See the websites used when finding your niche online
Before you start creating anything for a website you need to know what niche you'll be aiming towards. Firstly you should get to grips with the search engine Google. The higher you appear in Google's search results when people make a search, the more traffic (amount of visitors) will come to your site. The higher traffic to your site means more money that can be made from it.
Big Niches
 | A niche too big will be impossible to conquer because they'll be multi-million dollar companies spending hundreds of thousands to beat you in the search rankings! |
Examples are: online casinos, insurance, mobile phone, car sales
Getting noticed in a big niche requires a lot of money and effort. and I mean a LOT!
The big niche market is saturated online now so forget trying to be the next eBay or Facebook!
Small Niches
| A niche too small would be easy to conquer but the amount of traffic would be so small that making a large enough amount of money from it may be impossible. |
Examples are: white pencil cases, recyclable plastic flower pots, tree house holiday in France
With a tiny niche you can only expect a tiny amount of traffic (even if you are in first position in Google when someone searches for it!). Let's say one person in a hundred buys a product off your site; if you have 20 visitors per month then it'll take you 5 months to make one sale!
Cheap Niches
| A niche with very little profit may not be suitable to make money from - as my Dad says "if you sell peanuts then you'll make peanuts"! |
Examples are: ice cube trays, party balloons, matchsticks
If you sell someone else's products though an affiliate website then you'll make between 10% - 60% of the sale price. If the sale price was $5 then all your efforts may only make you $0.50 per sale!
Your Niche
 | You need to find a niche that is both specific and within a category that is searched for often. This means you'll have a nice number people to the website PLUS you'll be able to be the leading website in that niche online! |
Firstly brain-storm some large categories that are searched for often, three examples I can think of are:
- Holidays (lots of people take holidays)
- Cycling (lots of people enjoy cycling or need to cycle)
- Computers (half the world uses computers everyday)
Now break down your category into more specific niche ideas, let's use the "Cycling" category as an example:
- Padded Bike Seats
- Bicycle Bells
- Bike Route Maps
Now we have a specific niche we need to check that a lot of people search for it each month; it needs a fair amount of traffic to be profitable.
Google have a great "Keyword Tool" which estimates how many times people search for certain words on Google. A Keyword is any word(s) that people search for; someone searching for insurance for their car may type the Keyword "car insurance" into Google to find the sites they need.
We can use the Keyword Tool on Google to check how many people search for our specific niche ideas per month (note: you may need a Google account to use the Keyword Tool):
Padded Bike Seats ≈ 840 Searches per Month
Bicycle Bells ≈ 5,700 Searches per Month
Bike Route Maps ≈ 4,000 Searches per Month
So "Bicycle Bells" had the most search results and it is defiantly a specific niche in the Cycling category! I'm going to choose "Bicycle Bells" for my example, if your niche is too specific or too general (more than 10,000 searches per month) then you'll find it harder to make money online and you should try again with more ideas.
P.S. Choosing a subject that you like or have a lot of knowledge about will be a big advantage in the future plus you'll be more likely to stick with it in the future.
Now let's search Google for my niche keyword "Bicycle Bells":
Now hopefully you know which results in Google are natural results and which ones are paid results - if you don't then click here for more info. We want to get to the top of the natural search results as it generates free traffic. If someone typed our keyword into Google we want to be at position one!
Check the first 20-30 results in Google for your niche keyword; now it there a website specifically about your niche out there? If not then you could make a lot of money from it! There is no website currently on the internet just about "bicycle bells" alone so if I made one it would rise high in the search results when someone typed "bicycle bells" into Google.
