Choosing a niche that isn’t overcrowded and one that you’re familiar with is an essential part of ensuring your website will be successful. By investing your time into keyword research and checking the backlink profiles of your would be competitors, you’ll be saving yourself a lot of hassle down the road. If you do this right, then you will be able to find a market that isn’t overcrowded and will provide you with a great wealth of potential visitors and customers. This is a delicate balancing act but choosing well in the first instance will make every subsequent part of building and promoting your site much easier.
That being said, making money online has crossed everyone’s mind at some point or another, so finding niches that aren’t overcrowded or too competitive is a challenge in itself. So it’s crucial you pick a niche that you’re passionate about. The real question is, how do you stand out from the crowd, without limiting your appeal or writing about something dull? A tried and tested solution is to come up with your own niche and create a website that has no competition. Sound too good to be true? Here’s a look at how you could potentially achieve the creation of your own micro niche.
Sites That Don’t Fit Into One Specific Category
When browsing the web for inspiration, it’s easy to find generic categories; for example ‘fitness’, ‘making money online’, ‘weight loss’, ‘music downloads’ and others hyper-competitive terms along the same lines. If you’re new to online marketing then you need to dig a little deeper, not every site needs to fit neatly into a generic top level category – it is possible to come up with a completely unique twist on an existing niche and create something entirely new.
If we take http://www.lifehacker.com and http://www.lifehack.org as our examples. These sites exist in the same niche but if we were to go back a decade we’d find that the “life hacking” niche was non-existent. These sites merge self-help, attitude and day-to-day tips into one new niche and when combined with the ‘hacker’ attitude – where DIY applies to everything from self-improvement to making money you find yourself with a completely new idea.
Merging Various Concepts Together
If you’ve got an idea, but you can’t find a new twist or take on it, then another option would be to combine multiple existing niches that you think would fit well together. This way you wouldn’t be alienating your core audience and you’ll be benefiting from the additional interest from the second niche as well. Examples might include ‘bodybuilding and self-improvement’, ‘making money online and city living’, ‘travel and art’ or ‘cafes, coffee and books’.
This strategy is also effective because it creates a number of simple marketing options that you can use to reach a new audience. For instance, if you have a website that focuses bodybuilding and self-improvement, then you’ll be able to cross-promote your site on self-improvement forums and sites without being directly in competition with those sites.
Digging Deeper
In contrast to broadening your niche, another option available to you is to dig even deeper within a specific category also known as a micro-niche. Again, this will allow you to promote your sites on places that may have otherwise seen you as a competitor. If we were to assume you’re starting a movie blog, rather than focusing on movies in general you may wish to write specifically about “80’s action films”. This would make you an authority within that particular niche.
Fake It ’til You Make It
If you’re still struggling to find niches that you think would offer a good return on investment then start by copying an existing micro-niche site that has proven itself and is already making money. Sites like flippa.com and digitalpoint.com are great places to find sites that are already making money, copy their success or merge a few ideas together and you’ll be on to a winner!
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License: Royalty Free or iStock. source
License: Royalty Free or iStock. source
