why is choosing a niche so hard?

I try and find the Market and not the niche. Find a hungry market and place a product into it.

Nothing is saturated if you long tail enough.

My advice is to ignore people who tell you to look for sites with "x" no of competing sites, or in quotes, out of quotes blah blah.

I swear this is where people go horribly wrong, when you find your niche and your micro niche of that, then the ONLY factor you should be interested in is what the strength of your competition is, not the number of competition, whether that be in quotes or without.

You could have 1 million competing sites for a long tail which you could rank on page 1 with within 2 weeks if you know what you're doing or a keyphrase with 3 competing sites which you wouldn't be able to beat if your life depended on it, it's about strength of competition, not irrelevent numbers.

Find a market that's hungry, large and ideally one in which you can solve a problem, if it's a personal problem, even better, those people buy and buy and buy.

my advice is : "do it if you want, don't hear other voice..." . Hope this help...

Here's a far better approach to niche research...

1. search for a reoccurring problem
2. search for a solution to that problem
3. create a short product offering that solution
4. go back to the site where people where having those problems and expose them to your product

Don't make it hard on yourself, just do it!

simpleonline1234, why do you say your passion doesn't pay a crap? Did you do the right research?

I think you can do money with your passion and do it fast...

Thanks,
^PV Reymond

Hi,

There is no niche that is too saturated - seriously.

On top of that, passion does good for you - unless you are in some obscure niche like star glazing or tarot reading. Just get to the longer tail of long tail and find different angle to target.

I have yet to find someone whose passion can't pay. Tell us what your passion is and see if we can help you find ideas to make it make you money.

My thoughts -- put all the information already posted together, and you have your answer -- except add one more thing -- look for BUYERS.

Find a fairly large market that interests you (passion nice but not required, but it does need to be interesting) and that can be broken down into at least a few niches and sub-niches. Then look to see what type products the people in the market and niches are buying. Find a similar product and get it out there and promote it, and you should be able to make some money. The reason for niches and sub-niches is so you can build a list with your first product and then later sell the subscribers different but related products.

Buyers is the real key -- some markets and niches have mostly people who are looking mainly for information or freebies (or who have no money to spend, i.e. most college kids), but are not actually buying. If you find this to be the case, drop that market and move on to a better one.

Simpleonline1234, you really don't have to look for a niche to build around, but I believe everyone's objective is to make money, alot of money, and as quickly as possible online or off. Therefore, you select a niche, drill down into it, find a topic or issue with not too much competition so you can start making good money as soon as possible.

I have to disagree with you on using magazine dot com site because that is really a niche gold mine. Anything that has a magazine being published is full of buyers.

It takes a lot of money, people, equipment, etc.. to put out a monthly magazine, so it's definitely making a lot of money or they wouldn't be doing it for so many years. Go to your local library and sit down and go through all the long time published magazines. Read the articles because this is an indication of what their hundreds of thousands or millions of hungry readers are interested in and buying. Pay attention to sections of magazines dedicated to certain topics or issues. These are definite big money makers

Also look at back issues of the magazines and take a note of the advertisers which are in issue after issue. You'll note that some of the advertisers have been advertising the same products over and over again for years in these magazine. What are they selling? It's surely making them a lot of money for them to be running those ads month after month, year after year.

Niches with hard core buyers are not hard to find, you just have to see what everyone else see, but look at it differently. There are hundreds or perhaps thousands of them you walk past every day.

I feel like I'm a one-trick pony lately, but it bears repeating again I suppose...

Think LIST, not SITE. We get too caught up in Google's little game, trying to find a crack somewhere to get our sites ranked high enough to eek out some of that traffic. I get it. I play that game too. But less and less nowadays.

I've found that the far better use of my valuable time and resources is concentrating on building email lists. That's your traffic. Those are your buyers. With a list, you're not just a big fish in a little pond... you're the ONLY fish.

Look, squeeze pages don't typically rank well in the search engines anyway, so stop thinking SEO and Google rankings to get your traffic. Get your traffic through 2 other sources I think are much more effective anyway: article marketing and forum marketing. Both send really excellent visitors to your squeeze pages. They're pre-sold. They're excited by something you wrote. They aren't on some wild goose chase based on the scant hints a Google listing gives them. They know exactly what you're about when they come to you through one of your articles or your posts in a forum they frequent.

So you build a niche list by giving those visitors something valuable for free (report, trial version of your software, etc.). Send them a couple of good, info-rich emails a week. Don't hit them up to buy stuff from you right off the bat. Build rapport. Ask them for ideas. Get them engaged. Get them used to wanting to open your emails because you give them good stuff. Then start working in the occasional sales pitch. Do it respectfully and keep the offers closely related to what brought them to your list in the first place. That will do two things: reduce list attrition and improve your conversion rates.

Keep submitting articles. Keep participating in the forum(s) you find for that niche. That keeps your list growing. There's your traffic and sales!

Best of all, you're no longer at the mercy of Google's whims. FREEDOM!

John