BitCom Affiliate Services

Finding The Right Niche

The topic you choose for your site is a critical factor in driving traffic to your site. Even if you have an existing business within a specific niche, analyzing the most popular keywords will help you position yourself within that niche for maximum profitability.

Your goal when researching is to find the "sweet spot" where there is maximum demand and minimum competition for your keywords. Identifying the most valuable keywords will help you choose site content that will attract the most visitors. Why write about subjects that have no interest to searchers or have so much competition you'll never be ranked for those keywords?

Of course it's always important to choose a site topic that you are passionate about or at least have some strong knowledge. Your visitors will be able to tell when you are faking it. Plus choosing something that you truly care about will make it easier to write content and keep new pages coming.

How To Choose Your Niche

Analyzing your niche is critical for long term success. If your goal is to make money with your site you"ll also want to research the monetization options. If you sell a product what's the competition like? If you plan to monetize with affiliate programs make sure the merchants in your niche have strong programs and pay well.

Here's the niche selection factors in a nutshell...

Research Tools

There are many keyword research tools that help you analyze demand and supply for particular keywords. Some are clearly better than others. Our favorite is the Brainstorm It! tool that comes with the Site Build It! suite of tools but there are other good ones.

Try Google First

Want to get a feel for a niche before you get into serious analysis? Just type in the main keywords into Google and see what comes up. If it finds millions of pages you know it's a popular keyword/niche. If you see lots of PPC advertisers you'll know there's money being made in that niche.

As you do this follow the keyword flow from general term to very specific term to see if you notice certain sites and certain advertisers. For example in the golf niche the flow might be...

These keywords follow the "buying intention" of someone interested in buying a golf club. As intent goes up the keywords become more buying specific.

As you watch how the Google results page changes based on these keywords you'll get a sense of the competition and the monetization options in that niche.

Along the way, take a look at the sites you see come up. That will give you a sense of your competition. The really good sites will come up in the natural search results. The top Search Marketing (PPC) affiliates will be strong in the paid listings. Watch what these marketers are doing and you'll know what you'll need to do to succeed yourself.

What are you looking for when you research keywords?

Look for keywords within your niche that have a strong search demand but not too many other sites using the same keywords. You'd also like to know that within your niche there are plenty of searchers looking for products to buy. If you can find this kind of "sweet spot" you have a site topic that is ripe for the picking.

Buying Keywords

Within every niche there are general keywords and "buying" keywords. Strong demand for buying keywords indicates there is good monetization potential. For example in the "golf" niche, the term "golf clubs" and "Taylor Made Tour Burner Driver" indicate an entirely different searching "intention."

If someone searches on "golf clubs" their intention is very general and unspecific. They may have no intention to buy.

However once they raise their hands by searching for "Taylor Made Tour Burner Driver" it indicates they are farther down the buying cycle and may be considering a purchase. If they search for "best deal on Taylor Made Tour Burner" their buying intention becomes pretty clear. Evaluate your keywords with an eye for finding buying intention.

Be Aware Of The Long Tail

Buying keywords indicate good monetization potential but they will probably have lots of competition. But within any niche there may be many thousands of other good keywords that have less demand and little competition. This is the "long tail" of a niche.

The concept of the "long tail" was introduced by Wired writer Chris Anderson in 2004. His proposition is that niche products and ideas that don't have mass appeal are ripe for the taking by small, agile businesses.

Large companies cannot justify the expense of offering and marketing products that only appeal to a small section of the online marketplace. However a small company can take advantage of these types of opportunities.

As Chris describes on his site...

"The theory of the Long Tail is that our culture and economy is increasingly shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of "hits" (mainstream products and markets) at the head of the demand curve and toward a huge number of niches in the tail. As the costs of production and distribution fall, especially online, there is now less need to lump products and consumers into one-size-fits-all containers. In an era without the constraints of physical shelf space and other bottlenecks of distribution, narrowly-targeted goods and services can be as economically attractive as mainstream fare."

So a company that can provide a niche product via an online marketing channel may be more competitive because it's "content" can be more specialized and valuable to this small niche of buyers. If you'd like to learn more check out this page that goes into much more detail.

 

As you can see, the key to finding a profitable niche is keyword research. Try to find a niche with plenty of demand but not too much competition. If you can find the "sweet spot" you'll be on your way to online success.