subject: An Easy Niche Finder Formula [print this page] If you are looking to start a niche website, and wondering if you can succeed with it, let me give you a quick overview of what you can do to ensure you pick a winner.
You should, of course, pick a topic which you have a little bit of interest in, because if you start making money with it, you'll want to spend time each week finding good affiliate offers to your customers, and to develop additional content to attract more potential clients.
Once you found something you're interested in, you'll need to see if there's any money in that niche, and you check that by visiting google and typing the root keyword for your market. For example, if your market is judo throws, you might search for "judo". Check the results, and look for ads on the right side of the page and at the top of the search results. If you see 6 or more ads, there's money to be made. If you don't see any ads, it might not be possible to make money in that niche, so best to find another angle, or pick another niche.
So, you've found something with ads, and now it's time to find out what this market is searching for. How I do this is to search for forums and blogs where people are communicating about your chosen topic. Next, you need to find a common phrase that indicates people are seeking a solution for something.
I use phrases like "does anyone know" or "totally frustrated" or "completely frustrated" along with forum OR blog, plus the chosen niche keyword. For the judo example, a search might be
"does anyone know" OR "completely frustrated" (forum OR blog) judo
I just ran this, and found some questions about where judo is taught, where judo outfits can be bought, and other similar things.
Once you find a problem, the next step is to find related keywords that get some traffic volume.
The best way to do this is to google the "google keyword research tool" and enter your new keyword, and search for related keywords and volumes.
Once you find some keywords with volume, you'll want to see if you can get some natural traffic from the search engines. I use the Firefox browser along with a plugin called search status that shows some details about the search results, like number of incoming links, pagerank, and other stuff.
If you find one of the first 10 results have few incoming links, or doesn't have the keyword in the title and headline, then you can probably replace them with little effort.
With google, you can also use some search term modifiers to find the competition. You can look for sites with the chosen keyword in the title and url by using the modifiers intitle and inurl. Here's an example for judo outfits:
intitle:"judo outfits" inurl:"judo outfits"
At the time of this article, there were only about 7 results for this search, which means it would take very little effort to rank for this.
This is just an example, and you'd have to check the number of google ads to make sure this is a money maker, but this is a good result that is easy to rank for.
Going back to the google keyword tool, look for the volume for this phrase, and make sure it's enough to be worth the effort.
For our example, I found "judo outfit" and "judo outfits" has about 560 searches per month, which would probably bring in 100 to 300 visitors if you ranked well.
There's more to developing a niche website, but I hope this gives you a good start.
