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:

Does Your Niche Have Good Traffic Levels?

I have been making a good 4-figure income from my blog based on around 500 visitors a day so you can aim for a number based on that but the trouble is that it is very difficult to predict exactly how much traffic your particular site can get. However, we don’t actually need to do that as there is an easier way.

A much more general ballpark is simply to see that there are a nice handful of sub topics within your topic that are being searched on within Google and are getting several hundred (or ideally in the thousands) of searches. If there is and you write about them on your site then you’ll grab a share of that traffic from a multitude of different sources.

Google provides their own keyword tool and they made a recent change to it to show actual numbers which is immensely helpful for the research we want to do here. Just do a search for “google adwords keyword tool” to find it. The tool doesn’t cost anything to use. Now I’ll show you a very simple technique for estimating the traffic – it won’t be 100% accurate so don’t obsess over it. We just want to get an idea.

By default the tool will show data tailored to your country but we want to show ALL data so using the link ‘Results are Tailored To’, make sure that you select ‘All Countries and Territories’. With that done the first step is to start with some very broad one-word search terms related to your niche such as ‘gardening’, ‘golf’, ‘money’, ‘cats’ etc.

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.

What we should now have are potential sub topics and depending on how broad you started out each one may even have the potential to be a website in itself. But from here we can do down further. Type in one of the specialised keywords to get even more specific keywords. So a search for cat health might show topics such as dental issues, fur condition etc. If you see several levels of keywords like this then your topic has great potential.

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.

What Are The Monetization Options Like?

Using the same keyword tool from Google, as you do your searches look at the column that says ‘Advertiser Competition’. This is the number of advertisers that are paying Google to advertise their products and services to people who type in that keyword. What you are looking for here is HIGH competition – this is good because it means that people are making money from those keywords and if they can make money then so can you! Well, maybe

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.

Now one place where you are almost guaranteed to find an affiliate product for absolutely any niche is Amazon.com. Go to their website and simply type in some keywords relating to your topic. If something pops up (and it will!) there are products to promote as Amazon have an affiliate program for everything sold.

What this research shows you is the level of interest in the niche. If there are hundreds of products being sold then the niche is popular, people are buying and selling and making money. You might not earn very much from Amazon’s system directly but it shows you the potential. You can always go on to create your own products later on.