Smart Ways To Choose A Profitable Niche In Your Industry

Let get this party started! choosing a blog niche isn’t hard but its isn’t easy either.

I have 3 niches is mind- honestly, I’ve already bought the domain names. Once a niche idea pops into my head I start thinking of brand names/domain names and branding (colors and such).

Need help picking a domain name? Check out this tool here

If something sounds cool and less than 3 words, I run over to godaddy.com and see if its available- then decide if I actually like the name or niche.

So

I wont be going into how to find a niche

There are so many niches its not even a question of IF you can find a site, it more of a question of WHICH niche should you choose

Here is a list of 1,109 niches 

Side Note: If you want to follow along, which I strongly suggest you do, pick about 3 you may be interested in and I will show you how to narrow down your choices below (write in the comments if you have questions).

What Niches Am I Interested In and Why

• Healthy Eats
• Credit
• Traveling
• Automobiles
• Home Improvement

Time To Make A Decision: Niche Idea Process Of Elimination

When choosing a niche to build an online business or blog around, there are a few key factors that need to examined before publishing your 1st piece of content.

• Keyword Research
• Research Competitors
• Monetisation Options (How Can It Make Money)

​This is especially true if you want your site to be profitable.

The Keyword Research Process: Choosing A Blog Niche

The goal here is to check a few tools and resources to see how much search volume these terms are getting monthly, identify buyers intent and other commercial keywords.

Buyer Intent Keywords

 

Buyer Intent Keywords are phrases that make it very clear that the person searching has intent to purchase something once that land on the right piece of content.  Here are a few examples: 

• Cheapest [Niche Product]
• Best [Niche Product]
• [Niche Product] for kids

Wink: Many times, multiple of these keywords can be mixed and the serps will still crawl your site

​We aren’t just looking for people looking to buy something, we also want to find people who need information.

Why?

Because those people usually are thinking about buying something soon or need help with something they recently bought (hopefully from you)

Thinking ahead a bit: If they already bought something, you can improve there experience and monetize buy offering another product that helps or you can place ads on those pages.

What Are Those Keywords? Informational KWs Like…

• How To [Niche]
• Improving [Niche]
• What [Niche]
• Why [Niche]

 

Most niches will have these KWs, but not all are great for building an online around because of size of products, price points, search volume, etc.

Right now we are looking at search volume for a few main articles.

How To LookUp Keywords? and Find Traffic Volume? 

Google Suggest

Just start typing and you have keywords. Here, for the example, I will just type in “how to” with credit and see what happens

All those phrase that drop down under the phrase I typed in are Keywords and potential pieces of content

Ok… What about search volume

There are many tools you can use to figure out the search volume. At this point I pay for Ahref.com, and LongtailPro, but before I started really getting into building online business I used google adwords for free!.

Google Adwords

Boom! Search Volume is between 1,000 and 10,000 per month

Adwords also give related keywords, competition levels and how much ads cost (aka how much you can get paid per click if you had ads on your site for this KW)​

This is good information but it can be better. Tools like Ahref and LongtailPro give more specific information; they give exact numbers ….

 Bang! The exact search volume is 7.8K

They give comp levels, related keywords and even gives you an idea of how many backlinks you need to rank in the top 10 of search engines​

Powerful stuff

​

Reminder: Im not sure which niche Im getting into, Im just showing you the 1st steps in my research of the 3 niches I mentioned above.

Competition Analysis: What Do They Do? And How Can We Do It Better

Continuing with the Credit example I’ll make a short list of sites that create content around credit (credit scores, credit repair, credit cards, etc.)

3 Ways: How To Find Potential Competitors ​

1. Google it!

Type in a few phrases and see what you get… for example

• [Niche] + blog
• forums + [Niche]

2. Pick One, then type in the search bar- related:[Niche]

Example– related:creditcards.com

There goes 3 competitors.

3. Use The​ “Similar Pages” Chrome Extension 

​

This is just a faster way to find competitors. Here I snapped just a few but they give a list of about 10 related sites.

Remember, these are just examples, there is no way I could consider creditcards.com competition. They are a HUGE company and I don’t even have a site at this point. But its a great point of reference and great way to give you examples. ​So when you are doing your research look for smaller blogs to get information from, and use the huge sites to see how far you can go.

Monetisation Options: How Can We Make Money?

So far we learned, just by search one term, there are thousands of people search information about how to improve their credit… Awesome!

We learned that there are huge sites targeting credit keywords so, I assume they are making money.

2 Ways: How Do You Know If Your Potential Competitors Are Making Money?

Take a quick look at a few pages on the site… eventually you will see links, ads, services pages, courses, e-commerce cart, etc.

For this example you can see the creditcards.com is an affiliate for a bunch of different credit card companies and get paid from ads

​They even have a call # that I assume is linked to the site so they get paid if the custom gets cards.

​You can also use sites like SimilarWeb.com and see what sites people are refered to from the site you’re studying.

Here’s a screenshot from SimilarWebs overview​ where we can see the top sites people are directed to the most.

We see that Credit One Bank is the top referred site from Credit Cards(.)com.

So

Ask yourself, why would such a big site link to another site in the same industry? Its probably because they have a partnership or they are an affiliate in some way.

My next question is, does credit one ​have an affiliate program?  Let find out!

Yes! They do…

I don’t know if my example site owns this other site (they could) or if they are affiliates, but I have found out they its possible to become an affiliate.​

The next thing is to figure out what the commission payout is… is it per click, a percentage,  per lead, etc.  ​

Next: Going Back Into The Trenches & Coming Back With A Better Plan

Ok

We did a bit of KW research, Competitors Analysis and checked to see if sites could be making money.

Although I’ve​ broken things up in parts, you want to get to a point where you think of it all at once.

Meaning: You think of a niche, google it, search for volume, see which sites are ranking and look threw those sites to see what they are selling about how they sell it.​ All this with multiple tabs open and your brain racing – unless that sounds unhealthy to you, if so, don’t do it 🙂 

Moving Forward With This Case Study

Next, Im going to do everything I mentioned above 5 times over and for hours longer. This was not enough for me to choose a niche- but we started the process.

I showed you one example of everything above; you should research lots of keywords. List and review 10-20 sites to see how they ​make money and produce content. Check the references, look for affiliates, etc, etc.

​I’m really doing this as I go, so I don’t know what the next post will be about, but I mention how I plan to monetize, how I plan to promote, anything I done already and share the niche Im choose (maybe)

If I share the domain name, it will be months into the project.​

Thanks!!

P.S. Questions or comments? Write below. If you know someone who can benefit from this information please share! Make someones day better 🙂