What is a niche? - Things to know when choosing a niche

Posted by Eric

August 31, 2008

What is a niche? - Things to know when choosing a niche

If you are new in the internet marketing world you will hear the word ‘niche’ thrown around quite a lot. One may say ‘find your niche and then make a website on it’.

So what is a niche?

A niche is basically just a specific topic and all the sub topics that relate to that main topic. For example the niche I have chosen for this blog is ‘reviews, tutorials and tips’. You know what I mean? Now there are two different types of main niches you can select. Niches for an authority website or niches for a ‘niche’ website. Basically what this means is, most people (myself being one of them) make money by creating many smaller websites with not that much content which are optimized to bring in search engine traffic. These websites contain google ads on them which if people click on the website owner gets credit.

If you are making an authority website which is going to many many pages of quality content you would probably be better off picking a more broader niche which your website is going to cover. For example for an authority website I could pick the niche of ‘Tutoring’ while for a smaller niche site I would pick a much smaller sub niche of the main niche of tutoring. Such as. “Chemistry help”
You can then go deeper and deeper into the sub categories of the main niches.

Things to know about choosing a niche

Prior to picking a niche or topic you should do some market research to see how many competitors are currently also doing that niche, searches per day on that niche, and the CPC (cost per click) of google ads on that particular niche. Especially if you are making smaller ‘niche minisites’ you should aim to find a sub niche of a main higher paying niche which doesn’t have as many competitors but the CPC is still relatively high. For example, the topic of ’skiing’ has 12 adwords competitors and a CPC of say $2, but on the other hand the sub niche of ’ski vacations’ only has 4 competitors and a CPC of say $1.60. If you created a website on both niches the sub niche of ski vacations would actually end up making you more money as there is less competition for that topic and you will probably rank higher in search engines also.

If you need help finding a sub topic or niche you can use any large directory sites which have categories in them. For example you can go to about.com and find the category of education, click on that and it will bring a ton of sub categories which you could possibly create niche sites around.