Finding Niches

With so much competition for the popular highly-searched subjects like mortgages, gambling, health etc, it's becoming increasingly important to identify a niche market to target your site to. The top-ranked sites in these areas have, in a lot of cases, been around for many years, and will likely have many thousands of visitors and incoming links so the chances of you getting anywhere near the top few pages of the search engines to compete with them are very slim.

Therefore you need to find a popular niche that has a reasonable number of searches every month, and that doesn't have too many well-established competing sites. Therefore you know that you have a good chance of getting near the top of the search engines with a well-optimised site, and lots of incoming links (see the Search Engine Optimization section for more information on this subject).

So how do you find these niches? Well there are several approaches. Firstly I would recommend sitting down in front of a blank page and just having a brainstorming session. Start off my writing down as many words and related words as you can relating to subjects you know quite a lot about, such as interests, hobbies, skills, etc. If some of these words that you have identified are too generic, then break them down into sub-categories to identify more specific niches.

Keep these words handy for when you do keyword research later. Next you want to identify hot topics that other people are talking about. A good way to do this is to look at the types of subjects that people are writing about on blogs, forums and chatrooms. Another good way to find hot topics is by going to the large article directories such as goarticles or ezinearticles, and find the most popular articles and what subjects they are based on.

Another good way to find potential niches is by going to Amazon and going to the "books" section and click on "bestsellers" to see what kind of books people are currently buying. Then visit the magazine section and again see which subjects the top-selling magazine-subscriptions are based on. Ebay is another good research tool, simply look for the top-selling products, and maybe think about writing sites reviewing these products.

You can also look for ideas in the offline world as well. Go to your local newsagents and look at all the different magazines on display, and make a note of any potential niches you could exploit. Also visit your local library (yes they do still exist even in this internet age) for inspiration. You'll be amazed at how many ideas you can pick up. Most libraries even have free internet access so you can do keyword research at the same time as you identify potential niches.

Finally, if all else fails just look around you. There are literally thousands of potential niches. For example, computers, mouse mats, speakers, paper clips, posters, radios, etc, and their related sub-niches, such as customised computers, film posters, etc. Just be creative.

By now you should have a nice list of potential niches. Now it's time to do some keyword research to identify if these niches have limited competition and could therefore be profitable. Please visit the Keyword Research section for more information.