How To Find A Profitable Niche Market

A lot of people spend a huge amount of time worrying about what niche market they should launch their websites in and what kind of audience they should target. The best advice would be to focus on a subject that you are intimately familiar with and have a real passion for, but some people just want to find the best way to make money with niche websites. If you are thinking about setting up a blog or website purely with the intention of making a profit then finding the right topic can make a huge difference to your overall success. Depending on what methods of monetization you are going to be using, some niche areas will pay next to nothing while others will do pretty well. An example of a low profit niche area for Adsense is music which is an area I have spent a lot of time in and I can say from experience that money in this niche is pretty bad. I would not spend a lot of time building a music website which relies on Adsense unless I really enjoyed doing it because the potential to make very big money from PPC advertising is extremely low. I should probably mention that most niche websites aren’t big money makers but, given the right niche and some hard work, you can earn a reasonable return on investment over time.

Although there are always ways to make money using affiliate marketing or product sales, Adsense is usually a good first indication of the potential profit to be made in a given niche. In general the most profitable niches for advertising revenue are ones with expensive products or services related to them. If you think about it, advertisers pay the most money in areas where they are really fighting for customers and areas in which the advertiser stands to make a big profit. Good example of high profit areas would be things like travel, financial services and mortgages where consumers spend huge sums of money.

There are two opposing ideas regarding niche websites. On the positive side, the more obscure and niche your market is then the less competition you are likely to find for customers which gives you a much greater chance of dominating that market. In order to be successful with your site then you will need to be in the top few competitors in your niche. The downside to this is that as you get more and more obscure in your choice of niche, the less traffic, and subsequently customers, you are likely to get which means a low potential profit.

I guess you have to balance up your ability to compete with the potential to make profit. There are very few really profitable areas that are not already highly competitive and so making money out of niche websites is getting harder and harder. You do not necessarily want to start competing in a niche simply because it is profitable because you might find it impossible to compete with the bigger websites. It can take years to get to the top of Google in some niche areas and only months in others. The ideal situation is a moderately profitable niche area with very little quality competition.

I would say that if you really plan on making a good profit from a niche website then you will need to be at least on the first page of Google for your chosen keywords. Making a success of any website generally depends on traffic more than any other factor, and if you are not sitting within the first few results in the search engines then it may be hard to draw in the traffic volumes you need to succeed. This is always something worth bearing in mind when setting up a niche website. Always look at the competition and see if you honestly think you can compete with the already established sites in your area.

Things To Consider

There are three important things to consider when analyzing your potential niche market for the first time.

1 You will need a reasonable level of demand from people who are passionate about your subject matter.

2 You need to find out what problems people in this niche face

3 You must find a way to help them overcome their problems with useful information or services.

These three steps are really important if you want to understand your chosen niche market. Sometimes the solutions are simple and other times they require more thought. If for example you set up a website about piano playing then the problem the audience faces would probably be learning to play which you could help them with by providing lessons either in the form of free content or a physical book, CD etc.

When choosing your keywords to target for your website be as specific as possible in your choices. While there are millions of competitors for “piano lessons” there won’t be anywhere near as many for something more specific like “jazz piano lessons”. The more specific you are with your keyword choices, the more chance you have of being able to get to the front page of Google for your chosen keywords.

Ways To Make Money

There are many ways for you to make money in a niche topic are and here are some of the most obvious ones:

Product sales (Software, books, audio, niche products etc)

Direct advertising

PPC advertising

Affiliate marketing

Keywords And CPC

If you plan on making the bulk of your money through Adsense or advertising then you should be spending some time getting to know the Google Keywords tool, which should give you a pretty good idea about the potential profit you can make for each ad click. The amount of money that advertisers are willing to pay is usually a good indication of how much profit they are already making in that area. The more money that advertiser’s pay then the more money there is likely to be in a given niche market. Some keywords will pay more than a dollar for a click while others pay just a few cents. The differences can really ad up over time and make a huge difference to the amount of money you can earn. Imagine a thousand ad clicks at $1 vs. $0.01. As you can imagine the difference can be quite significant over time. Bear in mind that the actual amounts that the Google Keywords tool suggests is usually a lot lower. Some of the niche areas I have worked in pay out only $0.08 for a click while others can pay up to $1 or more. As I rough estimate I would say that you should half the figure it gives you for a more realistic view of how much money you will earn per click for a given keyword. By default the Google Keywords tool hides the Cost per Click data. To see the CPC figures go to the Google Keywords tool and select to view the CPC figures from the drop down list of hidden data.

I would print off a list of good keywords that you intend on targeting and then doing a search in Google to see how many results there are for that keyword.

Here is a list of some really high paying niches in terms of advertising. Bear in mind there are plenty of other ones not included here so I encourage you to go out and build your own list. These are some of the more obvious high paying Adsense topics.

Drugs

Rehabilitation

Mortgages

Credit Cards

Travel

Whatever niche market you choose to work in, always make sure that you are confident in dominating your niche and becoming one of the leading authorities on your topic. If you cannot honestly compete at the top of your niche then find an area in which you can. Success with niche websites is usually down to finding the best way to help the customers in your niche find what they need.