Niche selection is the first step in creating your blog

A niche is a specialized market or any interest you may have. When trying to find a niche you should choose something that is interesting to you, something that is profitable, and something that others are willing to pay money for. It is important to note that just because something is interesting to you there is no guarantee that it will be a niche that makes money. You will need to select a niche where there is a need for a good or service and people are already spending money.

A few of the most lucrative niches include business, health, relationships, and lifestyle.  Within those niches you should be able to find a niche that is interesting to you and that your viewers will be willing to pay you for.  It is not always necessary to find a niche with many searches. The most important factor in niche selection is finding something that you can consistently write good quality content about. Providing your visitors with quality information will ensure that you maintain their interests.

Find a Niche

There are several different steps involved in selecting a profitable niche. The easiest and most sensible place to start is with your own interests.  Grab a pen and pencil and let’s make some notes.  Jot down any forums you are a member of, what type books you read, your occupation, what magazines you subscribe to, and any other hobbies you like. Your list is now full of niche markets.  Still we have to do a little more work before we find a niche that makes money.

As you work to find a niche you will need to be sure that the following three facts are true before you continue.

1. There are enough people searching for your niche to make it worth the effort.
2. The people searching are actually buyers.
3. You can find a product or service to offer to people searching.

Niche Research

Niche research is probably the most important part of making money online so we will spend quite a bit of time here so we get this right.  According to Google, the most lucrative niches are:

• Dog Training
• Information Marketing
• Home Security
• Health and Fitness
• Real Estate Investing
• Sports
• Losing Weight
• Weddings
• Making and Investing Money
• Dating
• Arts and Crafts
• Self Improvement

However, these niches are too broad and much too difficult to rank highly in Google so we will take our list of niches and narrow them to a micro-niche list.  So, using my list for example, number 2 is couponing.  So let’s run through an example to show you how it’s done.

Step One:  Head on over to the Google Keyword Tool to determine searches per month and narrow my selection to a micro niche.  I type in couponing and the results are quite intimidation.  The searches are over 500,000 per month with medium competition.

So with a little brainstorming, I come up with a micro niche that meets my search, competition, and profitability tests.

The micro niche “frugal living” has low competition, 60.000 monthly searches, and will bring approximately 0.62 per click with Adsense.  That is what I consider perfect stats for Step One.

Step Two:  Now to see if we can market affiliate products related to this micro niche, we could use the Clickbank marketplace tool to check the gravity of a few items in our selected niche. But I take a different approach and use CB Trends, a site which shows the Clickbank trends.  CB Trends is easier to use and very simple to understand.  By searching for our niche market on CB Trends, we are able to find an info product that we could market to our visitors for our micro niche to make money.

Step Three:  Now that we know we have found a viable niche, it is time to get some “buying” keywords to target on our blog.  A buying keyword is a keyword that will bring buyers to your blog and not just browsers.   So I put my seed keyword “frugal living” into the tool and search.  Once the results are in, I download to Excel and filter by global monthly searches.  I am looking for secondary, long-tail keywords, that have at least 30,000 global monthly searches and low competition.  I find quite a few including ‘how to live on a budget’ with 31,100 global monthly searches and low competition.  I jot down 20-30 into a text file to use while I am working on my blog posts and SEO.  All done.  Looks like we were able to find a niche that makes money.  Now, that wasn’t so hard was it?

It is important to keep in mind while you try to find a niche, that you will be working on your blog for many weeks.  So look for a niche that makes money but also one that you can write good content for and keep your readers engaged.

If you were able to follow along with those steps and have selected a profitable niche, have chosen some great keywords, and are ready to move onto the next step, finding a blog theme that converts browsers into buyers, then, click the button below.  If you need more help, send me an email, and I will respond right away.