Niche not linked to products

Actually, I think your idea is pretty good. People that read about quantum physics are likely to purchase books. Write some reviews on physics books, and post links to amazon via an affiliate account.

Sounds like a winning formula to me.

You may make some money from your quantum physics site, but not as much as you would from a more product oriented site. If I were you, I would keep the quantum physics site. I say this because it is about something you like and you will work on it and learn the techniques. Then use those techniques and make a more profitable site.

Yeah, I'm afraid quantum physics might be pretty hard to monetize well.

I mean, you could probably turn it into a money-making hobby site. But I think you'd be hard pressed to retire rich on the income from it.

I can imagine a blog with whatever kind of information posted as frequently as you like. QP in the news...latest scientific breakthrough stuff...weird factoids that would blow your mind...that sort of thing.

Then mix in occasional reviews of QP books with amazon links. Or maybe ads that would appeal to the scientific-minded visitor. Gadgets, gizmos, DIY infoproducts and what have you.

I think, like, those magnetic generator ebooks that sell so well from clickbank might do okay on a site like that. Not HUGE conversions, since it wouldn't be direct marketing, but not zero interest, either.

Pick up a copy or two of Scientific American or something for ideas on what kind of tangents you might successfully market.

Okay, thank you guys!

I`d simply say you keep the quantum physics, build a site around it, select good books from amazon, add adsense to your site and Drive traffic!
You`ll be suprised at how much you`ll make...

There's always something to sell... and if there isn't anything readily available for sale, then you can simply create a product on your own.

Expect to make mistakes.

My first site will never see any useful amount of traffic because I made a mistake in my keyword research. My second site is on the first page of Bing/Yahoo but it's buried so deep on Google I can't find it - this is because I edited my content too many times (I expect it will recover but I don't know how long it will take). So far my third site looks okay, but I haven't done much backlinking yet, so we'll see how that goes, and I'm getting ready to launch a fourth site. This is two months of work and I spent about three weeks of that nearly incapacitated with pneumonia and other health problems.

What I'm saying is, if you are going to do niche marketing, get to building the sites. Books probably aren't going to be big money makers, but when you are starting out that's not really important. This business is very much about the longterm, and there is a huge amount of learning to do. There are a lot of things to learn that can only be learned by doing.

To me, the number of competing sites isn't actually relevant.

I'm competing with only the top 5 of them. If I can't reasonably foresee getting a site in the top half of the first page, I won't compete.

So all that matters to me is the quality of the SEO of those top few sites. Those are my only real competitors.

I'd rather compete with 50,000,000 others of whom the top 5 sites include "nothing special" and "article directory articles" and so on, than compete with 5,000 sites of which the whole of the first page (as can happen) comprises age-old, high-PR authority sites each with hundreds of thousands of backlinks from other high-quality, well-ranked sites, because I've no chance against that.

In short, I'm competing with about 5 sites, either way, and it makes absolutely no difference to me whether there are 4,995 more sites after them, or 49,999,995 more. So I have absolutely no interest in the number of competitors, per se.

Yes.

Maybe another niche in the same general area, or same market, but another one.

Specifically, beware of niches which look "too good be true", because it may be that either they're "non-buying niches" or niches with too many "non-buying keywords".

A good way to judge this is to look at the AdWords ads associated with the keywords. If there are many of them, and some longstanding ones, then it's a buying niche, because large numbers of people don't spend money indefinitely on PPC for no return. But if not, it's important to ask yourself why.