Find Your Niche

Anyone can start a blog on any topic.  The problem is, if you actually want to make money with your blog, then you need to select a topic that will have an enthusiastic audience from day one.  That means you need to do your niche research. 

Your first step is to brainstorm topics you might enjoy writing about.  You can look at your own personal interests, or you keep your eyes open for topics on TV, in print publications, and online.   

Once you’ve lined up several potential topics, it’s time to determine if there’s a market.  One way to do it is to go to Wordtracker.com (or your favorite keyword tool) and enter the search words your market might use to find you. 

For example, your keywords might be something along the lines of “how to lose weight” or “how to housebreak a puppy” or “how to crochet.” 

While each individual keyword might not get a lot of traffic, ideally you’re looking for a niche that gets at least a few thousand searches per month across all those keywords. 

For example, one keyword may get a couple hundred searches per month, another might get a few thousand, and dozens might only a few dozen.  But collectively you have a niche that’s being searched for thousands of times per month. 

Once you’ve determined there’s an audience, your next step is to check if people are willing and able to spend money in the niche.  Go to Google and Yahoo and enter some of your keywords.  Are other marketers buying pay per click ads?  If so, good – that likely means there’s a market buying goods and services. 

Finally, you can confirm the profitability by going to Clickbank.com, Amazon.com, CJ.com and similar.  Are their products and services catering to this market?  If other people are selling to the niche, then the niche must be buying.   

If no one is selling to the niche, don’t assume it’s an unexploited niche.  Quite possibly no one’s selling because there’s not a market buying anything, and thus not worth a marketer’s time.