How I choose website niches
Many websites that are developed are created as smaller ‘niche’ websites which are primarily created for the purpose of making money. However, most people don’t know where to go to get started or what type of ‘niche’ or topic to pick. Here are the methods I use to choose keywords and niches to write about.
I do a few things to pick what my niche will be and to determine whether or not it will be at least semi profitable.
I first think of a few main topics or ideas that I would be willing to create a website about. For example the main topic of ‘marketing’ I then go on about.com and find the topic of marketing and look for all the smaller sub ‘niches’ such as ‘internet marketing, affiliate marketing, advertising and THEN look for the smaller topics of those until I find a very minor sub topic of the main topic.
I then go on spyfu.com and see how much each of those keywords cost on adwords and sponsored search. A google adsense advertiser typically gets half of that so if it’s atleast $1 – $2 I choose that niche.
I then go on the seobook.com keyword research tool and type in the main keyword to get an estimate of how many times that keyword is searched. I also check whether there is a lot of competition for that minor topic in yahoo or google and whether it’s possible to get front page rankings without TOO much effort.
If everything proves correct, I buy a $6 .com domain from a domain registrar with one of my keywords in it. An example of this are the two recent websites I bought.
Digital Video Editing and Job Aid.
I am targetting the sub keywords ‘digital video editing’ and ‘job aid’ and the main keywords ‘video editing’ and ‘job advice’.
After everything proves successful, I then install wordpress on both websites and set them up to work like static webpages that don’t represent blogs. I then promote the new websites with my own promotional means. Eventually I start seeing some traffic and due to the high ctr positioning of my google ads and affiliate marketing links I make a profit.
Hope this helped you guys get a better understanding of how to start creating websites.
October 2nd, 2008 at 9:57 pm
Great post
How does spyfu.com get there data? How do we know if it correct? Does it line up with some of your niches you have done in the past?
Thanks
Rick
October 2nd, 2008 at 11:32 pm
Spyfu tends to update their data every week or two. Although no service can be 100% accurate, spyfu has come the closest in giving me accurate results on my niches. Most of the information they provide holds true.
These are the stats for spyfu at the moment.
Last Data Update: 9/22/2008
Currently indexing 508,274,289 results on 2,190,593 keywords across 9,591,801 domains
Cheers
Eric
October 27th, 2008 at 12:20 am
Creating a website on a niche that produces money but isn’t necessarily really interesting can prove hard to maintain. Surely one can copy articles from directories or just rewrite them but still working with this kind of website will eventually be tasting like wood.
Finding a niche that one is passionate about is the key to long-term website revenue.