How to find niches
The single most important decision to make in creating a website as a source of income is to select a suitable niche. A niche which has a considerable amount of organic searches, which is not saturated, in other words which is not highly competitive so that there is room for you to put your feet. This single decision will determine whether your online business is a success or it will be among the hundreds of thousands of failures. Indeed there are other things to consider but if you take a wrong decision at the beginning all your efforts and resources are wasted. Let’s discuss the key points one by one.
What is a good niche?
A good niche should have at least 1000 organic searches per month. Google keyword tool is a very good free tool to find this out. The other important thing is to find a niche that you can compete in. For this the average PR of the competing sites in the first page of Google search should be around 3. You can use a free tool to determine the PR of a certain web site. SEO plug in for Firefox from seobook.com and the SEO tool from SEOquake are both very good and free tools. These are very handy tools and save you lots of time in determining the competition you are about to face.
How to find a good niche
Then comes the most crucial and difficult part of the process,: researching for a suitable niche. For this you need to have ideas to work with. Following are few places you can use to get ideas.
- Just look around and think. Think the problems that you are facing and how you can solve them.
- Yahoo answers and webanswers,com are 2 great places to look for ideas. People submit their problems there and you possibly can find a nice idea from those questions/answers.
- Go to sites which actually sell products and see what are the top performing items. Ebay pulse, Amozon best sellers and yahoo shopping are obviously good places to visit. This is especially important if you looking to create a affiliate website .
· When you have some ideas or key phrases then you should check the long term sustainability of the keywords chosen. Otherwise when you enter the market the phrase that you are targeting may be not that much searched for. The obvious choice of tool for this is Google insight for search. This tool can be used to monitor how a key phrase performs over a long period of time. There you don’t want to see a peak and a fall. The search volume for the search phrase should be pretty consistent over time.
Once you collect some possible key phrases for your new site, there are two basic steps to follow.
- Go to Google keyword tool and find out how many searches are there per month and using the Google Insight for search, check whether the search is consistent over time.
- Go to Google search engine and find out the PR of the search result in the first page. If the average is less than 3, you have a pretty good chance that you can compete in that niche!
As I mentioned in the beginning of the article, selecting the proper niche is the single most important factor for you’re the success of your online carrier. The other things like developing the web site and SEO are pretty much straight forward and there is no much decision making involved.
