Choosing a Niche for Your Website

Choosing the niche, the very core topic of your website is an important step, since you’ll be stuck with it and if you don’t choose wisely you’ll soon abandon what you doing because of the simple fact you’ll not enjoying it. You have to be prepared to work for a year or two without, or with very little, financial compensation. Only handful people can do that. Are you one of them?

Brainstorming

If you want to create and manage a website, to become a webmaster, you’ll have to find your true passion and spend a great amount of time and energy in creating a good content, promoting your website and be prepared to learn something new every single day.

99% of the people, who try to make money online by running a website, they fail. There is no “get rich quick” scheme. Creating and especially managing a website is a long learning process and if you don’t enjoy it you’ll certainly fail. For that reason finding a niche that will keep you “alive” for several years is a must do.

So grab a pencil and a piece of paper and brainstorm some ideas about your new website. Ask yourself the following questions:

What I usually enjoy when I have a conversation with my friends and family?

In which field I’m considered as an expert?

What do I like to read the most?

What do I watch on TV the most?

What can get hold of my attention for a very long time?

Simply what is the true passion in my life?

Research

Now you certainly have some general ideas about what you want to do on Internet. Now fire up your browser and do some research about your “ideas”. You’ll be amazed of the fact that almost nothing is “new” on Internet. Whatever you think off, there is someone else who is already doing that. There is someone else who is already running a website based on your “ideas”. Whatever you think off, there will be a dozens of websites with the same “idea” behind. A truly great idea comes once in a trillion. Often that is a new technology employed by a group of people finding its way through the vast see of goods and services on the web (examples: YouTube, Facebook, Twitter etc.)

So what we are going to do about that. Nothing. There is a room for everyone. If you’’re good enough you’ll find your way.

Narrowing

So far so good, you have some ideas, you did your research on Internet and you narrowed your choice on two-three topics you are passionate about. That’s good but you have to be aware of one more thing. If you choose some broad, general topic (example: writing about “life”), you’ll lose the focus, you’ll face fierce competition, your site will be full of seemingly disconnected articles and probably you’ll have a hard time ranking well at search engines.

However if you narrow your niche to much (example: writing about “Australian cat grooming products”), you’ll have a very few people interested in this topic, thus a very small number of people searching for it on the web. Also you’ll probably run out of content very soon. Simply there is not much out there to write about it.

Profitability

It’s always good to check if the niche is profitable or not. For example the niche “insurance” is one of the most profitable niches out there, but in turn it’s very competitive. Google AdWords Tool is the best destination to check if the main keywords for your niche are profitable or not. Also you can check if they’re competitive or not and how many people are searching for them on a monthly basis.

Playing with the this tool will roughly tell you if you’re going to make some serious money in future and how much competition you’ll have to face along the way. For example the keywords related to “insurance” cost around $15 per click. That means if you decide to advertise your website with those keywords, you’ll have to pay a lot of money.

But, that also means if you place an AdSense ads on your “insurance” website you’ll earn good amount of money with every single click. However as I said it’s a very competitive niche and probably you’ll not make your site prominent and often visited, thus you’ll not earn much money from it, unless you’re genius in that field.

Wrap Up

Choose your niche wisely. Make sure it’s not too much competitive, that you have enough inspiration for it, it can bring fair amount of money, and the most important part, make sure you really enjoy the process of writing or creating the content for it.

Vlatko is the owner of Keen Talks. Visit his website to see talks, lectures and interviews with insightful people.