How to choose a niche

“How to choose a niche”

The first step in establishing an online business is to choose a niche in which to begin operating.

A niche simply means ‘topic’, or ‘subject matter’. It can be broad – ‘Digital Camera’, more focussed; ‘Sony Digital Cameras’, or very narrow; ‘Sony DSC S730′. The more focus you apply the less competing websites there will be, but there will also be fewer web-surfers looking for that product.

For example, if you pick ‘digital cameras’ you will be up against every website that has content on digital cameras and although a lot of people go online and search for digital cameras you will struggle to be found amongst all the competition.

The same applies to the phrase ‘Sony Digital Cameras’ – you will be up against any site that has content on Sony cameras as this targets all Sony cameras. However, there will be fewer searchers, but, crucially, fewer sites to compete with for those searchers. The most narrow term is ‘Sony DSC S730′ and this is a highly-targeted phrase that will yield much less competition and far fewer searchers. However, to begin with this would be your best target. Apart from the fact that there is less competition it is more of a buying phrase so you have more chance of converting visitors to buyers. Anyone searching for this phrase must already be thinking about buying the item rather than just researching.

Two Major Factors in Choosing a Niche

There are two primary factors which you will need to consider when choosing a niche, they are;

1. Are you interested in the subject? You will need to write a lot about your chosen niche (certainly at the beginning before you can afford to outsource) and so you must be able to find a lot of material for your articles and blog posts. For example, if you are targeting ‘Sony DSC S730′ then you will need to write posts and articles comparing various aspects of the camera with similar models.

2. Are there plenty of people searching on the subject that are willing to spend money? You have a niche that you are very interested in and could write all day on, but unless there is a crowd of hungry buyers you will be wasting your time.

How can you tell if a niche has potential?
There are a number of tools and methods you can use to check out whether a particular niche has a core of buyers or not.

First of all you need to check search volumes. To do this go to the Google Keyword Tool, type your term into the search box, fill out the ‘captcha’ and hit ‘get keyword ideas’.

Google Keyword Tool shows search volume and advertiser competition

As you can see in area shaded purple at the top an ‘exact phrase’ match yields 12100 searches a month and the advertiser competition is high.  The high advertiser competition indicates that this is a buying niche – these figures are for the paid ads that appear on Google and if there was not money in the niche then there would not be high competition.

A second way of checking the whether money is being spent in the niche is to simply type the term into the Google search engine (using quotes for higher accuracy) and check for the paid listings down the right-hand-side and in the top three positions at the top of the page.

The paid listings indicate that this is a niche in which people spend money

Again the paid listings show that money is spent in this niche.  Basically, any niche in which people spend money on advertising will almost certainly have income potential.  The trick is getting the balance right between the number of people searching and buying and the amount of competition.

To further research the amount of competition you can visit GTrends Wordtracker and type your term into the search box and hit ‘hit me’. You will then be returned a list like this;

Clicking on the small bar graph icon (highlighted purple) will bring up info on searches and existing websites

From here you are able to see the number searches and by clicking on the bar graph icon get more detailed information on the number of competing sites and the number of visitors that can be expected for a site in the number one position on the Google search engine.

Final Word
This is a brief run through of one way to find a niche that could generate you income, there are many different ways to research a niche and numerous sites that can help you compile research info.

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Tags: Camera Digital, Camera Sony, Digital Camera, Google, Gtrends, Models, Money, Niche, Niche research, Online Business, People Online, People Search, People Searching, Phrase, Searchers, Sony, Sony Cameras, Sony Digital Cameras, Sony Dsc, Subject Matter, Target, Targets, Web Surfers