Picking a niche is not that hard as it seems. In fact, this is the part that I like the most when building a niche website.
So, you are wondering what is the best method to pick a niche for your future website, right? The truth is that there are many methods and ways to pick a niche or a topic for your website. I’ve found to work the best using Google Suggest tool, “People also ask” section and a little bit of research.
I’ve developed my own methods and tools in order to handle this step with efficiency and speed. When I had in mind to publish a lot of content and to build many websites then this step was crucial. I learned a lot from other bloggers that were building websites. (I mention them at the end of this article).
But I wanted to develop my own methods of making things. So what I did is that I created for every step of building a niche website: methods, procedures, tasks, and tools. I’m constantly like to test new things, implement new ideas and create new tools.
I will tell you exactly how I do this with examples. In fact, I will pick a niche and I will use it as an example in the future.
The important thing is to niche down and to pick the right name for your website that will allow you to develop the website in the future if you want to.
Example:
Pets – Fishkeeping – Goldfish
- You can pick Pets but the pet niche is a big niche with a lot of competition
- I will pick as the main topic to write about Goldfish but I want also to be able to write about Fishkeeping and maybe who knows in the future I will be able to add other species.
- I need to pick the right domain name that will reflect my wishes. For this, I will choose something fun. FishPetHobby.com
- The name FishPetHobby reflects that my website is about Fishkeeping and not fishing.
Validating The Niche
In order to be able to bring traffic to your site, you will need articles to rank. But what happens if you pick a niche without doing some keyword research.
Here is where I use the Google Suggest/People also Ask method.
I want to see if my future topic will have the right potential. I don’t want to enter in a crowded niche that has a lot of competition.
So how do I check if a niche is crowded or not?
Well, it is not that hard actually.
What I do is the following:
1. Change Google Search to the United States (more here with pictures)
2. Search on Google for a couple of keywords specific to your niche: for example, let’s search right now for “goldfish”.
3. You can expand on Google Also Ask articles and new suggestions will appear.
What I like to do now is to visit a couple of these suggestions and to look at the top 10 spots.
4. If some of the top 10 results articles are from forums, Quora or Reddit then is a good sign that is the niche I would like to pick. In the case that I would not find what I’m looking for then I will go back and try with another keyword.
Niche Evergreen
Do you want to operate in a niche where people are searching about it all year round or in a seasonal niche? I prefer evergreen niches most of the time but also some seasonal ones. I would not pick a niche that is. a holiday niche like Christmas, Halloween and so on.
Examples
- Cooking is an evergreen niche. People are cooking every day.
- Camping is a seasonal niche. Most of the people go camping in summer. But there are also people that do winter camping.
- Christmas songs. See the picture below on how the song “Last Christmas” looks like in google trends over the years.
Next step