3 Steps To Picking a Profitable Niche

3 Steps To Picking a Profitable Niche

Choosing a niche is one of, if not the, most crucial steps in building a site. Choosing the wrong niche can be a death sentence for your site, and doom you before you even begin.

To help, I’ve put together this quick guide that outlines the process I use to select a new niche. I’ve purposely made it fairly lean as I think the process is generally straightforward. That’s not to say it doesn’t take work. I’d estimate that a good niche selection process should take about 3-5 hours depending on your experience.

So with that in mind, let’s dive right in.

Start With What You Know

The first step is to start brainstorming ideas, and there’s no better way to start than with what you already know. Think about your hobbies and passions, there’s a good chance that any of them could potentially turn into a profitable niche.

Start with what you know satisfies 2 pick criteria. First, it gives you a leg up in that you already have some knowledge of your subject. This isn’t critical, I’ve built sites on things I’m not an expert in, but it certainly helps. It also gives you a unique perspective that people love.

Secondly, it makes it easier to stay motivated. If you already enjoy something it makes it that much easier to stick with it and put in the work. This is important as you’re likely looking at 6 months or more before you see any income, so you need to be ready to work for the long haul.

So, the first step is to simply put down a list of all the topics you would be interested in writing and producing content around. Think about how much time you’d be willing to invest into your topics, and keep in mind that SEO is slow and all about the long game. There’s nothing worse than spending 3 months writing content only to burn out and become bored with a topic.

Determine Interest and Scope

Once you have the list it’s time to determine if there’s enough interest to make it viable. The goal here is to make sure that there is both a market for your blog and that it’s deep enough to justify writing content for.

The first is fairly easy, and there are 2 big ways I like to check for niche viability.

Other Websites

The first is simply to check that other websites are in the same or nearly the same niche. If I want to write a blog about “Traveling in Europe”, then I can do a quick Google search and see various blogs on just that topic. Write these sites down as they’ll be great for inspiration later.

Some might see that as a bad sign, but it’s actually a good one since it shows there’s interest in the topic. Generally, speaking, it’s hard to oversaturate a topic as long as you can bring your unique spin to it.

Social Media

Another way to determine interest in a topic is to look at social media. Are there any posts talking about or influencing posting about it? Taking the same travel topic you’ll very quickly see there indeed is, and you’ll also notice lots of engagement on these posts. These are both good signs that there is some interest in a particular topic.

Determining Scope

After you’ve determined that a niche has a market it’s also important to look at your appetite for it. By that, I mean taking a realistic look at how much content you can produce around a topic. I’ve mentioned a timeline of 6+ months; you need to be able to consistently produce content for at least that long to make your site viable.

For this, I like to start by taking an hour or two and coming up with a list of at least 50 article ideas. I know that sounds like a lot, but if you’re knocking out a few articles a week you’ll quickly go through them.

If I can come up with 50 that’s great, and a good sign that I’ll be able to keep producing content for this site. If I can’t, then that’s a sign that you might want to seriously consider dropping the topic.

Another option is to expand it. For example, maybe you were initially considering “Traveling in Spain”, but decided that you couldn’t produce enough so expanded it to “Traveling in Europe”. That’s a good way to quickly get more ideas, but be careful with making it too broad. It’s generally easier to target more niche topics, the broader you go the more competition you’ll have.

Bringing It All Together

At this point, you should have a nice idea of both the viability of your niche and your appetite for content. It’s a good idea here to start narrowing down your list and figuring out which topic most excites you. If you’re having trouble, then the next step can help you decide which topic is going to be the most profitable.

Check For Profitability

Lastly, you’ll want to start thinking about how you’ll make money off your site. There are numerous ways to do so, from display ads, to affiliate marketing, to building your own products, so you have a lot of options here.

A good way to go about this is to check popular sites like Amazon or Etsy to see if there are products related to your niche. If there is, that gives you two crucial pieces of information.

It shows people are willing to spend money on your niche. It gives you options for affiliate offers or advertising.

Depending on your niche this may be enough, or you might want to dig a bit deeper. Another great option is to check the sites you researched earlier. It’s often pretty easy to figure out how they’re generating revenue, and this can give you ideas on how to monetize your own site.

Keep in mind that you don’t necessarily have to monetize right away, it can be something you implement over time. It’s generally a better idea in the early days to spend time creating content over monetizing. After all, if there’s no one visiting your site then there’s no one to sell to.

What is important though is to make sure that you have a clear, long-term plan to become profitable. You don’t want to spend months working on this site only to realize that you have no way to generate revenue from it.

Final Thoughts

As I noted before, I did keep this pretty lean and there’s certainly more you can do to help plan your site. I’ll save that for another article though and leave you with this last piece of advice. Whichever niche you choose, make sure you generally enjoy it. I’ve reiterated this a couple of times now, but it’s critical.

So many people fail before they get started because they choose something that seems like it will make money rather than something they enjoy. Making a little each month is going to be much more rewarding than making nothing on a “more profitable niche”. Follow your passions, and you’ll find the blogging and content journey that much more enjoyable.

Last Modifed: January 3, 2023