How Do I Choose A Niche Site Topic?

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How Do I Choose A Niche Site Topic

Every great journey begins with the first step.  For our purposes, the first step occurs by doing your homework.  The reason choosing a niche site topic is so difficult for most people is because they hesitate to take the first action.  They spend tons of time thinking about what they like, what they think other people will like, what they think the search engines will like… and finally what they think will be profitable.  It doesn’t need to be complicated, and most importantly, it shouldn’t be so difficult that it prevents you from taking action.  Taking action is the #1 thing that will guarantee you success.

Selecting Niche Site Topics Is Easy!

Ok, well maybe not easy… but it can me made much easier.  Part of the selection process has to come from you.  Here are some really simple and effective techniques to selecting a niche that you can be confident you will have interest in.

  1. List the past 15 things you have purchased
  2. List 15 things that you have searched for online recently, yet were unable to find.  This could be products, trivia, etc.
  3. List 15 things that you are afraid of.  (I know, who wants to write about things they are afraid of, but trust me, people like to search for these types of things)
  4. List 15 things that you “wish” you could change about yourself.  (These can be physical changes like weight loss or cosmetic dentistry, or intellectual changes like finishing college or learning persuasion techniques, or how to get that guy/girl to notice you)

Hopefully you get the point by now… there are numerous ways to come up with a topic that not only should be interesting to you… but most importantly it will be interesting to others..  Look around the internet, there are billions of pages of junk… but most of them are niche oriented.  This is both a blessing and a curse.  Mistake #1 comes when people throw up more junk pages of good topics, but the content is completely useless.  Never, I repeat never, make that mistake.  You don’t have to be wikipedia or Seth Godin, but you do need to have some relevancy and quality content.

This is the beautiful thing about being an individual.  Lets look at the 15 things you are afraid of list.  #1 on my list is spiders.  I hate spiders.  I am sure there are millions of people that are afraid of spiders.  But how many websites are dedicated to “Keeping spiders away from your house?”  Well, according to my search on big G this morning, there are exactly 789 Exact Match results in their index.  Or How many people would be interested in 10 simple ways to keep spiders from biting you… No results found for “10 simple ways to keep spiders from biting you”.  Yeah, my focus would be keeping them away from me.  But how about people that are more afraid of what to do if bitten by a spider?  Your niche could be about spider bite remedies, 10 steps to take in case you are bitten.  And it is simple to monetize with products or information that you can sell.  Many people think Adsense is the only way to monetize… look beyond that.  You can even contact local pest control companies and see if they are interested in leads.

Now that you know what you have a good idea what your niche is going to be… and hopefully you got the idea from above, how do you dominate it?  Well it starts with figuring out what keywords you want to rank for, how many people are searching the web using that keyword, what the competition looks like, etc.

The Niche Selection Tools I Use

One thing I have learned in life, and while working in advertising for the past 10 years… is that when you want to go after something, you go after it to win it!  I am not going to look for a niche that I can’t absolutely dominate.  I think this is the philosophy of most successful people, and I intend to keep that in place.  A great mistake would be to think you can go after the simple keyword “spiders” and expect to become number one in the index.  Its just not going to happen.

So what I did was a TON of research about all the tools, websites, and theories on how to dominate rankings on the search engines.  What I did was spent a boat load of money buying products and guides about the best ways to get tons of traffic, etc.  Yeah, affiliate marketing at its best!  LOL  But what I promise to my readers is that I will only recommend products that I have purchased/used myself, spoken with the company and dealt with their support staff, and use to actively build my business.

That is why I can recommend 2 different products for this.  The first one I bought was Market Samurai (affiliate link)  Yes, I will recommend that you buy it, and eventually promote it yourself…  but you actually can’t become an affiliate for this program unless you have bought the product.  And yes, I use it.  I actually used it to find the keywords that I wanted to focus this post on… how about them apples!  I am going to do a full in-depth review of Market Samurai, but will save that for another post.  The other program that I just recently began using is Long Tail Pro (affiliate link).  Many of you are very familiar with Spencer and his website, and I highly recommend this product.  I use this just as often as Market Samurai these days, and can tell you that Spencer is an awesome guy to work with.  He also has a great site focused on niche sites  It really doesn’t matter which product you use, they are both great.  Finally, for those of you willing to do a little more work and keep some coin in your pocket, I would suggest Google’s Keyword Tool.  The other two products use it to help power their products, and you can really get a ton of quality information from it.

What I wanted to do here was explain that the first steps you should make in choosing a niche site topic are to get up off your rear end, pick a niche that you can be interested in and that you want to learn about.  Then use Market Samurai, Long Tail Pro or Google’s Keyword tool to decide if the niche is worth pursuing and to see if you can dominate it.  And by all means… TAKE ACTION.  Don’t get paralysis from analysis.  If it looks like someone else ranked well for a keyword that doesn’t have huge PR, old domain age, a ton of page indexed, lots of backlinks, etc… then you can too!

Hopefully this gave you some insight into how to select a niche… and more importantly how to do it easily.

Please please comment below if this post interested you or even if you hate what I am saying.  Feedback is always appreciated.

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