In your quest to make money on line, picking a good niche to work with is absolutely critical. There are many approaches that will work, but some scale better than others. You can go for a micro -niche that is high value and returns few sales, but high returns per sale or click, or you can target a high volume niche with many products, and potentially lower value returns per sale. Some niches will be extremely competitive, and this is the factor you probably need to pay the most attention to.
The best approach, in my opinion, is to choose a a very broad topicfor your site, something with an absolutely huge search volume, and then work micro niches within that broad topic base.
There is a huge range to choose from, consider broad topics like recipes, and then think about micro niches within this: French cooking, chicken recipes, chili recipes, etc. Recipes is just one broad subject, but there are many, many more.
Today I am going to look at another broad topic example: Apple (technology).
Within this topic I will choose another high search volume sub-niche, the iPad. If we use Googles free Keyword Tool to get ab idea about traffic potential, we can see it is pretty phenomenal, 45M searches including the words “the ipad” every month.
This data also gives us insight into another niche that could be good, ipods.
So focusing on the iPad again, looking at the huge number of monthly searchesI know I can build a great site around this topic, there is huge search volume and there will be a lot of longtails, so many that there will be guaranteed traffic if I create some compelling content. But this does not mean we must focus only on phrases that contain the word “iPad”, although topics like “iPad cases”, “iPad apps” will all be decent traffic drivers. However, we can also think outside the square and look at products for the iPad.
If you are monetizing with affiliate products, and you have an account with Commission Junction, you can then search for merchants and products related to your broad keyword topic. I’ve run a quick search, and a company that comes up with a number of products for our niche is ZAGG. They have screen protectors, cases, charging accessories and bunch of other things. They also have a new hot product called the ZAGG folio.
Hot products are good things to target, they will have decent searches around them, a good approach is to consider what the user may be looking for to help with their decision pre-purchase. words suck as “comparison” or “review”, and this is where you, as a writer, can add value. Consider in this example taking the ZAGG folio and writing a review, or comparing it to another, similar product, from another manufacturer.
Another good thing to do before beginning your review, is to search on Google for your keywords and see what comes up. We can get an idea from this if there is much search competition, but more importantly, if there is already high quality content on the topic. This is where many SEO guides fall short, in my opinion. They will tell you to analyze the competion for backlinks, keyword density, etc, But I believe the true metric we wish to measure against is the quality of the content you are up against. When I search for “ZAGG folio review” I see some average posts, and a few good ones, such as this ZAGG folio review.
If we are prepared to create content as compelling and informative as our competitors, then we can compete in the niche. This is the rule of thumb I abide by.
I hope this was an insightful case study. In future posts we will look at analyzing our competitors more closely, and extracting more keyword longtails for our micro-niche campaigns.
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