Choosing A Niche
Niche blogging means blogging with the intention of marketing to a
particular niche. A niche is a subset of a market. Think of it this way:
Sports >> Fishing >> Fly Fishing (niche)
Cars >> Sports Cars >> Ferrarris (niche)
Why not just create a blog about sports or a blog
about cars? Well, we could. But the reason why we want to narrow it down is
because we want focused content. We want our visitors to be looking for
something in particular-- and we want them to find it on our website.
A person stumbling on to a sports website could be
looking for anything. Football scores, golf tips, etc. In that case it becomes
very difficult, if not impossible, to cater to everyone.
But if you have someone curious about the best fly
fishing rods and he happens to come across your blog aptly titled, “Fly Fishing
Rods”, then you have satisfied his need.
He has stumbled across a website that offers exactly
the content he's looking for, and potentially the products that he wants too.
In this way, we don't need to drive TONS of traffic to
our blog just to generate a few bucks – because we can make just as much, if
not more, from a small amount of visitors because this traffic is highly targeted.
To break it down further, we'll be headed into
mico-niche territory. An example of this would be “bamboo fly fishing rods”.
This is even more targeted than “fly fishing rods”.
However, the key here is knowing whether or not this
micro-niche is popular enough to warrant making a blog about it. It doesn't
matter how targeted your blog is: if no one cares about this topic and no one
is searching for it, then you won't make any money.
A good way to tell if your micro-niche is popular
enough is by browsing Amazon.
By doing a simple search for “bamboo fly fishing rod”
on Amazon, we can see that there are several popular books on the topic.
·
Casting
a Spell: The Bamboo Fly Rod and the American Pursuit of Perfection
·
A
Bamboo Artisan Fly Fishing on the Ruby River
·
Bamboo
Fly Rod Suite: Reflections on Fishing And the Geography of Grace
·
Fishing
Bamboo: An Angler's Passion for the Traditional Fly Rod
·
Fundamentals
of Building a Bamboo Fly-Rod
·
Handcrafting
Bamboo Fly Rods
How can you tell if a book is popular on Amazon?
Overall, there are no hard and fast rules. Just browse through the selection
and it shouldn't be hard to determine whether or not people are interested in
the topic.
Just the fact that there are books written about the
subject should tell you something.
Check to see how many reviews the book has-- the more
the better (obviously). Also take a look at the book's rank.
The higher the rated the better. Generally, anything under 100,000 is considered decent. It is
also ranking pretty well in several categories.
To sum it up, just browse Amazon for a while to get a
general idea of the popularity of a niche. But don't be too analytical-- it's
easy to get bogged down in the analyzing/research stage, and once that happens,
you start to hesitate and second-guess yourself.
What if this niche isn't a money-maker? Well, you won't really know until
you try. So try! Even if you fail, at least it will be a good learning
experience, so you will be better equipped for your next blog.
Another step you take to tell if a niche is profitable
or not is to do a simple search on Google. In our case we're searching for
“bamboo fly fishing rods”:
To the right of
the search results, you'll notice a bunch of Google Adwords advertisements.
This is a very good sign, because it means that companies are advertising for
this keyword, which in turn means that people are SPENDING MONEY in this niche.
If you don't see any sponsored links when you search
for your niche, there's a good chance that there's simply no money in it.
