Tips On Finding A Good Niche

[thebluesquire]

Hi,

I would like people's advice please on how to find a good niche. I am completely new to "niche websites" however know the SEO Basics and have a fair amount of expeirence in designing and writing for websites as I run a Nintendo Gaming Website. I have researched on here and google a fair amount but have a few questions.

1. What is the minimum exact searches on the google keyword tool you should look for? Assuming I plan to make money from google adsense / amazon (not clickbank). E.g. if I did fishingtips I would plan to make money on adsense that showed links to fishing equipment. Is 5,000 exact enough? I'd like the potential to earn at least $1 per day.

2. If you've found a specific keyword with a good amount of exact searches, when you look at the google results page, what does it take for you to think this keyword will be too hard to SEO? Or how do you judge if there's too much competition?

3. Does order of the domain name matter, i.e. BestFishingTips.com or FishingTips101, which of them would be better?

I'm not looking for any killer keywords atm. I'd be content with aiming to make just $1 a day from adsense. Or even just $100 per year.

Thanks for your help,

PS - I realise Fishing Tips is a much too wide area and be very hard to run a successful niche website for it, I was simply using it as an example.

[Carl Brown]

Download the free version of Traffic Travis and also download Market Samurai. You can use Market Samurai for, I think, 10 days free (maybe 7). After that, you can still use the keyword function.

There's several great tutorials to find profitable keywords with Market Samurai on youtube.

Traffic Travis will tell you how easy it is to rank with a particular keyword

[jerytohn]

If you rank at #1, just 1000+ exact searches a month may be able to bring you a few dollars per day with Adsense, depending on the niche.

[timpears]

Your question is something like 'how long is a piece of string'. It depends on your goals. Everyone has their own opinion on the least necessary.

If you want to rank quickly, then you might want to target low search volume and publish a lot of articles. If you write ten articles targeting search counts of 800+/-, then you have a total of 8,000 search volume to feed your site. Few if any back links will probably be necessary to get you on the first page if your on page SEO is good.

[Amigo]

Search for 43things on google and look what people are searching or asking more, you will get the idea. about whats the hot topic..

[BAcheson]

2 tips to analyze competitiveness.

1) Google: intitle:"keyword" AND inanchor:"keyword"
The number of results returned shows you how many other pages are attempting to optimize for that keyword.

2) Scan the first results page. Is it dominated by big brands like homedepot, amazon etc. IF so, stay away.

As always, analyze buyer intent. 1,000 people searching for "honda crx rear view mirror" is a much better opportunity then 10,000 people searching for "honda crx".

[gamingmaster42]

1. Really depends on your targeted keyword's CPC, 5000 should be good enough.
2. I use Adwords Keyword tool.
3. Usually doesn't matter, I head though it's better to separate your words with hyphens, like Fishing-Tips.com

[arjuna79]

For adsense, I prefer to make a niche website which is not more than 500 visitors/mth.

[Instantfruit]

Good thread!

I`m in the same boat