What Is A Niche?

 CHAPTER THREE

Picking A Topic For Your Business

What Is A Niche?

A niche is another word for the topic of your website. For the rest of the book I’ll be using the word ‘niche’, so you can become familiar with internet marketing jargon.

A niche is just a group of people that you can categorize in some way. Golf, cooking, fitness, and tech are broad industries, and not what we’re looking for.

What specific subcategories of people can you think of in each of those industries? Here are some random niches I thought of off the top of my head. improving your golf swing for seniors Golf equipment for kids paleo cooking & recipes for families how to cook for college students indoor exercise equipment (people that live far away from gyms or are too busy to go) muscle building for women fitness gadgets and wearables (people looking for this type of technology) Learning games for kids See how each of those submarkets targets a much more specific audience? There are many ways to drill down from a broad industry to a targeted niche. There are hundreds of niches within the fitness industry alone, and finding one that makes money is simply a matter of finding one interesting enough to you that you follow through with creating the business.

Some possible ways of defining your niche are simply filling in the blanks:

[People] who want to ____. The following examples correspond to the examples above.

Golf

Seniors who want to improve their golf swing

Kids who want to learn how to play golf (Or parents that who want

to teach their kids golf)

Cooking

Families who want to eat a paleo diet

College students who want to cook good food on a budget

Fitness

People who want to be fit can’t make it to the gym

People with disabilities who want to stay in shape but need special

training equipment

People who like to exercise but live in cold climates and can’t exercise

outdoors all year

Women who want to gain muscle

Fitness enthusiasts interested in technology, data tracking

Learning Games

Parents who want smart kids

Which ones make the most money? ANY niche can make money! Many training courses I’ve seen have you do a bunch of research before picking a topic for your website, but this is now how I am going to teach you. Yeah, niche research can be useful, but it can also be confusing to newbies, meaning lots of people quit right in the beginning because they’re unable to find the perfect idea and get it right the first time around.

Picking that ‘golden ticket’ niche to make you rich is not what we’re shooting for at this point. We just want to find something that works for you, as a beginner. If you can make your first dollar in a niche you really enjoy, you can then use the skills you learned from building that business to start another website later on. By then you will have the skills to do research, test the market, and direct your business with more intent and foresight.

This is exactly what I did. I mentioned that I started out promoting VPNs. It’s something I had decent knowledge about and enjoyed writing about. But I also saw the huge potential in the “make money online” industry, and most recently started a website in that category.

Using what I learned building my previous sites, I was able to grow my new business faster, more efficiently, and more professionally than before. What may have taken me two years before took me one year this time around.

Please don’t stress about whether or not your niche will make money. It will.

Any website with traffic can make money!. Keep that in mind, but we’ll dig into that in the traffic section later on in the book.

Why Do We Need A Niche?

Why not create an “Everything about golf” website instead of targeting something more specific? More topics = more traffic = more money, right? Yes and no.

Sites like Mashable, Buzzfeed and Lifehacker cover a huge range of topics and rake in the cash because their “shotgun” strategy. But they have big budgets to hire website developers, writers, and social media managers. These articles are not written by experts, and published just to meet a deadline. The readers are savvy to this, as demonstrated by some recent articles I read about craft beer on Buzzfeed and Business Insider.

I’m a homebrewer and know quite a bit about craft beer. After reading these articles, I immediately knew that they was not written by someone who knew what they were talking about, and comments on the post reflected my own feelings.

Buzzfeed and Business insider got what they wanted – their money comes from ad revenue so they just want views, and don’t care if readers like what they see or not. If I hate it and share it with my friends to tell them how stupid it was, these guys still make money!

This is NOT the way to build a trusted brand. I would never buy a ‘how to brew beer at home’ guide from these websites. They need tens of thousands of views to make money from ad revenue on those cheesy articles. As affiliate marketers promoting specific products to a targeted audience, we can make money much more efficiently than the big guys.

The point is, we pick a niche is so that we can develop specialized knowledge on a very specific topic. Knowing a lot about one thing is much better than knowing a little bit about everything. By becoming an expert, or trusted source of information, people will buy stuff through our site based on our recommendations.

Another reason is simply to pare away the competition. You are starting at ground zero here, with nothing on your website. You’ll also be doing all the work yourself. How can you expect to compete with a website that’s been around for a decade and has 1000’s of articles and loyal fans? You can’t.

So we target a very small audience to make our job more manageable.

The extremely specific articles we write make it easier to rank in search engines, and build traffic slowly over time. Once we start gaining traffic from those low traffic, low competition articles, we can begin to expand into broader topics.

Perhaps the most compelling reason to focus on a specific group of people is so we know who we are talking to!

Let’s look at bodybuilding for example. Though you might think of this as a single group of people, there are actually competing subgroups within this arena.

Some guys want to build muscle mass. They love being the biggest guy at the gym and want nothing but ‘gains’ (slang for gaining muscle mass).

There are other guys that want a ‘cut’ physique, and could care less about size.

They want to look good in a tank top and be beach-ready all year long. They don’t care about gains, as long as they get the girls.

If you create a website about bodybuilding, who are you talking to? If you write an article about how to gain weight fast, the beach body guys won’t care. If you write an article about how to lose body fat fast, the muscle dudes will worry about loss of muscle mass.

You could even break it down further to ‘natty’ (natural) or ‘juicing’ (steroids) techniques. Include men vs women, and now we have several possible audiences to target our website to.

natural bodybuilding gains for men safe steroid use for bodybuilding women lifting techniques to improve physique bodybuilding for strength

How targeted you get depends on your level of interest or expertise in a topic, as well as how big of project you want to take on. It’s also nice to leave yourself some elbow room for growth. Doing something like “freeweight gym exercises for women over 50 to gain strength” might be limiting if you run out of exercise routines to talk about.

But ‘strength training for women over 50’ leaves you possible room to include topics like home gym equipment, supplements, human biology, exercise mentality, and so on.

My Stance On Competition

When deciding on a niche for their business, most people will start to look around at similar websites to see what others are doing. They soon realize that these awesome looking, established websites are going to be their competition, and the fear starts to set it.

“How am I ever going to compete with that?!”

I agree, it’s pretty hard to imagine that you, someone starting with pretty much zero internet marketing skills could outrank and outsell some of the big boys, whether it be Amazon.com or The Huffington Post.

The easiest answer to explain at this point is that you have to start somewhere!

If you don’t start now, at zero, you’ll never get started. The established players may have a lead on you, but remember, they too started out from scratch some years in the past, and grew to what we see today. In a few years time you will have a head start on some other newbies just getting started, and probably be happy that they have to work hard to achieve what you have.

The growth process isn’t obvious, but it happens to everyone in every business.

No one starts out on top.

The other portion of that answer is that no one stays in the lead forever. Many things can happen in the next few years. There are always things happening that shake up the business world, and new opportunities may open up that you never considered before.

One last thing I also want to help you understand is that it doesn’t take that much work to be in the Top 10. To be #1? Yeah, it takes true dedication. But to be just “very good” is achievable just by being consistent over a period of time. If you are careful about the steps you take and focus on creating high quality content that delivers value to your visitors, you will easily outrank 90% of the competition. The vast majority of people in every industry get lazy or complacent at some point, and that provides an opportunity for hard workers just like you!

No, it’s not always as easy as having the answers written on the wall saying, “Hey, Business X didn’t see this opportunity so now it’s time for you to take advantage of it!”. But the opportunities are always there, and it’s just a matter of knowing how to identify them as they pop up. Imagine if we lived in a world where established players just never gave up their position and the new guys never had the opportunity to show them up?

Nothing would change in the world of business, ever.

The more difficult thing to explain is that you will learn tactics and become a savvier business person in the coming months. You might not see things clearly right now, but as you do you research and learn about affiliate marketing, you’ll discover places where competition is extremely low, even in very competitive niches.

For example, weight loss for women is a very competitive niche. Even weight loss for women before weddings is well known as being lucrative and has a lot of established sites to compete against.

But what if you start targeting even smaller areas that the big guys neglect?

If usatoday.com is ranking for “how to lose weight before a wedding”, what stones have they left unturned? How about these: how to lose 10 pounds before my wedding how to lose weight fast for a wedding for someone with high blood pressure how to lose weight 2 weeks before a wedding how to buy a wedding dress if I plan to lose 15 pounds It just wouldn’t make sense for a site like USA Today to just write these types of articles over and over again. So they write a generalized 500 word pop article that their audience reads and forgets about. The real meat of research and help for people that actually need to lose that weight can be done by you and put on your site loseweightbeforeawedding.com.

No, you won’t get those big fat juicy rankings right away, but you can build up to that. We start with the scraps, but our day is coming!

One article can bring you 100 visits a day, or 10 articles with 10 visits each for a total 100 visits a day. Same deal.

So I mean to make these points clear.

1. Growth and competitiveness takes time. You’ve got to start somewhere.

2. There are plenty of ways to squeeze your way into any competitive market if you put in the effort  What You Need To Know About Traffic Another topic that many experts have different ideas about is whether or not you need to look up traffic (and other) stats related to your niche of choice.

My stance is that yes, it can help, but if it’s going to confuse you and keep you from getting started, forget about it and just choose something you are interested in.

I can tell you right now that ‘how to make money online’ is a very lucrative niche. Keep in mind though, if you are not interested in helping people build their business, then it’s a bad idea to go into this industry. Why would you want to trade a job you don’t like, for a business you also don’t like? Why supplement your current income by coming home to a website about something you don’t care about?

Wow, that would suck!

Sure, now you say that you don’t care what you write about as long as it makes money. But what happens when your business isn’t making money? I’d be willing to bet that most people reading this book will need to work on their business for at least 3-6 months before even making their first sale, and maybe a year or more before turning a regular profit.

Are you willing to put in 12 months of work into a business that is not profitable, about a topic that you are not passionate about, let alone interested in?

For me, and for a lot of new online business owners, the first time around is like a trial run. We have to learn the ropes, see how to connect the dots, and then we can find our ‘big break’ somewhere down the road.

What are you worried about?

If you do build a website and find out that traffic isn’t great, it doesn’t mean you can’t make some money from your website.

ANY website can be monetized and profitable. Let’s say that worst case scenario you dedicate 6 months of your life to a website you are completely passionate about. You spend every waking hour building this site to be the most beautiful, most interesting, and most helpful resource in this niche.

But then you find out that traffic isn’t as great as you thought, and you only earn $100/month from it using general paid advertisements (like Google ads). Oh no, wasted effort, right? Wrong.

Now you can pay someone $25/article and have them publish 2x per month to the site to maintain it. You make $100, spend $50 in outsourcing fees, and pocket the other $50. Now you have a profitable business on your hands that runs by itself basically, and you can start site #2, with more knowledge and foresight.

This time around you have a better idea of some hot markets you want to go into, a good idea of how to get your pages ranked faster and where to target low competition areas of high traffic niches. Instead of taking 6 months to produce a website that makes $100/month, you take 4 months to create a website that produces $500 a month and still has potential to grow beyond that.

Was your first website a waste? Absolutely not.

This is why I don’t want you to focus on traffic numbers while choosing your niche. Honestly, stuff like that will confuse a lot of you to the point that you won’t even want to get started. Understand that your first website might not be an instant success, and you can always regroup later as you gain more experience. Let’s move on.

Passion VS Profit

I built at least 10 websites before I found the one that really worked for me.

Most of them died out because I just couldn’t bring myself to write another damn article about Plants VS Zombies plush toys (one of my first websites).

Yet, here I am spending my Friday night typing away at an ebook I have no idea if I’ll be able to publish, or if it will make me any money. Even if it does make money, will it be worth the effort? I don’t know, but I do know that I enjoy talking about this stuff, and really want to create a unique product that helps people accomplish the same things I have.

Some folks tell me that they don’t have any interests, and don’t care what they write about as long as it makes money. I call BS on that. Everyone has preferences.

You don’t have to wake up in the morning drooling, unable to hold back the pure passion you feel for the niche you’ve chosen. That’s a bit extreme. Just pick something that you think you might enjoy as opposed to something else that is boring. You like…stuff right? Think about what stuff you could enjoy writing about.

Breakfast is delicious. I could probably make a pretty interesting site about breakfast. How about an old fashioned cocktail website? I don’t know much about them, but they sound pretty interesting.

You don’t have to know everything about your niche right now. It’s not necessary to be an expert at day one. Chances are, most of you are not an “expert” in anything right now.

If you dedicate 12 months of your life to researching a topic daily, you WILL become an expert in whatever you choose. So it’s not necessarily that your business will be chosen for you based on what you already know, it’s that YOU will choose your business based on what you want to know more about.

Fear of Choosing The Wrong Niche In 10 Years…

An idea I try to drive home to folks that get stuck in the “I’m afraid to pick the wrong niche” phase is to think about their potential failure and what that means. Consider the worst case scenario, and it might not be as bad as you imagined.

If all of your websites make $0 for the next full year, lots of people would consider that a failed business venture. Wow. You’re a failure!

But what if after that year you scrap everything and start over. This time you build a website, and it takes you another full year to make your first sale. Slow, but progress nonetheless. At your 5 year anniversary, you are making regular sales and your business is profitable, allowing you to quit your job and work full time from home.

So fast forward 10 years from today. You have 1 year of utter failure, and 4 years of struggle. Then you have 5 years of working from home, then another couple decades of success ahead of you in the future.

Would it be worth it?

Would you trade 5 years of NON-success for 5 years (plus the future) of success? Most people would.

But for some reason when newbies get started they set unrealistic timeframes of just a few months to “test this thing out” and see if they can make it.

If I had quit at 6 months because I was failing I would not be here today talking to you.

So forget the idea of picking the right or wrong niche, and just pick something that suits you for now. Not right now, because we’ve still got to talk about how to actually pick one in the next section, but I mean pick it by the end of this chapter.

About Pivoting If you are still concerned about picking the wrong niche because of profitability, or just don’t want to waste your time, here’s another thing to think about. You can always ‘pivot’ later, and change the direction of your site. If you pick a domain correctly, it won’t lock you into a specific niche and you can just tweak the content as you grow.

For example, a domain like laserprinterreviews.com is going to lock you into laser printer reviews for life. But a domain like mrprintmaster.com can start off as a laser printer review website but change later. If in a few months you discover that this isn’t your thing, you can tweak to to be broader, more narrow, or head in a different direction (while still somewhat related to the domain).

For example, you could start reviewing all printers later if you run out of stuff to say about laser printers. Alternatively, you could make a website about how to start a t-shirt company. “Print” fits with t-shirt printing, so no one would think it was weird that your domain is called mrprintmaster.com. You could even go a bit more abstract and do something like small home business advice, with a little printer-man as your logo. Kooky, but fun and still makes sense because small businesses use printers.

I chose the name onemorecupof-coffee.com for my current affiliate marketing website because it had a story behind it. But when I started, I wrote about everything related to making money – real estate investing, stock investing, and passive income. As time went on, I realized I wasn’t that interested in all those other topics, and just wanted to focus more specifically on affiliate marketing through Wordpress blogs.

I changed direction (pivoted) and no one noticed.

The other thing is that you can always put a project to the side for a while and come back to it later.

Maybe you start a website this month, unsure if it’s really something you are passionate about. Then two months down the road you have your “aha” moment, and have a great idea for a different website. You can put the first on the backburner and restart it later if you want.

Letting a website stew for a few months isn’t going to harm it, especially if it’s brand new. Nothing gained, nothing lost. The story might be different if you were generating traffic and revenue from the site, but I have a feeling if that were the case you probably wouldn’t be putting the project on the back-burner!

Big Mistakes To Watch Out For There are a few common niche-picking mistakes I see, and while making mistakes can be a great learning process, here are two concepts that are simple to understand and avoid.

Don’t Pick A Single Product Without A Niche To Back It Up Sometimes it’s easy to mix up ‘niche’ with ‘product’. Beginners often tell me they want to promote the iPhone 6, or a specific brand of shoe. My response is always – what happens when iPhone 7 is released or the shoe goes out of style?

The other thing to consider is that you are going to be talking about this product on a weekly, maybe even daily basis. Can you think of enough content to back it up?

iPhone might actually be OK, since there are lots of related topics like app development, games, paid app reviews, and lots of rumors to speculate on.

But if I were to pick something like the Logitech c920 webcam, I might be screwed. What would I write about week after week on logitechc920webcam.com? Not much…unless…I had a niche to back it up.

So in the case of ‘iPhone’, I could pick a broader niche like app development or iPhone game reviews. Instead of the Logitech c920, I might create a webcam review site, even something like ‘staying in touch with friends & family overseas’ (the c920 review would be one article on the website). Using the “person who wants to ___” example I used before, here’s what those two sites would look like: 1. People interested in buying a webcam 2. Families that want to to use technology to keep in touch It would be a nightmare for me (personally) to dig into webcam specs every day for the rest of the year, but I could have a fun time reviewing webcams, talking about handwritten letters, teaching Skype to the elderly, or craft ideas that are easy to for kids to send in the mail. Both the webcam review website and ‘staying in touch’ website are interesting ideas for different types of audiences.

Actually, now that I think of it, the second example is a pretty good business idea! You can have that one. I don’t have the time for it right now :) Don’t Pick A Broad Industry Some folks go in the opposite direction and say that they want to promote “everything technology”, or “video games”, or “fashion”.

Actually, video games and fashion are two of my biggest niche pet peeves. I hear them all the time and I really have a hard time thinking of ideas of how to break them down for folks because I just don’t know enough about them.

BUT, we’re going to do it here, right now, in case you were just thinking, “I love video games” in the last chapter. The key here is to break the industry down into “tribes”, identifying groups of people that are different from each other.

For example, someone playing Second Life is way different from someone that’s into vintage video game consoles. Now we have two niches from one industry!

Other possible video game niches are: immersive video game equipment (gaming chairs, shock controllers, headsets) console repair indie games MMORPGs World of Warcraft DOTA 2 Minecraft creating gaming mods NOTE: WoW, Minecraft and DOTA 2 are huge games with massive followings and more than a decade of history behind them. They are very complicated games and I think could stand on their own legs as a separate niche. Need-4- Speed (a racing game) however, I think could not.

There are no doubt more sub-niches that I haven’t thought of. If this is your passion, put on your thinking cap because “game reviews” just isn’t going to cut it.

Honestly, I’m not even going to touch fashion because it’s something I have a hard time with. I’ve seen some people do really good jobs of it, in ways I wouldn’t have thought of. I don’t want to give away their great ideas, but it can be done well if you think about who you want to be visiting your website.

Let’s talk about something that’s a bit more interesting for me to break down:

Dogs how to train a puppy owning small dogs organic dog food reviews homemade dog treats health & nutrition for older dogs adopting rescue dogs showing specific breeds in competition And how about one more just to give you an idea of just how many possibilities there are. Lots of people say “tech” or “smartphones” as their niche, but that’s just way too broad. It’s too much competition, and you would kill yourself trying to write everything about “smartphones”. mobile game app development app development for small businesses wearables fitness technology medical technology 3d printing drones smart homes

Hopefully these examples have made it clearer how to break down a broad industry into an actual niche. Coupled with last chapter’s advice on how to avoid going too narrow and building yourself into a corner, I think you have a pretty good shot at getting it right the first time around.

Even if not, remember that you can always tweak it as you move forward.

Chapter 3 Summary + Tasks

We are going to be choosing a topic (niche) for our website that we know something about, or are interested in learning about. The main reasons we do this are to learn specialized knowledge about a specific topic in order to write quality content on the topic, and to reduce the amount of competition our website will face.

It’s also going to help keep us motivated and interested while building our business. A topic too broad means that we won’t have a defined audience, and it will be too much work. A topic too narrow means that we’ll struggle to think of what to write about on a weekly basis. It’s a balancing act, but it can be refined later on as we grow our business and learn about our audience.

Tasks For This Chapter

1. Pick 3-5 potential niches for yourself

2. Read the chapters on affiliate programs and domains + hosting before you start buying anything. I know this is a lot of info to take in, but these three sections (niche, affiliates, domain) kind of go hand in hand