Niche Selection

This website was built using XSitePro Software you can find details of the software here

So, you've decided to build a website - now you have to choose the topic for your site. If you have offline expertise in a particular area, perhaps that's where you'll start. If you want to build a website to make money however, the topic, or niche that you choose will determine how much it is possible to make.

A profitable Niche should have the following features:

• A high number of daily searches online
• A high number of related long tail keyword searches
• Some keyword phrases with medium, low, or little competition 
• Advertisers willing to pay for advertising space, and/or
• People searching for a solution to a problem, or problems, and willing to pay for it.

You'll need to use some of the same keyword research tools that are used for Keyword Selection, in order to accurately select the niche or niches that you want to target. But here's a starting point that is free.

Click here to go to the Wordtracker Free Keyword Tool. This will list the top 100 phrases that contain your selected keyword, listing them in order of the number of daily searches. Some keywords that you check out will not have 100 results, meaning that the niche does not have much depth. Others will list 100 keywords, and even number 100 will have a high number of searches, meaning that the niche has plenty of long tail keywords to choose from, and may have up to 1000 related keyphrases. (I have done keyword research on wordtracker that produced a list of 13,000 keywords) 

I've entered the keyphrase "selling websites" - maybe you have some old websites that you would like to turn into cash, or you want to build a site to advertise websites that you build and flip for cash. The results will vary slightly (sometimes a lot with seasonal keywords like halloween, or christmas) but I find only 14 keyphrases listed with total daily searches of 84. Perhaps you'd like to target the keyphrase "buying and selling websites" which gets 3 searches a day? I know i wouldn't.

Lets try another phrase - Bass Fishing. You'll find that there are now 5265 searches, and keyword number 100 has 19 searches daily. Clearly Bass Fishing is a niche that merits further investigation, whilst Selling Websites does not. 

Before moving on to in depth keyword research, I like to find out how much advertisers are willing to pay to appear on google Adwords. You can do this the long way, or click here to find out about a tool which will quickly conduct keyword research for you, including Google Adwords Bids. using this tool, I find that there are around 500 clicks a day on "bass fishing" and that the advertisers pay around 90c per click. I also find there there is higher income potential for the keyword phrase "florida bass fishing" at around  $2.70 per click.

Next, we look at in depth keyword research