Picking A Niche, Single Most Important Factor To Keep In Mind
Posted in How To, Optimize And Monetize, Web Master by DB
Two most basic and widespread forms of generating revenue for a website owner is either by
- Selling Advertisements.
- Affiliate earnings from sale of goods or services.
Do it right and you have a winner on your hands, one that can keep you going for a while and even fund your other venture(s), who knows it could be the one that you sell and retire. Starting a niche site targeting ads and affiliate earnings seem to be the rage currently. While we all have our own ideas and methods on how we go about finding that elusive niche gold mine, many of us tend to ignore a crucial aspect, the site or blog demographic.
Let me explain. To me there are two categories of internet users.
- People like you and me who are relatively internet literate and
- People who are not.
If your niche targets users from the first category, unless you become really really popular, you will find that your earnings from the PPC ads or the various affiliate links that you run on your site are simply not translating into money. Let me ask you a few questions
- How many times have you clicked on a PPC ad from say Google Adsense or YPN?
- How many times have you hovered over a link to check if the link has an affiliate id?
I’m willing to bet that the answers to the first question is “Never” and the second is “All the time”. Another true statement would be, ”I and you don’t have a problem clicking on ads displayed by Google while searching on Google.com, but would almost never click on the same ad if it was displayed on an external website even though it’s the same Google Ad”. It goes to show that we simply are the worst users to make money from.
Now what you really should be doing is target a niche that will pull in visitors that are for the lack of a better term, “Not so Internet Savvy”, your second category of users. People that don’t understand the difference between a standard link and a paid advertisement. Even if they do, they simply don’t care as long as there is a promise of finding the information that they are looking for. This is the demographic that will fill your bank account and the better you serve them by offering them a quality site and resources, the more they will reward you by coming back and spreading the word. Find your niche amongst these users and look after them with passion.
There are many keyword tracking and analysis tools out there that will give you a pretty close estimate of how many people have searched for a particular word or phrase in a given time period across all major search engines. While you should most certainly use them to find your niche, decide to take up the niche only if the niche demographic falls into the second category. Good luck!!
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March 16th, 2008 at 3:32 pm
[...] id as part of your URL is a complete turn off for many readers. Read my previous posts about niche user behavior and also about how your blog or web site url should be structured. Many bloggers have caught on [...]
March 30th, 2008 at 4:20 pm
[...] Making money from affiliate earnings The main goal here is to earn an income from affiliate earnings. Now you could be blogging about lots of things like gadgets, books or even about being a super affiliate but the main income is from affiliate earnings. Yes, you do make some money selling ads but is a small portion when compared to your earnings from your affiliate commissions. If you fall in this category be sure to pick your niche wisely. Read more about picking a niche. [...]