Niche Websites - Part 1: Identifying a Niche

SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 9, 2008

This is the first part in our series of niche website design articles. The purpose of a niche website is to get lots of targeted traffic and make money from pay-per-click advertising or affiliate schemes. Following the launch of 2 niche websites; Telescope Advice and Lawn Mower Advice, we are discussing the techniques used to identify a niche in this first of our five part article.

This is probably the most important part of building a niche website. If the niche isn't popular enough or if the topic is already saturated, the niche is unlikely to be successful. In these articles we are going to focus on niche websites which use Google AdSense as revenue generation.

For this business model to be successful it's all about getting the 'supply and demand' ratio correct. There has to be enough people searching for your niche, as well as, enough people advertising on this niche (using Google AdWords). Thankfully, there are hundreds of tools and resources out there to help us determine whether our niche has a chance.

The Supply

It is essential for there to be plenty of advertisers for your niche. If there are few advertisers you won't have any adverts appearing on your niche website, or they will lack relevance. The first test is to do a Google search for your niche and look at the Google AdWords on the right hand side. If there are few adverts (less than 8) then it's unlikely that your niche will have a good supply of advertisers.

Secondly, create a Google Adwords account (if you haven't already) and create a test campaign for your niche. The objective here is to see what the bids are like for your niche. If the bids are large then you will get a higher return on each click-through.

The Demand

If you've got this far then you've discovered that people are paying to advertise for your niche (or not). We're half-way there. Next, we need to make sure people are actually searching for our niche - otherwise we won't get any visitors!

For this, we use various tools to see approximately how many searches are being performed per month for our chosen niche. The ones we recommend in this article are Wordtracker and SEO Book. Enter your chosen niche keywords to see the number of searches being performed. To help gauge the demand you may need to compare these figures with other topics which you know have a high (or low) demand.

Later on, we'll use these tools to identify our keywords and phrases which form the sitemap of our niche website.

The Maths

You may have seen formulas for 'supply and demand' bouncing around the Internet, but in our experience these formulas do not represent the true feasibility of a project. There are other things to consider other than the supply/demand figures, such as bid amounts on Google AdWords, quality of competition, and availability of niche content.

As a rule, if there are enough people searching AND advertising for your niche then it's worth a go - you'll learn a lot from this process and perfect your approach over time. Learn from your mistakes.

The Competition

Do a quick search on Google to see your competition. Take a look around these web sites to see how they fair. If there are plenty of good well-written websites on your chosen niche, your topic is probably well saturated, making it more difficult to get good search engine placement.

Availability of Niche Content

Your niche website must contain good, unique, keyword rich content. This is harder than it sounds. You will either write the content yourself or hire a copywriter to do this for you. Either way, there needs to be sufficient content and articles on your chosen subject to base your content on. Search Google to see what's available.

To Sum Up...

Hopefully, you will have either discovered your niche has a fighting chance or doomed to fail. The most common being the latter! If you have plenty of people searching and advertising, poor competition, and readily available content then you have the basis for a good niche website. Our next article will discuss researching your niche and choosing your keywords.

Helpful Tools...

Posted Feb 9, 2008 03:55 PM by Andy Crathorne | Permalink | Send to a Friend

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Comments (7)

Liverpool Website Design wrote:
Great post, very useful for identifying niche keywords. I am sure many people I speak to will find this information very interesting indeed.

Kind Regards
Posted on 14-Mar-08 at 1:04 pm | Permalink

web pixy wrote:
Thanks for this awesome article! I hear this term 'niche website' for the first time and it is very interesting. Thank you for the info.
Posted on 21-Mar-08 at 9:30 am | Permalink

James wrote:
Thanks for the article, this is ideal for anyone starting a website, good planning is very important, otherwise, you will be wasting time, money and effort if you dont research your niche properly.

Many Thanks
Posted on 24-Mar-08 at 1:03 pm | Permalink

Lincolnshire web design wrote:
Research your niche. Solid foundations are vital for any business. Get as much information as possible.

Posted on 31-Mar-08 at 11:28 am | Permalink

Jason Marsh - Website Designer wrote:
Hi, great article, very very help full thanks. At the end of the day content is king, it has to be informative, short, sweet and to the point. But thanks again for the help figuring out if your niche is indeed worth the effort..
Posted on 01-Apr-08 at 4:36 pm | Permalink

Free Article Resources wrote:
that's really a fantastic post ! ! added to my favourite blogs list. .
Posted on 03-Apr-08 at 1:07 pm | Permalink

philippine web designs wrote:
This article is just right for me since I find it difficult for me to choose my kind of niche for my blogs
Posted on 12-May-08 at 4:36 am | Permalink

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