Finding Your Niche

NOTE: The information in this article falls into the category of “conventional wisdom.”  Look here for a counter-argument.

At first, you’re not going to be a big ad company.  There is no way for you to cover a broad range of topics, so the best thing for you to do is find something that’s not being completely over-covered.  If there are hundreds of very good sites with which to compete, it’ll be extremely hard for you to get yourself on the first page of Google search results.

If you decide to create a site focused on ski gear, for example, you’ll probably want to type “ski gear” into Google, along with a whole host of other terms relating to skiing.  This is the best method to quickly find your toughest competitors.  The sites that come up in the top rankings on Google will likely have been going at it for years.  If you do succeed in finding an under-covered topic, you’ll have a much easier time attracting visitors to your site.

A service like “Wordtracker” might be worth your while so you can get a detailed look at what keywords are popular.  Alternatively, Google’s own tool here could do the trick. When you search for the popular terms on Google, you can also get a sense of the quality of the top search results.  If the top pages are executed beautifully, it’ll be hard for you to offer something that they’re not.  If you see all sorts of problems with the pages, you’ll then be able to go ahead create a better site.  The point here is innovating in ways that these sites do not.  Knowing popular keywords will also help you improve your page ranking in the search results (by integrating these words into your site).

Profitability is another key concern.  The space you’re looking into might not be very profitable.  This is a bit harder to pre-determine than the likelihood of your site being popular.  There are some general rules, however.  Your niche should not be too general.  
If it is, targeting your audience becomes too difficult, which carries with it a host of other concerns.  Being too specific, on the other hand, limits your options.  You need to strike a middle ground.

Let’s take clothing as an example.  Building a site around clothing is far too general of a topic, so we get more specific and call it winter clothing.  This is probably still too general, so we limit ourselves further to a review site about winter coats.  You probably don’t want to limit yourself any further than that or you’ll become too confined in what sort of information you can include.  From here, we Google “winter coats,” along with a host of other phrases like, “buying winter coats,” “best winter coats,” “warmest winter coats,” and dozens of others.  We can also look into popular keywords and phrases related to winter coats.

That’s just an example to illustrate how you might go about breaking down your chosen category.  Finding a sparsely populated field in which to stake your claim is by no measure an easy task.  Just take your time and be thorough.  Don’t become frustrated when the answer is not immediately obvious, and you’ll eventually hit upon a good topic.  Unless you’re really lucky, you’ll likely fail several times before you succeed, which is really the best way to learn.  You need to actually get your feet wet!