What’s holding you back from making an ABSOLUTE KILLING on your website? A profitable and sustainable niche. In this article, I cut through all the superficial advice and tell you how to find a profitable niche for your blog!
Hey, I’m Ani and I am a digital marketer. I’ve seen countless online businesses and entrepreneurs struggle because they could NOT settle with the right niche, therefore, lost so much of their time, and money…
So, unless you want to waste your time and money like them, follow these four steps that I’ve seen working for affiliate websites, blogs, and even service businesses too. Not only that, but I am going to cover the most COMMON MISTAKES beginners, like you, made over and over again.
Are you ready to find your niche and make your website an automatic ATM machine?
Let’s go!
What is a niche?
A niche is a small segment of a large industry that targets a specific type of consumer persona or product line.
Many people get the real definition of a niche. The word gets thrown around a lot, and often comes off very confusing. So, I would like to use a common example for you.
Industry: Fitness
Topic: Weight loss
Niche: Weight loss for petite women
You could argue that weight loss alone is a niche, but in my opinion, it is not niche enough. I agree it is smaller than “Fitness”, however, there are just too many different type of personas in the weight loss topic. It is better to break it down for a specific group so that all your content, product or service serves that one specific area or niche.
Does a niche always have to target a person? No.
Here is another example:
Industry: Automobile
Topic: Car insurance
Niche: Car insurance in texas
You can follow the same exercise for any industry, but we recommend you to learn proper keyword research and see if your niche has any search volume first.
In other words, learn keyword research and see if people actually search for the term you are going after.
In this guide, I’ll explain more about how to determine the “best” size for your niche – so keep reading!
Can you find a profitable niche as a beginner?
Yes, you can find a profitable and beginner-friendly niche as a beginner. If you just built your brand new website and you are new to online marketing these are the steps you must follow in order to land on a niche that works for you.
Essentially, there are no right or wrong answers to finding a profitable niche, however, you want to make sure that the niche you are picking is both profitable and sustainable in the long term.
These elements depend on your preference, skills, and resources, so keep that in mind.
4 Steps To Find A Profitable Niche
- Interest, not passion: brainstorm
- Access trends on Google Trends
- Access profitability on Online Marketplaces
- Start creating content
Step 1: Interest, not passion: brainstorm
The first and most overlooked step is to do proper brainstorming. Start brainstorming topics that you have the slightest interest in and group them into categories.
It doesn’t matter whether you’re an expert or not.
Try to list down every possible idea and group them if they belong to one of the big 3 categories that makes the most profit:
- Wealth
- Health
- Relationships
Remember, these three categories are the MOST profitable ones because people’s biggest problems always start from here and they want answers immediately!
Think about it – How to get rich or how to lose weight are one of the most common phrases we ask and they fall under health and wealth.
And if you ever read the book, “$100M Offers: How To Make Offers So Good People Feel Stupid Saying No” by Alex Hormonzi, you know that your absolute grand slam offer is either in wealth, health, or relationships category.
Step 2: Access Trend on Google Trends
When you got a list of possible topics, all you have to do is to check their historical trend and predict if they will continue in the future. You can check your chosen niche’s historical trend for free using Google’s Free marketing tool, Google Trends.
Google Trends shows users what people are searching for using real-time data. It is simple to use, and any beginner can understand it!
Plus, with Google Trends data, you can make a sensible prediction about your niche’s future popularity. So don’t skip this step otherwise you could waste your initial investment!
How to use Google Trends:
- Go to trends.google.com
- Choose location
- Enter search term
- Change period to Past 5 years
- Scroll down and access the graphs
NOTE:
If you see your graph dipping at the same time in the same year, that means your niche is very seasonal. For example in the case of “golf bat” in the US, the search term tends to dip in the winter months. This dip is reasonable since golfing is not popular in the winter.
Google Trends shows you related topics and queries people ask about your chosen topic. Use this to expand your content.
You can follow our video tutorial on YouTube and see how to do Step 3 and Step 4:
Step 3: Access Profitability on Online Marketplaces
What if I told you, you can just go and see how other websites are making money in the same niche YOU want to rank? When you are picking a niche, make sure you go on online marketplaces and do your window shopping.
Imagine, you want to buy a new pair of shoes. Don’t you want to see which shop gives you the best deal or which brand has the best reviews? It is a similar scenario when you are hunting for your best niche.
You can look at potential competitor websites through Flippa.com or Empire Flippers. Both Flippa and Empire Flippers are central hubs for buying and selling online businesses, therefore websites have to display their:
- Monthly Traffic
- Monthly Revenue
- Niche
It does not matter whether you are there to buy or sell any business. When you create an account, you can view these websites like a regular user.
This information is PERFECT for you, as a newbie to access whether your chosen niche is profitable for others or you can even find a niche you have not thought of before!
Step 4: Start creating content
Every successful bloggers and vlogger have one thing in common: they published great content over a long period of time.
The last step to actually make your niche worthwhile is to create regular content around it that matches search intent.
Although this step is not necessarily needed for you to find a niche, it challenges you whether you can keep publishing content and keep this niche for a long time.
Many people drop out at this point because they realized the topic is either too challenging or they do not have the right resources to keep up with content creation. Often, drop-outs happen because they’ve bumped into one of the common mistakes beginners make when they’re choosing a niche.
So, in our next section, we’ll go over how you can avoid the most COMMON MISTAKES newbies make when they’re picking a niche for their website.
5 Common Mistakes When Choosing a Profitable Niche
When you are choosing a niche for your brand-new website, you are essentially choosing your key product, unique selling point, and the whole foundation of your business. Therefore you do not want to make these costly mistakes that can waste so much of your time and money later on.
Lucky you, I’ve collected the most crucial and perhaps, most expensive mistakes 90% of beginners make when they want to start an online business. – Trust me, I’ve done almost all of them!
So, here are the common mistakes when choosing a niche:
Choosing Your Passion As A Niche
Picking your passion as a niche doesn’t mean the niche would ever be profitable. Do not make emotional decisions to run your future business. A niche is picked with careful market research and your interest too. However, that does not mean you should 100% rely on your passion, whatever may be.
Imagine someone whose passion is to collect …stamps. The average price of one stamp is a few cents, plus there’s only so much stuff you can write about it.
Let’s say you want to start an affiliate website referring your favorite and most loved product on earth – Stamps.
You’d have to sell millions of stamps before you make any relevant return on your time and monetary investment!
The other downside of choosing your passion as your niche is that you’ll probably burn out or end up hating your passion.
When you are running a website, it can be tough, and you’ll end up spending a lot of time building your content to get anywhere. You may get tired of your own topic because it is no longer “fun” anymore, but work…So, be careful when you consider choosing passion as your niche.
Don’t pick a super competitive niche.
One very common mistake when picking a niche is that the product is very competitive. If you’re going for high commissions and want to make a lot of money fast, you’ll find yourself in extremely competitive niches like personal finance, insurance, medicine/health supplements, or MLM (multi-level marketing).
What could be very misleading to beginners is that these industries promise high commissions when the products get sold.
Although the rewards seem promising, as a beginner you probably do not have:
- Proper qualifications to refer these products effectively
- Advanced lead generation knowledge to execute any campaigns.
I had this experience with my friend once. She was running a website for a skincare product, hoping to get commissions after a sale. However, she did not have the marketing background to generate leads and ended up selling the products to close friends and family.
After a couple of months, I did a simple keyword research on Ahrefs and saw that the product, she was trying to sell, was a super high competition. – There could have been 0 chance for her new site to rank against them.
You, my friend, should do this better.
If you are a beginner and you have 0 background knowledge of your chosen niche, I really advise you to stay away from extremely high competition where “you” or your website needs to be an industry expert.
Competitive niches promise you a huge exit but that might not be the right niche for you!
Don’t make your niche super narrow or broad
A niche is a smaller part of an industry, for example, kitchen decoration within home decor. But picking something super narrow niche like the “best wooden spatulas” would really hit your website. Many beginners (including myself) get confused with the actual definition of a niche.
A niche is a smaller segment of a large industry therefore you do not want to make your segment too broad or too narrow. You should be able to find a niche that is small enough for you to compete but also large enough to create content around for a long period of time..
One common example of a very broad topic that people mistake as a niche is fitness.
There are tons of topics around fitness and as a beginner, you’ve got very limited resources to cover all of these sub-topics within the fitness industry. What will you write about? …
You could be talking about exercise, how to lose weight, how to do yoga, keto diet!
These sub-topics could make good niches by themselves.
But it would be a waste of time and money if you want to cover everything as a beginner.
Alright, to choose the right size niche, do this instead:
Pick a bigger industry and narrow it down to multiple sub-topics and pick one that could be your niche. Then, down the line sell products or other digital assets, ie. courses or subscriptions.
For example:
Industry: Fitness
Sub-topic: Weight loss
Niche: Weightloss for busy adults
Weight loss alone is a very competitive topic, although it is still a sub-part of a large industry, which is fitness.
However, if you go specific enough, ie. weight loss for busy adults, then you touched on a specific segment that speaks for one specific group of people.
Don’t fall for FAD niches
Just like FAD diets, FAD niches won’t work in the long run. Your perfect and profitable niche is only good if you can stick with it for the long term.
Take the new iPhone 14, for example. You can write a lot about this latest phone, and create review videos or blogs – You’ll rank and make money from sales.
However, it is super trendy and won’t guarantee sales in the future. Especially when new products are dropping on the market.
In the same way, you can’t sell more fidget spinners because they aren’t trendy anymore. FAD niches have a strict expiry date and you don’t want to fall into one-off trends.
Don’t pick a niche with zero buyer intent
To make the best out of your niche, you have to try which one actually makes money. Do people spend their time on the website to purchase or to read? This is why a profitable niche has a strong buyer intent behind it and if your chosen niche does not have it, you will never make scalable passive income.
Marketing gurus always shove down the idea that you must know EVERYTHING about your target audience.
What do they like? Where do they live? What are their favorite activities?
But to cut it short, your number one question to ask is: Do people in the niche actually spend MONEY?
When you’re picking a hobby niche, chances are that yes, people DO spend. Those are things they like doing and they do them for fun.
But there are areas where you could potentially break into the market, yet, people are just not there to spend.
Here is an example: I recently watched Matt Diggity’s video where he ran an affiliate website about yoga traveling but people just weren’t on the website to spend their money. People who searched for those yoga traveling terms were looking for yoga retreats and other events.
So, you want to make sure you’ve got your keyword research right before you jump into any niche.
Don’t pick a niche that requires frequent updates
Picking a niche that requires frequent updates is a common mistake for beginners because the niche is everchanging and thus makes it harder to publish new content.
As a beginner, you should go for a niche that requires little updates. You don’t have the time and resources to keep updating every piece of content, especially if you want to start this as a side hustle.
Take gaming for example. If you’re a hardcore gamer who knows what’s changing in the industry all the time, then, good for you.
But for the rest of us, keeping up with every new gaming update and strategy is a pretty difficult game to play. *Pun intended*
Remember, when you’ve got a site you’ll have to write a lot! And you don’t want to write and publish content day and night just so your site can cover every update.
So, you want to make sure that your niche is stable and doesn’t change so much over time. Popular niches like gardening are fairly the same now as it was 10 years ago but you can always add new techniques here and there to boost your online marketing.
We also provided a list of stable, beginner-friendly niches for 2023. Although the new year is coming soon, there are a handful of niches out there that do not change over time and thus the competition is fairly low.
Conclusion
If you liked this article, read more about profitable niches in 2023 based on industry predictions and stay ahead of your competition before the new year begins. We collected a list of possible niche ideas that could skyrocket in 2023!
Are you interested in making 5 to 7-figure income with your website? Make sure you join the Affiliate Lab and kickstart your affiliate marketing journey by learning from people who started out just like you. The courses include real case studies, no B.S. and you can support our page and save $200 today! You can begin anytime. The courses give you lifetime access.
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