There are three common problems when it comes to finding a lucrative niche for an online business.
and the reason why they are problems is because there is conflicting, yet valid points to each side of the coin.
Problem number 1 : Possion vs Profit.
one group of people will say to pursue something you are passionate about or else you will fail.
and the other group will say to follow the money, because passion is not going to pay the bills.
Problem Number 2 : low vs high competition.
One party swear that low competition niches are the only way to go because you can get traffic faster and you won’t have to compete againts behemonths with bottomless wallets.
and the other side says that you have to go for high competition niches otherwise, you are limiting your earning potential.
and problem Number 3 : Micro Vs Broad niches or the age-old question “How niche should I go ?”
Now, Finding a niche that’s right for you isn’t a coin flip.
and there is no magic formula that’s going to give you that answer.
and that’s because there is no generic solution to these problems.
Finding and choosing a niche will come down to a mix of personal and business decisions.
so in this tutorial, I am going to show you how to find a niche for your online business.
vet and research that niche and actually choose on that is going to meet your personal style and business goals.
Alrigh, so before we get into solving these problems, there are 2 things we need to do first.
1. Define what a niche actually is.
and 2 talk about how to find niches.
and the answers to the three problems I just discussed will help you to actually choose a niche.
so let’s get on the same page and talk about what a niche is.
Simply put, a niche is a segment, or a smaller part of an industry.
and this segment has a community with their own specific needs.
fow example, backpacks for hiking is a niche.
backpacks are a segment of the larger industry of bags and luggage nd the audience is hikers which has a pretty big community.
Now, whether you want to monetize through t-shirt sales, affiliate marketing, or whatever
All of research methods and principles that we will cover today can be applied to your business
but because we can’t cover every possible business model, for this tutorial, let’s say
that we are looking for niches for an affiliate website.
This way, we won’t need to discuss things like cost of inventory, logistics, ets.
Alright so let’s talk about some ways to find a niche.
THe first way is to dig into a competing website’s traffic and financial information.
there are website marketplaces like flippa and empire flippers whete sellers are required to include traffic and financial information.
so assuming you have no idea what kind of niche you want to enter, you can get started by going to flippa.com
and since we are looking for affiliate ideas I will hover over browser, then content, and choose to look through blogs
Next, I will filter just revenue generating site.
Now, after skimming through results, I came across this listing.
and right away, you will see things the site’s age, monthly profit, profit margin nd montly page views
scroll down a bit and you can see the revenue breakdown over the past 12 months
Scroll a bit more, and you will see data that’s been imported from Google Analytics
Now, to get a very basic understanding of profitability, you can take the average profit and devide it by the average pageviews.
So that would work out to around three cents per pageview.
Again, this is just a very general way to understand how much money you could make if you were to rank for the same topics in the same niche with the same monetization method.
Alright, the second method is to use Google ads data as a proxy to commercial value.
And this can be done using a metric like Traffic value, which is an SEO metric Available in Ahrefs’ Site Explorer.
And traffic value estimates the values of a website’s organic traffic if they were to pay for that same traffic through Google ads.
so in this case, our blog gets around 300.000 monthly search visits and the value of that
And that’s because SEO and digital marketing are pretty lucrative topics.
so basiclly, this method is based around the theory that if advertisers are paying top dollar to appear for these keywords, then there’s likely going to be commercial value.
Alright, so to find niches with high traffic value, you can use a tool like content Explorer which is a searchable database with billions of page of content.
Now, if you have a general idea of the area you want to create a website around, then enter that in the search box.
but in our case, let’s say that we are open to any niche but we want it to be an affiliate site.
so I will search for “amazon associates”, because people often include some kind of Amazon affiliate disclaimer on their pages.
Next, let’s set a website traffic value filter with a minimum value of 5000, meaning, websites that show up shoulding be getting at least $5000 woth of montly organic traffic if they were to pay it with Google ads.
Now, to filter out these mega sites like amazon and CNBC to name a few, we can set a domain rating filter.
Domain Rating
and domain rating is an Ahrefs metric that represents the overall strength of a website’s backlink profile And it’s generally a good way to filter out highly authoritative sites.
so let’s choose the Domain Rating filter and set it with a maximum value of something reasonable like 40
Next, let’s set the “one page per domain” filter since we only need one result to see a website’s total traffic value.
From here, you can skim through the results and just eyeball the domain names to see if there are niches or industries you can tap into.
Alternatively, you can go to the websites tab to scan through the top 100 websites.
