One of the first steps you need to take care of before setting out to build a money making website is to choose a niche that is both lucrative and achievable – there is no point selecting a niche that is worth a lot of money in a market that you can’t compete in and vice-versa.
Take the time to get the niche selection right in the first place and you will save a lot of money and time down the track.
I know this is just common sense but not everyone gets it right. Many are stubborn; others are just unaware.
I often get emails from people who are struggling to get results and this is usually due to being in a niche with little search traffic, strong competition, or limited ways to monetize. Even after being told about the lack of scope available to improve, a lot of the people struggling refuse to adapt and are stuck working on a project with little potential – don’t be that person!
There are several elements of niche selection that you need to consider before committing to a website:
- Traffic
- Monetization
- Competition
I like to look at them in that order. Traffic is the key but is wasted if you can’t monetize it. Competition takes the longest time to analyse and no point wasting your time on it if the market isn’t worth it to begin with.
First things first…how to find a niche to start with?
Brainstorm! Start getting used to writing down any idea that pops into your head. Once you start writing things down on paper other ideas will start flowing from these base ideas. Start your list by writing down everything you love to do in your spare time. It is much easier to create content for a subject you genuinely enjoy.
Add to your list any problems that you may have in your life or get asked for advice on. Other people might see you as an expert on something that you have never really considered pursuing. If the knowledge is there to begin with it will make content and even content creation a breeze.
The ideas on your paper are a great starting point and usually from this list you can expand out to related niches very easily.
If your list is still small then grab a magazine off the shelf and start flipping through the pages. Take note of the common subjects and questions being answered. Look at the advertisers and try and brainstorm from what you see. Ideas could be types of products, common problems, useful information…
Work backwards. If you find a product or two in a niche that appears too small, take a step back and find out what niche the sub niche belongs to. Expand from there.
Still struggling to fill up the paper? Head over to Amazon.com and start clicking through the categories. The Non Fiction books are a great place to browse. Find the best sellers and brainstorm from there. Head out of the house and make a trip to the library or favourite bookstore and look at the best selling sections there. Sometimes it is easier to keep a clear and focused head away from the computer.
Your list should be pretty full now…let’s see which ones are worth making a site for.
Traffic
This is the big one; what point is a website if no one sees it? Like any business, the more people walking through the doors the more money you can make. Many people neglect this basic qualifier for creating a site.
You can get your traffic from several different places but they all require different skill sets and methods. Organic (search engine) traffic, social media, video, and paid advertising are all valid options. Organic is the easiest to qualify and I will go into more detail below but social media and video require a bit of thought.
Content that attracts interest from social media sites is quite a bit different to the usual stuff people write about on affiliate sites. People on Digg or StumbleUpon aren’t going to be interested in a review of a toaster so you would need to make your content a lot more creative. If your niche isn’t suited to creative writing techniques that attract the needed viral attention then social media isn’t really an option for getting traffic to your site.
The same goes with video. If you aren’t equipped or prepared to create video content for a site or the videos already in your niche aren’t attracting much attention then video may not be an option. If YouTube is loaded with related videos and backed by an active group of viewers then video marketing may be a viable traffic generating option for your site.
Organic Traffic
If your niche isn’t suited to viral social media marketing or attracting attention through videos then the other and most common traffic generation method will be from search engines (mainly Google). The majority of marketers go this route.
Finding out the potential traffic from Google is pretty simple. You can either use the Google External Keyword Tool or my favourite – Market Samurai, to get the number of searches happening each month (or day for MS).
I have covered this previously here (So You Want to Create a New Niche Website but Don’t Know Where to Start?) but to recap…
Take a niche idea from your notepad and create a new project for the word in Market Samurai and head to the Keyword Research Module…make sure Include Additional and Google Search Keywords is selected. Generate Keywords and Analyze.
Sort the list of words by broad searches.
From here you can get an idea of what people are searching for – related to your search. If the numbers are large you know there is traffic available for the niche. Don’t worry about finding specific keywords yet as we have to make sure it can be monetized first…
Monetization
The traffic is there but what are you going to do with it? Think of the niche you have chosen and try and think of what the demographic will be after.
Do they want a guide on how to create, succeed, complete, or learn? Digital products are one way to make some money from information hungry customers.
You can check out sites such as Clickbank to find products created by other marketers that may be suitable to your niche. If you can’t find a suitable product then that might be a golden opportunity for you to create your own.
Users after information are also great candidates for you to start a mailing list. Instead of sending them straight to the offer place them on a mailing list and prime them for a sale over time…
If the information for the site is more general and not suitable to a guide or electronic product then have a look at Google AdSense. If the market is popular amongst advertisers then the clicks you get from AdSense can be very worthwhile. Have a search for other sites in the niche that are using AdSense on their site. If the advertisers are related to the niche market then you should get like advertisers on your site too. Check the sites like SpyFu to get an idea of what the advertisers are paying per click. You will only get a portion of this on the content network but anything averaging over $2 per click is worthwhile.
If the demographic are chasing products then there are some great options available. Amazon.com is my favourite. You can find pretty much any product you can think of there. Search the site and see what’s available. If there are a lot of high selling products then Amazon is a great option – especially for niches where AdSense isn’t suitable.
There are sometimes higher paying affiliate programs for Amazon products so you do have room for choice. Commission Junction often has high paying offers direct with the suppliers. You can also use Google to find other affiliate programs. A simple Google search for keyword +affiliate can return some great results.
Another option to lookout for are Cost per Action (CPA) offers. CPA offers will give you a set amount for each lead you generate for an Affiliate Network. These can be anything from a simple email submit form to a large survey. Many of the larger markets pay quite well for a lead so give them some consideration when looking at your options. You can use this search engine (Offer Vault) to see if there are any CPA offers available for your selected niche.
Sometimes a niche is suited to multiple monetization methods. If you plan properly you can make great use of this to boost your income significantly. The beauty market in general is a mix of people looking to solve problems and people looking to buy products…think about if you can capture the people looking for information on a mailing list and using that same mailing list to promote the product reviews you have already written to attract other searches. You can have a continually growing group of targeted users reading every new review you write – as well as the daily traffic looking at those reviews from Google.
If you can’t find a way to monetize your niche from any of the above methods then drop it now and look at the next one on your list of ideas.
If you are happy that the niche has money in it then let’s see if you can compete for it.
Competition
It is now time to get down to the nitty-gritty. If you have read my report on competition analysis then you already know what you should be looking for…easy keywords!
Take the list of keywords you generated when looking at the potential traffic and start drilling down into the list to find keywords you can compete for.
I generate keywords in a couple of runs. From this initial list I look for seed keywords with a broad search of 2000+ times/day. I go through the list and open the 2 to 3 word combos that are related to the niche into a new tab. These words will be used to seed more similar keywords. Make sure the seeds are unique so you don’t repeat yourself down the track (red widget = widget red).
You can now browse through the tabbed keywords and generate a fresh list of keywords – remember to change over “Include Additional Results” to “Ignore Additional Results”. From the fresh list of keywords set the match type to Exact. Filter out all keywords with less than 78 results.
I cover this in more detail here in the Let’s Get Some Keywords section.
With nothing but highly searched exact matched keywords remaining you can start doing the competition analysis as described in my free report. Write down all of the ones that have weak competition into a text file.
If after analyzing all the keywords you still have enough words to make a site with decent traffic you know you have found a niche suitable for a new website. The site will have sufficient achievable traffic to a monetized site.
If you find that the competition for the current group of keywords is generally a little too strong and the niche supports a product based monetization method – try looking for some products within the niche and repeating the keyword analysis on their names. It is quite common that the products within the niche are less competitive than the general keywords and the searches are still high.
Still no luck? Find the big forums in the niche and look for the common questions and terminology that you may not have thought of. People within a niche may use a different language to those outside…
If the product names and variations are still too competitive and you can’t brainstorm another angle from the forums then give the niche a miss and head to the top and restart the process.
Just remember to be picky at the start to reap the rewards later. An extra hour, day or even week of researching the niche will save you months of wasting time on a doomed website.
