Niche Blogging For Profit

Many people dread the niche finding process thinking it is the most difficult part of niche marketing. In today’s post I will share my personal technique of finding profitable niches that don’t have a lot of competition.

1. First I surf the news sites to see what people are talking about. News shows and magazines can also be helpful. Believe it or not, Yahoo Answers is a great place to find niches. If people are asking questions about something, odds are they would visit your blog to learn more.  Just be sure to find a narrow niche – don’t pick anything to general like Teenage Pregnancy. A better topic for a niche would be pre-natal vitamins for the pregnant teen. I’m not sure there is a market or products for that niche but at this point you are just brainstorming and I would guess the pregnant teen would need more supplemental nutrients than an older pregnant woman (since the teen is still growing and developing themselves). Don’t be afraid to use your own imagination as well.

There is much debate over whether you should stick to topics you already know well or go after topics that are most profitable. I think you should at least stick with something you are extremely interested in or you may find it very hard to force yourself to work everyday. I know if I find something boring I don’t want to spend the time researching and writing about it. If you are the type of person who doesn’t mind that, then go for profitable.

2. Now that you have a list of possible niches, head over to Wordtracker’s Gtrends tool. It’s based on Google Trends and provides an easy way to see if your niche idea had enough interest and not too much competition to be a good niche blog pick. Start by typing in one of your niche ideas into the tool. You will get a results list including your keyword and related keywords according to how many people have searched for that term each day over the last month. After each result you will see a little icon. If you click the icon, another window opens that shows you a comparison of the competition for the keyword and the average number of searches. Wordtracker has even gone so far as to include a green check mark or red “X” to quickly show you whether you have picked (or clicked) a winner or a loser. Naturally you are looking for two green checks to let you know that you should continue on with this niche and keyword.

3. Next you’re gonig to take your niche keyword and plug it into the Google Keywords Tool. This tool provides detailed results for related keywords and how many searches you can reasonably expect from them. Again, you want keywords that have high search potential. Pick 4 or 5 keywords to go with your niche keyword. These terms will be scattered throughout your niche blog and your marketing articles.

The trend used to be to write a dozen articles all optimized for a different keyword. Unfortunately the search engines have gotten wise to keyword optimization techniques and are starting to crack down on keyword spamming. You are better off to have a few good keyword that you naturally scatter around your site. Not only will the search engines love you more but your readers will appreciate the natural tone of your writing.

4. Now you have a niche! You are ready to go forward and start building your niche blog. Next time I’ll cover how to get a good domain name and set up a blog.

Happy Blogging!