and ideas: Gas crisis, mortgage crisis, politics, and lets not even start on all the celebrity news and gossip.
- What Magazines Are On The Stands? - Look at any magazine stand and you’ll almost immediately spot some hot niche markets. Any topic which has more than 3 magazines dedicated to it is niche you could probably profit from. And if the topic has 10+ magazines it might just be a goldmine
My point is this: Niche markets are all around you. Just open your eyes and you’ll find tons of them!
Now it’s good to note that I use the above methods when I’m looking for an excellent niche topic website to promote. I’m not just looking for the hottest keywords of the moment to make a quick article out of, I’m looking at the overall long term viability of a niche market instead.
There’s also quite a bit of confusion among online marketers about whether you should go for a large niche or a small one, so I’ll be creating a detailed write up of that topic soon too. I’ll give you a hint right from the start though: For long term websites, go broad.
SideNote: “Niche” is supposed to be pronounced “neesh” but I and many other Americans pronounce it “Nitch”.
