Finding A Niche Market

Finding a niche market is crucial to your success. Getting people to your website is a very important skill. It's not just about writing content and generating a buzz around it, although those are important skills too.

The work begins way before you start writing on your site, as you need to find the perfect niche - the subject of your website. Niche research is about finding profitable subjects that are broad enough to write enough content about. Can you see yourself still writing quality content on this subject one year from now? This is why it is important to be passionate about your niche. If you become bored with your topic, you are going to battle to keep up the enthusiasm, and your readers will pick up on this very quickly. When this happens, they just won’t return to your site. Provide your readers with useful information in order to keep them interested.

Yet it must be narrow enough for you to become an authority on the topic. Select your topic, using keywords with high search results, but low to medium competition. This is where you have to find a balance that you are comfortable with. High search results are great. It means many people are doing searches related to your topic. But do some research regarding the competition as well. When you have to compete against millions of other sites, you might find it hard to rank, which makes it harder to get traffic. No traffic means no sales. This often causes people to become negative and just give up.

A great way to establish the popularity of a niche market is to use the Google AdWords keyword tool. Simply type in the name of the niche and you will see the number of searches performed each month, along with lots of related keywords

I have seen different recommendations as to what should be the lowest search results and what should be the highest, but what I find practical and to try and keep it as simple as possible, I stick to the following recommendation: Try to find keywords with between 5000 and 250 000 searches a month under the “Global Monthly Searches”. This will give you plenty of searches and not too much search engine competition.   

There are a number of ways to find out how much competition you will face if you launch a site in a particular niche market. For a very quick and broad estimation, simply search for the niche name in speech marks in Google

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You can also sign in to this tool. Keyword Spy reveals the average price people are paying for ads to appear in Google for that particular keyword or keyword phrase. It gives you a rough idea (or value) of how lucrative it is, and how much money there is to be made in the niche you have chosen to research.

To get a more reliable indication of how tough a keyword will be to rank for in search results, there are free tools to download, popular ones include Market Samurai and Traffic Travis. These will analyze things like how many inbound links are pointing to sites already ranking for the niche terms.

This gives a far more accurate picture of competition, but can take a while to fully research.

By doing your niche research properly, you will save time and effort. Focusing on the wrong markets will usually result in poor results, namely profit. When you find a niche market with plenty of search volume, good advertiser spend and relatively low competition, you have truly found your niche.