One of the most important things to do when starting a new niche blog is to ensure that your effort is worth it. Not all niches are created equal, and doing your research can save you a lot of wasted time. In this article we’ll look at 3 ways to check if a niche is worth investing time in.
It’s important to note that these 3 techniques should be used in conjunction. Just doing one of them might give you a false positive. It takes a bit of work upfront, but it’s well worth the time it saves on a bad niche.
Check For Relevant Search Traffic
The first step before jumping into any niche is to determine if there’s actually people interested in it. The quickest way is to simply plug in your niche and related keywords into keyword research tools and make sure that it gets enough traffic to justify targeting.
First, sit down and brainstorm a short list of related keywords. These should be words you’d consider targeting and generating content for.
For example, if your niche is “Dog Training”, you might come up with:
- -How To Train Old Dogs
- -Dog Training Techniques
- -Easiest Dogs to Train
What’s great is that this type of keyword research you’d normally be doing anyways, so it does double duty.
Once you have a decent list, say 10 or so, you should run them through your SEO tool of choice. There are dozens of tools out there, so choose your favorite, or work with a free tool. Google offers their Adwords planner which is free to use.
What you’re looking for is to see that there are a decent number of average monthly searches. That exact number is up to you, but if you’re looking at longer, low competition keywords getting 100+ monthly searches is a good sign.
Also, keep in mind you’re looking to get a sense for the niche as a whole. If one keyword is bad, but the other 9 are good then you still might be okay.
Look For Competitors
Next, you’ll want to look out for competitors. While having no competitors might seem attractive, it might also be a sign that there’s no demand or money to be made in a given niche.
A simple Google search is a good place to start. Look out for established businesses or sites that have been around for a while. Finding these does mean you will have a harder time ranking, but it also shows that there are likely people interested in your chosen niche.
Be careful if you do find a very low or no competition niche. While you might have an easy time ranking for “underwater basket weaving” if no one is searching for that then your rank doesn’t matter at all.
Note down any competitors that you do find as this can make doing competitive research in the future easier.
Find Products Or Advertisers
Our third tip is to be on the lookout for people that are actively making money in your niche. This includes people selling related products as well as people advertising. Businesses are not going to consistently advertise if they can’t make money doing so. Checking for advertisers is pretty easy, simply do a search for your keywords and see if there are any ads above the search results. If there are, that's usually a pretty good sign that people are spending money in your given niche.
You can also look for related products on big sites like Amazon. The nice thing here is that often you can later use these products to generate revenue through affiliate marketing if that’s part of your monetization plan.
Overall, the goal here is to make sure that people spend money in your niche.
Other Niche Considerations
Lastly, I just wanted to touch briefly on some additional considerations when selecting a niche. Each of these could probably have an article dedicated to it, so this is just a touch to get you thinking about these types of things.
Seasonality
Some niches follow general trends throughout the year and experience peaks and troughs. If, for example, you’re blogging about Christmas lighting you’re going to see the majority of your traffic coming at the end of the year.
This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it’s important to keep in mind as it will affect your revenue pattern. If you’re interested in checking your keywords Google Trends is a great (and free) choice.
Geographic Location
It’s also important to keep in mind the geographic location that your readers are coming from. The people interested in cricket versus American football are likely located in different parts of the world.
This might influence the way you write and even the primary language your content is consumed in. Keep this in mind when planning your content and while creating your overall marketing plan.
Monetizability
Lastly, if your goal is profit you should always be looking for ways to monetize your content. These days, it’s usually pretty easy to find some type of monetization strategy, but they’re not all created equally.
There’s a big difference in highly targeted ads versus a static banner or being able to sell your own product. Some niches are easier to monetize than others and it’s not a bad idea to start thinking about this from the onset.