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To have a profitable niche there are two main factors that you need. First of all the niche needs to have traffic, specifically search engine traffic which means a steady stream of people searching for lots of keywords in the niche. Secondly, you need to be able to monetize that traffic with ad programs, affiliate products etc. Let’s look at both in turn:

How Much Traffic Does Your Niche Need?

My blog has been making a good 4-figure income from just a few hundred visitors a day. However, all traffic research methods are estimates and it’s impossible to predict exactly how much traffic your website can get but that’s not really necessary anyway so don’t sweat it.

All we really need to know is that the traffic potential is there - that there are thousands of searches being performed on keywords within that niche every day. As long as you do your homework and build your site around the relevant keywords and do the relevant SEO work then you can know that you’ll get a slice of that traffic but if the traffic is not there in the first place your efforts are wasted.

So what we need to do is find out how many searches are being performed. The best way to do this is using Google’s own keyword tool which is free. Just search for “good adwords keyword tool” to find it. All we’re going to do here is determine the traffic levels and brainstorm the kinds of sub topics and keywords in our chosen niche.

First of all, make sure the link next to ‘Results are tailored to’ is set to ‘All Countries and Territories’ - this ensures we’re seeing ALL the traffic and not just a slice of it. Now pick the broadest possible word that you can think of that relates to your niche such as ‘gardening’, ‘golf’, ‘money’, ‘cats’ etc. Try and make it just one word to start with.

Obviously broad words such as these will show huge traffic numbers but don’t get too excited as these are usually far too broad to target effectively. What we’re looking for here are the related keywords which will show hopefully a huge number of sub topics that you could write about. For example if you picked a topic such as ‘cats’ you might see cat grooming, Persian cats, cat diseases and so on. All of these are potential content topics.

Now you can drill down a little bit if you like, if you type in ‘cat health’ as a potential topic for your blog you’ll see a ton of keywords now more specialised. They cover topics such as hairballs, teeth problems, fur etc - in short, you have a nice topic here with many smaller topics that you could write about which all have lots of traffic potential. This is a great topic.

On the other hand let’s say that you’ve chosen Carp Fishing as your niche but you are only interested in Carp Fishing in France. If you type in ‘carp fishing france’ into the Google keyword tool you get quite a few related keywords come up but they each have very small traffic numbers - each has less than 100. This is not good. You’re looking for a topic where the top level topics are getting thousands of visitors so although Carp Fishing is a great niche, specifying France only is too small.

Analyzing Monetization Potential

In order to example the profit potential of the niche we first need to look at who else is already making money in it. We can use the same tool to do this. Look for a column labelled ‘Advertiser Competition’. A high number here shows you that there are lots of advertisers bidding on that keyword which is a good thing. What you are looking for is lots of keywords with high advertiser competition.

Now of course this only shows you the number of advertisers, it doesn’t show you what they are selling. You might be worried that perhaps these advertisers are all selling their own products and you won’t have anything to sell. If that’s the case we can do some additional specific research to find some products that you could sell.

A great place to start this research is Amazon.com. The reason is that they have a gigantic catalogue of products and they have an affiliate system allowing anybody to sell anything from their entire range. Whatever niche you are in, you’re almost guaranteed to find plenty of products you could sell via Amazon - just search using some of the keywords you found already.

Some marketers don’t like Amazon because their commission is small however that’s missing the point really. What we’re trying to do here is establish the profit potential of your chosen niche. If Amazon have a whole bunch of products relating to your niche then it is another indicator that it has good profit potential. Later on when you develop your site more fully you can go on to create your own products and services.