Choose a website niche

If you'd like to choose a website niche that's just right for you, it's time to do a little research.

You need to think very carefully about what interests you; and then find out if it interests other people too - and we'll take a look at how to do that.

What is a website niche exactly?

Well, it's a specific topic that you can write a site about - sometimes quite a narrow topic that solves a particular problem for people or gives them advice about how to do something.

We'll look at some examples below.

Choose a website niche - top tips

Think about your interests

• What kind of food do you like?
• Are you a wine afficionado?
• Are you a collector?
• Do you make your own jewelry?
• Do you help friends organize weddings or baby showers?
• Or maybe you love travelling to a favorite spot that you'd like to tell others about?

Write a list of your interests

No problem!

Where do you spend your

• time
• energy...
• ...and money!

Get it all down on paper.

Use your experience

Have you faced difficulty in your life, and become an expert in finding solutions that others might find useful?

For your first site, it's so much better to choose a niche that you're enthusiastic about and that you know quite a lot about.

Research your niche idea online

And when you're trying to choose a website niche, you must find out if anyone online is interested in this topic. If nobody wants to find out about your chosen subject, then there's not much point writing a site about it, as you won't get much traffic.

So you need to do a bit of market research.

1: First of all write a list of all the different words and phrases you can think of relevant to your niche.

Let's say you want to write a website about Scottish Terriers - wonderful!

You might create a list like this:

• scottish terriers
• scottish terrier puppies
• scottish terrier care
• scottish terrier health
• scottish terrier temperament
• how to buy a scottish terrier
• famous scottish terriers

... and so on.

2: Now get onto Google and plug in words and phrases from your list.

Are there interesting sites? What kind of info do they write about? You're sure to find tons more ideas! Are there specialist forums, questions on Yahoo! Answers? In other words - is there a fair amount of interest out there?

• You may find there is nothing much about your niche idea
  This could either be a golden opportunity for you - or it could mean that others have tried and failed to build a successful site about your topic.

• You may find many top-quality sites about your topic
  It may be hard to compete against them... can you find an original angle on the topic or present it in a different way?

How successful website builders spot good niches

There are plenty of online tools that can help you discover if your niche idea has great potential.

Remember the phrases from our Scottish terrier above?

Grab your own list of words and phrases for your niche. Plug them into this free keyword tool from Wordtracker.

Get an estimate of how many times people search for these phrases every day at the search engines.

Try all kinds of phrases about anything and everything if you like - to get a feel for the figures.

The paid version of Wordtracker will give you a lot more information, including what kind of competition you're up against.

My website building package includes a keyword "Brainstormer" - I plug in a phrase such as my "scottish terriers" topic, and it comes back with hundreds of associated keywords for me, along with the numbers I need to decide about my niche's potential.

Find out more about SBI! hosted websites.