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A niche is just a group of people who want to buy stuff! The question “Do I find a niche micro or macro?”, probably hasn’t even come onto your radar. There are lots of definitions about niches out there, but let’s not make it more difficult than it is. I like to keep things simple. It’s just a group of people who want to read your blog. Once they have built trust with you they will want to buy products you recommend.
Picking a niche can be one of the most important and overwhelming tasks you do at the beginning of your online career as a marketer. Unfortunately, many people simply choose something someone else mentioned that was profitable, which is the wrong way to go about the process.
The last thing you want is to be chained to a topic that bores you or that you don’t honestly care about.
Who wants a niche “Pink iPhone cases?” The whole writing process is easier, if you imagine over time you will want to write hundreds of articles
That said, another aspect of the niche selection process that you have to consider is drilling down until you find the sweet spot of the topic where you have the right amount of interest and profit potential and the least competition.
When you’re newer to the online marketing or entrepreneurial world, you might just think bigger is always better. But that’s not true – even for list building or niche selection. Having a huge list doesn’t mean it will be profitable if the audience is too broad and generic to care about everything you recommend to them.
The danger in thinking broad is the fact that “Everyone is not a niche”. You cannot market to everyone. There are always stages people go through and you can’t appeal to them at all stages. Don’t get me wrong you don’t have to be an Expert to be able to be an expert to create a blog. Complete beginners need guidance.
Let’s say that you want to lose 50 pounds. You have committed yourself to a diet plan and you are on your journey. It is perfectly acceptable to blog about losing weight even though you have lost an ounce. There are people who are considering losing weight at this time. One person may want to consider going on a diet, because an invitation to their niece’s wedding just popped through their letterbox this morning.
The same holds true for niche selection. For example, think about the creation of a blog based on dieting. That’s such an enormous topic, but you will need to cover everything under the umbrella of that broad keyword. That requires tons of content on issues like calorie counting, meal prep, fasting, cooking, shopping, fasting, keto dieting, vegetarian diets, and many more. So now think about what your content schedule might look like for the upcoming months.
You want your site to be seen as an authority site, which means Google thinks you know what you’re talking about. If you are talking about 30 different completely unrelated topics then it’s hard to be seen as an authority. For example, in week one – you might write one post about calorie dieting, one about meal prepping, one about fasting, and so on. That means you are diving in all over the place. Google has no idea where your posts are going. The objective for your site
If you don’t want to drill down, then at least concentrate on one aspect of dieting. Such as increasing more fruit and vegetables in your diet. Write about twenty articles on this topic. Once you have started to gain traction there, you can expand out to say Keto dieting for another thirty articles.
Trying to rank for “dieting” as a single one-word broad keyword is an uphill battle. It will be going head to head against all of the established authority sites that have hundreds of relevant articles. You are at the start of your Journey.
Indexing merely means Google has found your website. Think of the Internet as being in the ether. In space, there are lots of things flying around, it is like the Wild West. Meteors, explode into comets, comets explode into stars. You get the picture I am sure, granted you may be wondering what this has to do with the Internet. New Internet content is being all the time.
YouTube has 500 hours of video uploaded every minute (Tubefilter, 2019). 30,000 hours of video are uploaded every hour. And 720,000 hours of video uploaded every day to YouTube.
Every minute 243,055 new photos are uploaded to Facebook.
There is massive competition to stand out just from Facebook and YouTube. Most of the search engines send out little robots or bots. Their job is to ferret out this content. This process is indexing, and it just means Google or another search engine has found your content.
Indexing merely means Google has found your website. Think of the Internet as being in the ether. In space, there are lots of things flying around, it is like the Wild West. Meteors, explode into comets, comets explode into stars. You get the picture I am sure, granted you may be wondering what this has to do with the Internet. New Internet content is being all the time.
YouTube has 500 hours of video uploaded every minute (Tubefilter, 2019). 30,000 hours of video are uploaded every hour. And 720,000 hours of video uploaded every day to YouTube.
Every minute 243,055 new photos are uploaded to Facebook.
There is massive competition to stand out just from Facebook and YouTube. Most of the search engines send out little robots or bots. Their job is to ferret out this content. This process is indexing, and it just means Google or another search engine has found your content.
Search engines might index your site, but trying to rank for dieting as a broad keyword is an uphill battle against all of the established sites that have tons of competitive content while you’re just getting started.
Now consider a week when you focused on just one topic, such as meal preparation for weight loss. Suddenly, the field has narrowed considerably. You’re able to post a week’s worth of content all about meal prepping for dieters, and every time someone is looking for those ideas, Google will be able to send them to you over a broad site that may have 1-2 articles on the topic, and thousands on other topics.
You won’t actually be missing out on profits. Instead, you’ll be positioning yourself to thrive because you’ll be viewed as an expert site that’s focused and the increased traffic you enjoy will result in sales and commissions.
Think of it from your own point of view as a consumer. If you were searching for a lawnmower, and you found two sites. A broad lawn mower site that included all sorts of mowers, from riding to push mowers – and a drilled niche site that only wrote about battery-operated mowers, which is what you wanted, which would you choose?
If you have never owned a lawnmower, then you are looking for more general information to start with. Well, if you knew of the drilled down item you wanted, you’d probably go to the site dedicated to exactly what you want. When you go to a broad site, a lot of the information will be irrelevant.
You’ll put the main topic in the center, inside of a circle. For example, you might put something like Marketing. That’s a very broad topic to cover. Then you’ll begin branching out by drawing a line to another circle, with a narrower topic, like affiliate marketing. Other examples are info product creation, traffic, list building, social media, and more.
You continue doing that for each circle you create until you’ve exhausted all ideas. For example, your circle for social media might branch out to each site or app, like YouTube, Facebook, Pinterest, etc.
For the Facebook circle, you might narrow it down to Pages, Groups, Paid Ads, etc. Next, you’ll need to decide where it makes sense for you to position yourself as an expert in that mind map.
You could technically target marketing as a whole or drill down and become known as the social media guru or the Facebook expert. Of course, you may not want to build an entire business just targeting the topic of Facebook pages, but Facebook Ads or paid ads, in general, might be doable.
Never lose sight of the fact that you start an online business to make money. Play around with it and bounce ideas around to see what seems like it would be a good fit. If you feel like you may not be able to write enough content, or that there aren’t enough products to promote with that narrow of a topic, then you’ve probably drilled too far. If you can’t find products to promote then there’s no point in building a tiny micro-niche.
Keyword tools are an excellent resource for helping you drill down into a niche to see what’s viable when it comes to profiting from a narrow niche. There are dozens of them – both free and paid.
One of the best can be accessed here Jaaxy. This is a paid keyword tool but if you open up a free account here to build a niche website you can access the keyword tool free of charge
Some aren’t even marked as tools at all, such as when you go to Google and type in a keyword and watch it autofill with 10 possibilities as you type. You can enter an asterisk and then a broad keyword or use the keyword first.
So if you enter * gardening into Google, it will show you phrases like square foot gardening, container gardening, hydroponic gardening, and more. If you just typed the word gardening into Google, you’d get different results.
You’d see things like gardening tools, gardening zones, no-dig gardening, and more. So on your mind map, you might have a mix of both – and consider making a site just for gardening tool reviews, or only about container gardening.
If you want to reach a specific audience, you can type in another phrase like “gardening for” and see what comes up. You have results such as for beginners, for kids, for seniors, for mental health, and so on.
While two are based on an age demographic, kids and seniors, the others are more about status (beginners) and purpose (stress relief). So those are slants you could use for your site.
Slanting something this way, like gardening for stress relief, will be specific enough to target a detailed audience. Also broad enough to allow you to cover a wide variety of topics – container gardening for stress relief, senior gardening for mental health, and more.
Don’t just use Google. Use a variety of search engines, including YouTube! This video site is actually the largest search engine in the world. Using this tool, if you type the word gardening in, you get different results.
These include phrases like gardening ideas for home, gardening hacks, urban gardening, vertical gardening. Other ideas are kitchen gardening, raised bed gardening, and the list goes on and on.
Eventually, you’ll find ideas that sound good on their own. Or you feel could be good combined, such as “raised bed gardening for seniors”. The primary keyword here is “raised beds”, but you can slant this to raised beds for pregnant women, or “raised beds for seniors”. As your mind map or list expands, you’ll scour through the results and see how it all fits together like a perfect puzzle you feel you can master as the content host presenting ideas to an interest ad engaged audience.
There are paid keyword tools you can use, too. Jaaxy is an excellent one, and they have a tutorial built in to help you think of additional ways to search. Sometimes you’ll see a result and instantly know that it might make a great blog post, but it’s not meaty enough for an entire site.
That might be something like the best types of soil for gardening. It’s good information for your audience to know. That doesn’t mean you can build an entire site around soil.
In the form of television, magazines, websites, and other places, the media will give you great insight into what people are looking for, so use that to your advantage. Start with looking up the niche-specific sections of news sites.
FoxNews.com and CNN.com have sections for health, for example. While Fox has sections for mental health, cancer, and heart health (to name a few), you’ll find things like mindfulness, fitness, and sleep on CNN.
Jot them all down and see what’s trending. When you dig into the section on fitness on CNN, for example, you see plenty of articles about deep breathing, and it’s also in the sleep section too.
This titbit may tell you that deep breathing is a hot topic, but is it enough to build an entire, lucrative site about? Of course, people often want some hacks on breathing better, and there are a handful of products they may buy to improve their breathing – but you may want to broaden your health topic a bit more to sustain a site long-term.
Looking at images in magazines is an inspiring way to see what’s trending. For instance, you could type in Woman’s World magazine in Google and you can see what’s popular at the moment. All of the headlines on the front page will give you ideas. You would see that recently, things like brain health, keto dieting, joint pain, and energy are all popular.
Every niche has its jargon and expressions and flicking through magazines is a great way to understand the jargon quickly. Scan the covers, and you’ll see wording like shortcut keto and quickie keto. This is telling you people want fast keto diet plans, so you could focus on that as your slant.
You can check daily for a week or look back at past covers, previous news stories and more to pinpoint trends that ebb and flow within a niche. Make sure you aren’t targeting something that’s simply seasonal. Seasonal topics do make money but they create an awful lot of work for something that will only be profitable for maybe three weeks a year.
You want an evergreen topic that will stay viable all throughout the year. It’s okay if it has spikes. For example, dieting is a good topic year-round. But it has spikes around New Year’s Day when people make their resolutions to shed pounds and improve their fitness.
As you get your results from your keyword research (which may be rather large), take note of buyer keywords. These are often people searching for products they want to spend money on. Keep these on a spreadsheet for future use.
This might be something where you see a phrase like the best gardening apron or where to buy a gardening bench. You want to keep track of all of these for later use whenever you create review blog posts.
Look at your results and see if people are looking for information. Or they may buy in the form of a book or course on ClickBank or Amazon. Some people prefer tangible products. This is especially true of cookery books. Even if someone owns a Kindle they very often want to hold a cookery book. If you can narrow your niche down to the point it includes digital and tangible products you have hit the sweet spot.
For example, with container gardening, that audience needs tips and information, so they do buy books. They also need to buy things like grow bags, trowels, a watering can, and so on.
One thing you want to do as you hone in on your narrow, drilled down niche, is TO keep in mind that eventually, someday, you may want to expand your reach. As you get more articles onto your website you will broaden out the niche.
So if you’re covering a topic like survival food on your narrow niche blog, and people keep asking about water storage, gardening, self defense, and solar information, it may be time to broaden your reach.
To do this, you don’t have to abandon your site. You can build a network of mini-sites that all connect to a broader one. You could have one for food, one for water, one for solar power, and so on.
But then all of them could link back to a parent site where you discuss survival tips as a whole. They can also reference (link back) to each other. If you write a post about food storage and you mention that water storage is more important for survival, you can include a hyperlink back to that other site.
The audience stays within your network of sites, and all of them have a chance to compete in the search engine results pages. The drawback to this kind of expansion is that it requires a substantial amount of content.
Only expand to what you feel like you can handle. If you need to reinvest some of your earnings for ghostwriting or private label rights content for your sites, you can do that as well.
In Conclusion
You can go as targeted or as broad as you like. If you start with a broad niche then only write about one topic for at least a month. This gives you traction to get a page rank. Don’t fall into the trap of building such a narrow targeted niche site that there aren’t enough products to promote. As I said before don’t lose sight of the money which is why you started this business.
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