Everything starts with niche selection:

What will your site be about?

Too many people make the mistake of looking for the “perfect niche” and end up spending way too much time on this part.

As a result, they can never get their blog up and running.

Whatever niche you may choose, you have to realize that you can make money in just about any topic.

So the first thing you have to decide is:

What are you interested in?

Now, let’s get started and choose our niche

There are many moving parts to niche selection:

Are there plenty of good keywords within the niche? Is it profitable? What is the CPClike? How competitive is it?

FORGET ALL THOSE THINGS FOR NOW.

Let’s just narrow down a list of your interests to start.

Ready? Let’s get started

I’m going to take you through a few sources you can use. These are my favorite sources to use when doing niche selection.

While you’re browsing the lists, just write down on a piece of paper or notepad app a few topics that spark your interest.

Try to keep it between 5 to 10.

Broad or targeted?

It doesn’t matter at this point. For instance you can be as broad as just saying“basketball” or you can be as targeted as saying “jumping higher for basketball players.”

You can be as broad as you like or narrow it down as much as you want. We’ll get to sorting out that part in the next step.

RedditList – Ever wonder what the hottest trending topics and sub- reddits are onReddit? This website shows you in real-time. Although a lot of Reddit’s subreddits are not niche-site topics, you’ll often come up with some great ideas browsing what’s trending.
Udemy – Udemy has high-quality courses on a variety of topics. If people are willing to purchase a course about it, chances are it’s a pretty popular topic. You’ll come up with a lot of great ideas browsing through their courses. Go through different categories and skim through what types of topics people are creating courses on. It’s a great way to spark ideas for your niche site.
Barnes & Noble – Just a giant list of book categories. One of my favorite places to find niche ideas is at the bookstore. The section you find yourself going to most often is probably going to be a good idea to start your niche site about since you have an interest in it. Well, this is probably the most extensive list of categories you’ll find without having toactually visit a bookstore.
Magazines – A huge list of magazines. If thereʼs a magazine about a subject itʼsusually a good sign thereʼs also a market with buyers, sellers, and advertisers.

The three big niches

There are 3 core markets, also known as the 3 core interests. These are BIG, so think of them like umbrellas for the niches youʼve been reading about.

The 3 niches are:

Wealth
Health
Relationships

These are very profitable markets because these are linked to the 3 top desires that motivate most people: to be healthy, wealthy and have good relationships.

The Health market is so valuable because there’s a high level of urgency, people are always looking to solve their health problems.

Money, whether weʼre talking about making money or saving money, is a powerful motivator for a lot of people and this market includes many profitable niches like real estate, debt, starting a business and many others.

Having good relationships is also high on the desires and niches like dating and romance keep growing in value.

Each of these big 3 has lots of sub-markets and niches inside them, like these:

Health > Nutrition > Nutrition for moms Health > Nutrition >Diets > Vegan diet

Wealth > Investing > Investing for entrepreneurs Wealth >Investing > Buying websites

Relationships > Dating > How to save your relationshipRelationship > Dating > Dating advice for men

By giving it a different angle or twist you can differentiate in the marketplace:

Health > Fitness > Energy > Entrepreneurs and CEOs

These niches are still growing

Each of these 3 markets is growing and expected to keep growing in the near future. For example, the market value for Health and Wellness in the United States is expected to reach a staggering 179 billion U.S. dollars by 2020. The health and wellness product market is buzzing with exciting new trends, many of which are related to food and nutrition.

For some business experts, niches that are part of these 3 markets are considered less risky for a beginner, even though thereʼs usually a lot of competition in them.

The Niche Book

The Niche Book is packed with more ideas than youʼll know what to do with. With 112 profitable niche ideas and over 300 keyword ideas, youʼll find new opportunities every time you scroll through it!

You can download your book from Training Materials. It used to be a paid resource, but I really donʼt want to see anyone stuck on the niche selection phase.

Do you have your list of niches?

In this lesson, I gave you a few sources where you can go to get your niche ideas and a big resource full of ideas. If you followed my instructions, you should have around 5 to 10niches noted down that are worth analyzing.

Donʼt get too picky here. If youʼre not sure if a certain niche is interesting or not, just jot it down anyways.

This is exactly how I start my niche selection when Iʼm about to start a new project.

It doesnʼt have to be a complicated process. Just going through a few different sources and jotting down a few that catch your eye is all thatʼs required.

Profitable niche

Imagine finding a niche, working months on it, only to discover itʼs unprofitable. Hereʼs my process to find the perfect niche every time.

The most FAQ I receive is niche selection related. No surprise there… itʼs where everything gets started. I hope this little, fun resource can help simplify your thought process. Because…. niche research isnʼt that hard!

Make a list… of niches

Niche ideas are everywhere. Seriously. Everywhere you look is a niche idea.
Not all of them will qualify to be good enough to build a site around, but make a list of anything you can think of. We can filter them down later.
I have a separate notepad on my desk where I just write whatever topic I have down when I see or think of one. When it comes down to build a site, all I need to do is start researching them.
Ideas lead to more ideas. Seed words lead to ideas you may never have thought of. For instance, I might just thoughtlessly write down McDonaldʼs as a niche idea. After a bit of research, I might land on a really cool idea like…… nutrition information, fast-food nutrition, how much fat is in X, how much caffeine is in X, where does X get their ingredients?…. etc, etc. See how far you can go with just a single seed idea? Pretty neat, huh?

Difference Between Niches & Keywords

One of the biggest problems I see is the confusion between niches and keywords. For instance… weight loss is a niche and how to lose weight quickly is a keyword.
You donʼt target niches as keywords because theyʼre too broad.
Another example: karate. Karate is a niche. You donʼt target the term, “karate.” Instead, youʼll find keywords within that niche such as how to teach yourself karate, how to kick higher, or karate training from home.
Letʼs go through another one: Letʼs say we thought of something like how to run faster. Thatʼs a keyword. In that case, your niche is running.

You have to determine these things during your niche research. What is your niche? What are your keywords?

Understand The meanings niche behind your keywords

One of the biggest mistakes I see during niche & keyword research is the failure to look at the MEANING behind searches.
What do I mean by the meaning behind a search? It means the TYPE of search result that the user is looking for.
Why is this important? Because Google thinks itʼs important.
For instance: If you wanted to target the travel niche and one of your keywords is travel to Rome, your article about the benefits of traveling to Rome is never going to rank… ever… for that keyword. Why? Because of the meaning behind the search. The search results are ALL going to be travel packages, hotel accommodations, flight information, etc. Thatʼs what Google interprets that search query to MEAN.
You have to understand this during your niche & keyword research. You have to be able to pivot and find INFORMATIONAL keywords like reasons to travel to Rome. In this case, your article about the 100 awesome reasons to travel to Rome has a chance at doing very well.

What exactly are we looking for during niche research?

Niche research doesnʼt have to be so complicated. Here are the steps Igo through…
FIRST: Make a list of a few different niches. These are possible niches we might like to target. They are the niches we will research.
SECOND: Research each niche by putting them into Googleʼs KeywordPlanner one by one.
WHAT ARE WE LOOKING FOR? Weʼre looking for niches that have big keywords. Keywords that we can make 50,000+ searches per month with using the Pillar Keywords strategy taught in the book.
REMEMBER THOUGH: We are not using niches as keywords. To find keywords, you will have to do some digging. Add in different seed words next to your niche and use your creativity.
FOR INSTANCE: If you had karate as a niche idea, donʼt just type in karate into the KW Planner. Type in other words alongside it like karate training, how to learn karate, learn karate, karate tips, online karate training, best karate, career karate.
Doing this will bring back whole different sets of suggestions, which can be used to identify some high search volume keywords.
WHATʼS NEXT? Once you do this, youʼll be able to filter down your initial list of niches. Only keep the ones that have some good high search volume keywords (ones that, combined with similar phrased keywords, can be turned into 50k+ searches per month).
WHAT IS A SIMILAR PHRASED KEYWORD? Keywords like karate training, karate training tips, how to learn karate, etc… These all mean the same thing. Theyʼre just worded differently. As a result, they will all be targeted through one single page. Therefore, you can combine them together. **Refer to the Pillar Keywords and Pillar Posts section of the book for more information on this.

And then what???

So by now, you have a filtered list of niches, along with their keywords.

Your initial list has been filtered down to only contain the ones that have

high search volume keywords we can target. But it requires one more step…

Niche low competition research

We want to take a look at what the competition looks like. So for each ofthose big keywords, run them through Google.
FIRST, skim the list… Are they names you recognize like Inc, Forbes,eHow, Huffington Post, etc?
SECOND, open up each page and check out their content. Is it indepth? Is it “great” content? OR is it full of fluff? Can it be improved? Can you make something better than blows it out of the water?
THIRD, run the sites through a backlink checker like Mozʼs Open SiteExplorer. Check their backlinks. Domain authority will usually be high for most sites ranked highly for most search results. Take a look at their page authority. Analyze how many links are pointed at the actual page.
For MOST search results, you will see that there are fewer than 20-30 links pointed at the actual page. Thatʼs a good sign. Sometimes, youʼll come across pages with hundreds of links pointed at them. Youʼll have a very difficult time outranking that.
Go through this process for each keyword in each of your niches. Findthe one with the best opportunity. That means a lot of keywords with high search volume, and not much competition. Thatʼs how you filter down a list of niches.
And thatʼs the last step. Once youʼve done this, itʼs time to decide whichniche you want to target. If a niche has made it to your final steps here without being filtered out, thereʼs potential in the niche. Itʼs time to stop the dilemma over which niche you should choose and just TAKE ACTION.

Niche keyword research