Tools To Find Your Niche

Wednesday, March 19th, 2008 | Niche Sites with

Welcome back. Do you have your list handy? Lots of stuff on it? Good. Now I want you to get a separate piece of paper and list the top 3-5 ideas from your original list. These are the top niches you love the most AND ones that you think others will be interested in as well. After all, you’ll need traffic to your new site if you want to be able to make money from it.

Make sure that your niches are neither too broad or too narrow either. If you choose a niche that’s too broad you’re going to have a hard time with competition. For example, the pets niche is very competitive and even choosing dogs or cats would be too broad. However if you focus on a single breed of dog, like Pomeranians, you could have a niche that’s just right.

So how will we determine if the niche is just right? One that is narrow enough for you to dominate, but broad enough to have demand? First of all common sense should give you a feeling about whether a niche is too broad or too narrow, but there are also some tools we can use to put some numbers to our niches.

I like to use two tools to determine if a niche is feasible or not. The first will show me the demand (number of searches) and the second shows the supply (competition).

The first tool is the Keyword Suggestion Tool at SEOBook. It will give you mountains of information, but at this stage I concentrate on the daily searches. The Keyword Suggestion Tool will tell you how many times a day a keyword is searched at Yahoo, MSN and Google as well as a total number for all three.

So, using the Pomeranian example I find that Pomeranian is searched for 2,362 times each day. That’s a lot of searches, but it probably means a lot of supply as well. I’ve found that usually the easier niches tend to have between 300 and 1000 searches per day. Anything less and it won’t be that profitable and anything more and it’s really competitive. The next phrase down is Pomeranian Puppies and that has 658 searches a day. OK, let’s look at supply now.

For supply I use good old Google. A search for Pomeranian yields 3,600,000 results. Not bad, but I’d like to see that number under 2,000,000. Searching for Pomeranian Puppies yields just 473,000 results. Or if I change the search to Pomeranians (the plural) I get just 641,000 results with demand at the Keyword Suggestion Tool being 550 daily searches. So, either Pomeranian Puppies or Pomeranians should be fairly easy to rank for with enough searches to bring traffic as well.

So, use SEOBook and Google to determine supply and demand and follow these guidelines:

Demand at SEOBook should be between 300 and 1000 searches per day
Supply at Google should be under 2,000,000

Do this for all 3-5 of your niche ideas, refining them as necessary. And if you really love a certain niche and can put a good deal of time and effort into developing a site or blog around it then certainly use that idea even if there’s a lot of competition. Sometimes the competition drives us to do better than we would otherwise.

Tomorrow I’ll be back to take a closer look at monetizing these ideas and evaluating which one(s) are most suitable to develop further.

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