Choose A Niche

Gone are the days when you could become an overnight success writing about your cats, that fight you had with your mom and the math assignment that’s due tomorrow. These days, to have a successful blog, you need to choose a niche. Niche marketing has become something of a science. It has its own language, a specific set of tools and steps that need to be completed.

Blogs today are about information. Successful blogs today are about very specific information. For example, a blog about English Literature probably will not be the biggest success because the topic is too wide. However, if you build a blog about the poetry of John Donne, you stand a fighting chance of dominating your niche.

After having created several niche blogs, I’ve narrowed the process down to seven specific steps. This article is an introduction to these steps and this website. This article will be followed by articles discussing the seven steps in more detail and sharing resources I use when building and advertising my niche sites.

• Step One: Brainstorm

  Perhaps the hardest part of creating a blog is choosing a topic. If you’re looking to make money or bring in visitors, your topic could very well make or break your success. The first step I take when choosing a new niche blog topic involves making two lists: a list of topics I love and a list of topics about which I am know ledgable or would like to become knowledgeable. If you are new at this, I suggest choosing something you already know about, but if you are willing to research it isn’t strictly necessary.

  To create the lists, I simply brainstorm. Let your mind wander and write down anything that comes into it. There’s no editing required at this stage because these lists will be just for you. Once your lists are complete, compare them. It’s quite likely you’ll have some topics on both lists. These are the topics with which you will move on to the next step. Choose your two or three favorites and get ready to do some research.

• Step Two: Research Keywords to Target a Sub-Niche

  You could spend anywhere from ten minutes to ten days researching keywords. In fact, keyword research is an excellent way to procrastinate. Don’t let it be. Allot yourself a specific amount of time (no more than an hour) to research each of your potential topics. There are many tools you can use to discover a niche’s profit potential. You want to make sure that there are plenty of products available in the niche (Amazon and Clickbank are both great places to do that) because if people are selling, that means that people are most likely buying. Run your keywords through Google: you want enough results to show there’s an interest, but not so many that the niche is super-saturated. I will cover this in much more depth in upcoming articles.

  Once you’ve accumulated the information necessary, choose a broad topic and then use the same information to narrow it down to a sub-niche. With so many niche blogs out there, the smaller your target, the better chance you have of scoring big. There is, of course, a fine line between targeted and too small. For instance, don’t start up a blog about a certain brand of contact lenses; the chances of getting either traffic or sales are very slim.

• Step Three: Choose a Domain (And Buy it!)

  All the good ones are gone. That’s what you’ll hear about domain names from many people. Is it true? Only if you’re looking for a single word or popular two-word combination. When people refer to the “good ones” they’re not generally talking about the type of domain name that is well-suited to a niche blog. Your topic is specific and your domain name should be as well. By this point, you should have a list of keywords for your niche. Use different combinations of these to find an effective domain name.

  For finding domain names, I recommend a few resources: Go Daddy’s Smart Search and Make Words dot com. Both of these free search engines will add popular terms to your keywords if your domain isn’t available. For instance, you may want to buy ContactLenses.com. Sorry, you’re way too late for that. However, these searches will automatically add words like “the” or “best” or “your” to create domain names that actually are currently available. It’s very helpful and sometimes you end up with a domain that’s even better than the one you were originally hoping to purchase.

  If you are willing to shell out some cash for an existing domain, I recommend checking out the Digital Point Forums. You can usually find some great names here. However, as I said, keyword domains are generally better suited for targeted niche marketing.

• Step Four: Choose a Blog Platform, Design and Begin Posting

  Wordpress…Wordpress…Wordpress. Trust me, it’s easy enough for a newbie to customize and robust enough to keep a hard-core techie feature-happy. Wordpress is free and it has everything you need to build an original, eye-catching, easily navigable blog.

  There are tons of design resources online both in template and how-to guide formats, so I’m not going to delve into that topic too much in this article. I’ll just share with you what I consider to be the three most important aspects of a well-designed blog: (1) It’s not over-designed or too busy. (2) You limit yourself to ten categories or less. (3) Stick with a regular posting schedule - whether it’s once a week or twice a day, readers like consistency.

  Once you’re up and running, start posting. Writing style, length and content is all up to you. If you feel stuck, visit some other sites/blogs in your niche for ideas or check out some forums. One thing to keep in mind is that consistency is key. I highly recommend setting a posting schedule. You don’t need to post every day, but if you start out posting every Tuesday and Thursday, then stick to that.

• Step Five: Advertise and Build Traffic

  If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound? Let me rephrase the question. If you write the best post in the whole blogosphere and visits your blog is it still the best post ever? The answer to the question is this: if you do not have traffic, you do not have a blog. It’s as simple as that. You must let people know that your blog is awesome and get them to come visit it… often.

  There are as many options for advertising as there are niches, but some art more effective than others. A few of the most effective free ways to advertise are: RSS feeds, Technorati, Stumble Upon, article directories, site maps (for natural search engine results) and Craigslist.

• Step Six: Start Building Your List

  The money is in the list. Repeat this over and over in your head until you believe it. The best way to look at this is to view each subscriber as $1 a month. The trick is that while you view them as $1, you also need to view them as an individual person.

  It may seem that if you are building a blog you don’t need to build a list. While it isn’t strictly necessary, it is highly advisable if you are looking to make money online. In order to build a list you need an information product to give away as an incentive for sign-up and an autoresponder. Though I loved using Aweber, I didn’t use it often enough to justify the charges. I will discuss autoresponders in depth a bit later, but you definitely need one for your list.

• Step Seven: Monetize

  Making money online is a huge topic. There are as many ways to do it as there are dollars to be made. From affiliate marketing to private advertising, you have a huge array of choices when it comes to monetizing your blog. On Choose a Niche, I will be discussing many of them, starting with some of the simplest.

And there you have it: the seven essential steps to building a successful niche site. Tomorrow’s post will focus on Step One: Brainstorm.

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Arguably the most important and difficult part of creating a niche blog is settling on the perfect topic. If you’re looking to make money or bring in visitors, your topic could very well make or break your success. The first step I take when choosing a new niche blog topic involves making two lists: a list of topics I love and a list of topics about which I am knowledgeable or would like to become knowledgeable. If you are new at this, I suggest choosing something you already know about, but if you are willing to research it isn’t strictly necessary.

To create the lists, I simply brainstorm. Let your mind wander and write down anything that comes into it. There’s no editing required at this stage because these lists will be just for you. Once your lists are complete, compare them. It’s quite likely you’ll have some topics on both lists. These are the topics with which you will move on to the next step. I’m a visual person, so I like to use a Venn Diagram to map out my list. It makes it easier to find comparisons:

During this stage there are also some questions you will want to ask yourself:

1. Is it possible to build an entire blog around this topic?
2. Will you get tired of writing about it?
3. Is there enough content to write about indefinitely?
4. Is there a strong community of hungry buyers (I will discuss this more in the next step as well)?

As you become more experienced you will come up with your own list of questions, but these are good basics with which you can start.

Once you have narrowed down your lists, choose two to three topics to carry over to the next step. Because of the over-saturation of many markets, you will want to narrow down your topic to a sub-niche. This will be down in Step Two: Research Keywords to Target a Sub-Niche.

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You could spend anywhere from 10 minutes to 10 days researching keywords. There are many many ways to conduct the research, but they are not all created equal. I break this process down into a few steps which you will complete for each of the topics you chose when you were brainstorming.

Search engine optimization is important for a blog in any niche and choosing the right keywords can be crucial to a site’s success. At this point, you are going to run each of your narrowed down idea through these steps because they will (1) help you determine whether the niche is oversaturated and (2) help to build a list of keywords to target when you are optimizing and writing articles for your blog.

To determine market saturation, we will use a formula called the keyword effectiveness index. KEI compares the number of search results for a particular keyword or phrase with the number of web pages returned by that particular keyword or phrase. Easy, right? Sure, just as easy as any other aspect of search engine optimization. Which is to say that it sounds straightforward and simple, but after three days of research on how to optimize you feel that perhaps you’ll just write that Great American Novel after all.

The formula looks like this:

In English, the formula says that as popularity increases and the number of competing sites decreases, the better choice a keyword is. To get a clear picture of the situation, I generally build a spreadsheet with four columns: keyword, # searches, # pages, KEI.

Open your favorite web browser and pull up Overture’s Keyword Selection Tool. Type in your primary keyword and click the little blue arrow. You will get a list of suggested keywords and the number of searches conducted. Copy and paste as many results as you wish into the spreadsheet you created (in the keyword and searches columns).

Next go to Yahoo and search for each of the keywords you got from Overture. If you use a spreadsheet application, you can enter the KEI formula in the fourth column so that calculations are made automatically. Below is an example of a completed KEI spreadsheet:

The two keywords I highlighted are distinctly different. The first one is somewhat usable. I think with a few cleverly placed articles it could work. However, the second one that is highlight is completely hopeless. I have no idea where the word “hulk” comes in and how there could possible be over 300 people searching for that term. You will often find anomalies like that as you conduct your keyword research. They provide nothing more than a bit of comic relief.

Since we are looking for the highest KEI, you are now getting even closer to your topic. This is a good point to touch base with your topics. If you can see that there just aren’t enough searches for any of the keywords in one of your topics, don’t waste any more time with it. Otherwise, let’s move on to the next step: assessing the competition.

If you are going to attempt to infiltrate a niche in the hopes of financial success or social popularity, you need to know your competition. The KEI of a search term can give a good indication of where it stands, but it can’t tell you how tough it will be to get noticed. Even if there were 50 million searches and only 50 competitors, you could still be sunk if those 50 competitors have huge budgets and you are working with $100 a month.

There are some very cool niche marketing keyword tools available for a price. Wordtracker is one of the best known and you can use the free trial to see if it feels like a good fit for you. If you know of a tool that is not already on the Keyword Research Tools list please leave a comment and I will check it out.

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