Finding a niche

We have already established the need of fresh unique content for a site to get good ranking. So a website owner needs a certain drive to acquire or create content on a timely basis, and thus must have a certain feel with the websites subject. But there are several other things you might want to consider before pouring your foundations.

What is a niche?

A niche: is basically a subject your website is built around. The website holds information about a certain subject and thus certain search words will be used a lot on its pages. A website can have pages about a broad subject or very specific information. For example
website A about ‘survival’ could have pages on ‘fire craft’, ‘traps and snares’, ‘survival tools’, ‘navigation’, etc. whereas website B about ‘snares’ could have pages on ‘bait-use’, ‘the deadfall’, ‘a bow-trap’, etc. Website A sits in a broad niche and website B has parked in a very narrow niche.

How to choose a niche?

There are no real rules for choosing a niche, in the first place I believe you should feel happy writing and learning more about your websites subject so you can easily make yourself add more content. A second consideration could be: is this nice profitable?

What influences my niches profitability?

With a little common sense you can imagine that a page on ‘the deadfall’ from website B will not have many visits and advertisers will probably not pay a lot for the visitors that come from your site. There are not a lot of companies that sell books about ‘the deadfall’ trap and would like the people that especially searched on this subject, to come to their site and buy the book.
 
There are however probably more companies that sell pocket-knives and would be interested in people that searched on ‘survival tools’ to come to their site and buy a pocket-knife. The ‘survival tools’ page on website A would probably get more money from advertising and also get more visitors.

Considering this, website A would be more profitable, but because there are many other people out there that understand this principle, there are probably more sites on ‘survival’ than there are on ‘snares’. The chance that a surfer interested in ‘survival’ ends up on your website A is lower than a surfer interested in ‘snares’ ending up on website B.

In short, your niches profitability depends on three factors:

• The amount of websites on the subject
• The amount of searches done on the subject
• The amount of money advertisers pays for visitors interested in this subject

How can I calculate a niches profitability?

You can not actually calculate the amount of money a niche or subject will generate per day before you have made your site. The actual amount of money made depends on too many factors to accurately calculate. You can however use the three factors mentioned above to compare niches profitability.
There are several free and paid tools online that will do this for you like:…
But it pays off to be able to calculate and find the values yourself. Although it might lack accuracy, good decisions can usually still be made.

First think of the most relevant keywords per niche and write them down.

Now Google on each of the keywords and write down the number of hits behind each keyword.
Use the Overture Keyword Selector Tool.
Use the Overture Bidtool or Google Traffic Estimator to estimate an average (Cost per Click) CPC per keyword.

Now calculate the average hits, searches and CPC per niche and use these averages to calculate the final value. Divide average searches by average hits and multiply by the average CPC. This number (Keyword Effectiveness Index, KEI) doesn’t say how much profit you are going to make but good decisions can be made whilst comparing these numbers or KEI's. Quite simply, the highest number wins.

BUT, there is a quicker way!
Use the SlowSEO.com Keyword Selector Tool and it gathers all this information for you and you will not need to do any calculations. You can even compare keywords by adding them to your keyword basket.

How should I use profitability in my decision making?

When you can’t choose between several subjects you are naturally interested in, you should use the subjects’ profitability to make the decision. I don’t suggest you just randomly find the niche were you could make most money and start writing articles. You probably will not be fascinated by the subject and it will get harder and harder to write new articles.

Some other considerations

Not all surfers are the same. For example, a website owner knows what ads look like and will less likely click on an ad, this is called ‘ad-blindness’. A person that not uses the internet as often isn’t as good in distinguishing advertisements from content and will click on ads more quickly. This might be something to consider when the profitability difference between two niches isn’t very great.