Today I want to show just how I am researching to find a new niche. Actually I will be testing 2 new niches and I am doing this all from scratch, meaning I have never before marketed or had any websites outside of the ‘make money online’ niche. This should be real interesting and hopefully lucrative.
In my readings and research I have found some dissenting advice. One group of people say to go after smaller niches that are less competitive so you will have a better chance of ranking and taking a good share of the market. Another group of people say to go after a niche that is competitive and has a proven buyer base.
Much of this advice has come from successful marketers I have met in the Warrior Forum. There are several posts in there dealing specifically with this subject. I think the overall resounding message I am getting is to go after a niche that is proven over and over again. There is a reason why all the “big dogs” are marketing in these niches… they make money.
Here is a great quote I read in that same forum, “If you know how to market and have the fundamentals handled, you can compete and profit from virtually any niche.”
So step one is knowing not to be scared of competition, yet to relish in it and accept the competition and just work harder than your competitors. I am going to look for a niche that has proven buyers and market at a slight angle. Meaning I will try to take a product or service and make it a little better or add a little something to it.
So, just what type of niche should I be looking for? For myself, it is imperative that I find a niche that I am passionate about. Something that I will be able to add my own unique touch to and a topic that I will be motivated to add fresh content on a daily basis.
Topics that I enjoy are sports, health and fitness, science, video games, camping, movies, night life, money, humor, food and drink, and writing to name a few. I don’t think I would have a problem starting a website with any of the above. Lets do some niche research to show you exactly what you need to be looking for.
I am going to do one example so you can follow my steps for whatever topics you might be interested in. Just for this example I will randomly choose the food topic. To narrow it down even more lets go with growing your own vegetables or starting your own garden. I’m not overly versed in this subject but I think that there’s got to be some pretty popular search terms. Lets see…
What I want to do next is pick 5 or so keywords for this niche and add up the total searches per month for all my keywords. I’m looking to add all of my keywords up to get a search term volume total of at least 75,000. Let’s go with ‘starting a garden’, ‘growing vegetables’, ‘planting a garden’, ‘growing tomatoes’, and ‘gardening tips’.
Next I will add up the daily search results using these tools (Google Adwords keyword tool, free Wordtracker tool, Seobook keyword tool) and times it by 30 for a total monthly search volume. Sometimes there is a bit of a discrepancy between the tools, in that case just take an average.
- starting a garden = 5700 searches a month
- growing vegetables = 6900
- planting a garden = 3900
- growing tomatoes = 35000
- gardening tips = 65000
All these keywords add up to a total of 116500. That means there is plenty of desire for this specific topic. Of course there are plenty of other keyword terms I could have used and to be profitable I probably want to narrow that niche down even further.
This is the most important step as far as making a niche be profitable for you. Let’s pretend for a second that we are gonna give the gardening niche a shot…what do we do next?
Lets use these same keywords and type them into Google to see what kind of competition we have, or more importantly, how the competition is monetizing off of the people who are using the keywords.
After just a little bit of research it’s easy to see that the folks who own the websites are making money by selling advertising space, e books, and by using Google Adsense. The same form of monetizing used in almost all niches.
If you have a great desire or passion about gardening, you could definitely make some money tailoring to this niche. Remember though, you will only make as much money as the effort you put in.
Finding a profitable niche requires real research and time. Stay tuned here the next few weeks as I continue to do some market research and move into sequence on the next few steps of my mission to find a profitable niche. We’re not done yet. 
Best,
Matt Helphrey
