How To Find A Niche

If you would like to start making money online one of the most important aspects is choosing a profitable niche.

Definition of Niche (from thefreedictionary.com):(Business / Commerce) (modifier) relating to or aimed at a small specialized group or market

Simply put the niche of your website is the topic you create the website about.If you create a blog about internet marketing then you are in the internet marketing niche.If you create a page that sells dog food then you are in the dog food niche.

Before selecting a niche you should know the traffic volume for keywords relating to your niche and the level of competition.The traffic volume will tell you the amount of income you can generate off the presence and the level of competition will tell you the amount of internet marketing needed to rank well. The key to success in the online business world is finding high traffic low competition niches.These are easy to dominate and have enough traffic to make good money.These tactics are probably too advanced for someone who is just starting out.

If you are new to online business, website development, or web publishing then less emphasis should be placed on the niche.For those new I recommend picking topics that you feel comfortable writing about and topics that you have expertise or higher than average knowledge about.The best work will come from your heart so write about topics that you are passionate about rather than those you think will do well.Before you can succeed online you need plenty of practice so this is why you shouldn’t worry about the traffic or competition.Use websites like squidoo and hubpages for easy publishing.These resources are wysiwyg editors meaning you will not need to know any web language or how to use ftp protocol.Another couple of resources that are great for publishers include Blogger and Wordpress.These are free blogging platforms that allow you to create a free blog.

The more advanced online business owner should look directly at competition and traffic levels.To see the level of traffic for any given keyword use Google Adwords Keyword Tool which you can find at adwords.google.com.Type in a few keywords that closely relate to the subject you are thinking about creating a website on.This tool will tell you the monthly traffic volume for the keywords you inputed and the monthly traffic volume for many other keywords that closely relate to the keywords you have entered.Pick keywords that have over a thousand monthly searches this will ensure that when you rank well you will receive enough traffic to make a decent amount of money.

The second thing you will need to check before website creation is the amount of competition.Doing this will be much more difficult than the keyword volume and is quite a bit more important.Understanding the competition is a fundamental aspect of search engine optimization.There are only so many different things you can understand about a presence without having access to Google Webmaster Keyword Tools.The first place you should go is Yahoo.com.Type in the search box link:URL (URL being your competitors URL).Yahoo will bring up the amount of indexed pages and the amount of incoming links they have recorded.This will give you a general idea of how popular and how big their presence is.

The next step is actually going to the competitors website and looking at the source.Look at their title, description, and the type of site it is.You will be able to tell your competitions knowledge of search engine optimization by checking to see what words they use in titles, headings, and within their navigation.If you run across a page that has “home” rather than the main websites keywords you know the competitor does not have a very good grasp of search engine optimization.

One importantranking factor of a page that should be considered when determining the competitor level is the top level domain.This is the .com, .org, .edu, and others.Some of the top level domains carry huge amounts of authority and these would consist of .edu and .gov domains.If they are frequent in your niche then you should consider moving to a new niche.

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