Andyrew

Taking the Niche

It’s inevitable that you’ve read articles about niches, what they are and how to make them. I know of webmasters that live entirely from these kinds of sites, and are pretty much full-proof. I have actually ever ventured into them, despise the success hat i’ve had online. I have always focused on certain stages of website developments.

• Think of an idea that will bring shear amounts of traffic
• Build the site.. add the content
• Get the traffic
• Figure out what to do with it

I’ve never actually thought about the smaller scale things. What if i was limited to having 100 visitors a day? I surely couldn’t make anything from that.. I’m used to having sites with 75,000 visitors to them. One small change would often mean in maybe 200 less clicks to AdSense that day.. which didn’t make much of a difference on a site where each click only generated a couple of cents anyway.

I have always been a fan of the saying, “Don’t place all of your eggs in one basket” meaning.. one false move, and all of your eggs will break and you have nothing. I have been aware of that before. But, it was always at the back of my mind when i had the larger sites. After all, what’s the chance that something will go wrong?

After selling pretty much all of my large websites now, i have started to rebuild some replacements.. all of which come to think of it, will be going large scale once again. But, before they are quite finished.. should i try my hand at creating a website created around a niche? I see them for sale everyday on Sitepoint

Let’s be honest. There are two main categories that a website can fit in.. the large scale ones (no SEO, thousands of pages, user driven, low CPC) and the small scale ones (SEO like crazy, very few visitors, high CPC with only a few pages)

What would happen if i go to the other side of things here? I read a post earlier today over at JoshBuckley.net who has written a beginners guide to SEO, part I. Some of these things include…

• Keywords
• Title tags
• Meta tags
• URLs
• Headings
• Linking
• Navigation
• Sitemap

Of course. Everyone knows about the title tags, the keywords and H1 tags.. I’m interested to see what will become of part II to the guide. From what i’ve seen.. it seems like there are a few steps to creating a niche.

1. Look in overture, and find a topic that is regularly searched for
2. Compare the topic to the results found in Google
3. If the comparison is good.. take the niche.. if not.. try again

I think I’m going to take a shower, grab a coffee and read some articles about creating some niche sites.. maybe on ache or eye surgery or whatever. Since i’ve never tried it.. i don’t know what to expect, but I’m about to find out and tell let you know about it too