How to Pick a Niche

Before you get a website, you have to find your niche. A “niche” is a specific topic that you’ll base your entire website on. The topic might be “financial planning” or “baseball” or “knitting.” Regardless of the topic you choose (it can be anything) it needs to meet a few common criteria.

A website needs to have a common theme. The reason it needs to be about a common theme is simple for two reasons:

• Visitors. When someone shows up on your website they should see a single common theme. If they are looking for information about taking trips, they should see nothing but travel info. If they want information about dieting, then they should see nothing but dieting related info.

• Search Engines. Search engines rank you higher for a keyword if your website is chock full of info. This means more traffic later down the road, which means more money.

This common theme has three criteria for being a good idea for a website if you want to monetize your website in the future. So there needs to be a common theme. Right. Now what? Now you move on to figure out what that theme is. It’s something you have to be passionate about, it needs to be fairly popular, and there doesn’t need to be too much competition.

• Passion. Your niche needs to be something that you are passionate about. You’ll be writing literally dozens of articles on the topic, and will be thinking a lot about it. Don’t start a website on something just because you think it will make you money.

• Popularity. There needs to be a lot of interest in your niche. If you have the perfect website in the niche of “the philosophy of anchovies” … you probably won’t make much money.

• Competition. The less competition in the niche, the better. A great way to check the competition is to go to Google.com, type in the main keywords of the niche you are considering, and then analyzing the websites that come up on the first page. If all of the websites on the first page have over 10,000 links to them (you can check them individually at BacklinkWatch.com), then that’s probably too competitive for your first website. You can still try it, but it will be difficult.

Just remember, don’t pick a topic just because you think other people will like it — make sure you pick a topic because you like it. Your niche has to be your passion… a hobby, a pass-time, an expertise, a business idea — something along those lines. When you finish picking the topic for your website, move on to the next step… building your own website.