How to Choose a Money Making Niche for Your New Blog

Whether it’s for a new blog, website or ebook you plan on creating if you hope to make money from the venture you’d better target a profitable niche . Choose right and your product or website could be exactly what a hungry crowd of buyers is looking but choose wrong and it could all be for naught. The key to getting it right is in the research you do beforehand.

While you may hear many times that you should choose a topic that you love that can be very misleading and many a blog has died a horrible, unprofitable death based on this theory. Yes, by all means, start out writing down a list of your interests. Writing about something you love and know well makes the whole creation process infinitely easier but before you write a single blog post you need to research your interests to find out if there’s money in that niche.

How to Research a Niche

If you have some ideas already run with those and see if there’s enough interest in those topics to sustain a blog dedicated to it. Begin by going to the Google Trends lab and entering a basic keyword for each niche idea. For instance enter the words “dog training”, “wine tasting” and “GPS” (all without the quotes) into the search field and separate each by a comma.

Google will come back with a graph chart showing you the popularity of that particular topic over the last few years. If one of your choices is on a steep decline axe it. If it’s on the rise it’s got great potential but we wary of “flash in the pan” fads that rise quickly and burn out fast. Look for niches that are relatively high and steady or on the up rise but have long term potential.

Go Keyword Hunting

Once you’ve found a niche that’s popular and sustainable you’re going to want to know what search terms people are using to search out information on this niche. Go to the Google Adwords Keyword Tool and enter your basic search term as you did for Google Trends.

Google will return a list of keywords along with how often that phrase was searched for last month and on average how many searches it gets per month. You want to look for a niche that has, at minimum, 20 related keyword phrases that receive over 500 searches per month. More is better, less is an indications that there’s may not be enough interest. Plus, don’t forget that you’re going to have to write blog posts on this niche so if you can’t even find 20 phrases relating to that topic are you really going to find enough material to write on this niche for years to come?

Related Products

Another good indicator that a niche is profitable is how many products are for sale relating to that niche. Take dog training, for example, if you do a search for the phrase “dog training book” you’ll see there are many books, both printed and ebooks, dedicated to this topic. Now, while the niche “dog training” is still general and has a good deal of competition narrowing your niche down to a related topic (take a second look at that list of related keywords) such as German Sheppard dog training. You can still use basic “dog training” phrases for blog posts but narrowing the niche a little makes you a bigger fish in a smaller sea.

Check out places such as Amazon.com, Clickbank.com or Commission Junction as indicators of product availability.

If your chosen niche or topic passes all the tests above there’s a good chance you’ve picked a winner. While you can never know 100% for sure until you begin blogging on that topic whether you’ve picked money making niche or not if you do your homework ahead of time you substantially increase your chances of profiting from your new blog.