Due to the length of this post and the size of the subject I have decided to break it up into 2 or 3 posts to make it a little more manageable.

Today I am going to try and give an introduction into finding a niche for your niche affiliate website. This post isn't by any means the guru guide to finding a niche but I hope it will give you a good guide of where to start and how to find good niches along with some of the things not to do.

Some of the scripts we have access to today such as BANS, phpbay, storestacker, associate omatic, shopping.com etc etc are extremely powerful and relatively easy to set up, they allow pretty much any 'newbie' to get an 'out of the box' site up within a few minutes, but I believe its this ease that leads people to think that because setting up a site is so easy making money off it is too. Half of the problem, in my opinion, is that many people have very little understanding of what a niche actually is, I think if I see another iPod, Apple Laptop or Sports Car store I think I will go mad :), That's not to say I don't understand, I certainly built my fair share of 'newbie niche stores' when I was first starting out and it was due to the support and guidance of a few good people that I was able to develop greater knowledge and move on to build money making sites.

I always think of a niche as a market inside a market and some of my most successful niches are actually markets inside markets inside markets, I bet your thinking what is he talking about? Well lets take the site BestPriceBeads.com an example:

It would be easy to build a complete jewellery store (Top Market) which is what I see a lot of people doing, but this would take forever to optimize the pages with meta title, descriptions, keywords etc. It would also be incredibly hard if not impossible to get a to a decent position in any of the search engines without going 'deeper' into the market. So we could look at beads, this is a niche within jewellery, albeit an extremely large one but still there are many many types of beads, around 30 main classifications that I can find in google, but there is just too much competition and the niche is too big. So what about if we dig even deeper, go to a niche within the niche as it were and we come to pandora beads. Now even with pandora beads we could probably go deeper into that niche to find a very very specific niche but we don't really need to. I will come onto how to find how successful a niche may be in the next post but basically the term 'pandora beads' receives around 180-200 searches a day depending on where you look and that is what I consider as strong. Then if we take a look at google we can see there are only around 400,000 other websites competing for the same search term 'pandora beads', this is not fantastic but its good enough. Of course there are going to be different search terms and keywords which we can use which may be less competetive and this goes for any nice. So with this information and looking at the sites listed in the top positions on google I know that with the right techniques and marketing this niche could be a good revenue generator.

What are the main things should you remember when finding a niche?

There are several things which I try to think about when I am trying to find a niche and these are:

1.Choose something that you know about: This is going to make the niche research, content writing, article writing etc etc much easier and so it will make the overall marketing of your site easier. If you don't know anthing about a good niche that you have found then take the time to learn everything you can about it, trust me its better in the long run.
2.Choose a product or niche that you are passionate about, one which you are interested in: This way when you have to spend time creating content, marketing it and building it, you won't get fed up after a week, end up not do anything with your site then wonder why its bringing no revenue in.
3.Research your niche: No matter how much you love something, it doesn't mean anyone else will and it certainly doesn't mean everyone else will buy products from it. So take the time to find out if there is enough demand for it and if there is then make sure the competition won't kill you before you've started (such as with ipods). Look at google and other search engines for the levels of competition and use keyword research tools to find out if there are sufficient searches for the niche you plan to market. Its about competition and demand and you need a decent balance to be successful.

In the next post I will cover the places you can look for to find a niche and give you an idea of what to generally look for so that you can anticipate whether or not a niche is likely to be successful.

For now remember its about QUALITY NOT QUANTITY. One well optimized and marketed site is better than 20 out of the box stores which you have done very little to.

Your To Do List:

• Start having a think about a few topics/possible niche ideas that you know about and that your passionate about and we will try and find out if they are good niches or not in the next post.

Similar Posts Which May Be Of Interest:

• Finding Profitable Keywords & Niche Markets: Micro Niche Finder Review
• Finding A Niche Part 2: Where To Look
• Using Google Insights For Niche/Market Research?
• Remember to Consider Market Trends!
• Generating Article Ideas For Your Niche Website!