The first step to creating a profitable website is to pick a niche.
A “niche” is a specific topic that you want to write about on your website. There are literally hundreds of thousands of different niches to choose from. For example, here are three different niches that my websites fall in:
| Site | Niche |
|---|---|
| Wander Cincinnati | Local travel |
| Statology | Statistics education |
| Four Pillar Freedom | Personal finance |
When choosing a niche, I recommend using this three-step process:
1. Make a list of topics you’re interested in.
Your website should be based around a niche you’re actually interested in. It’s simply easier to write articles about a topic you actually find interesting. Here’s what that list might look like for me:
- Coffee
- Lifting weights
- Meditation
- Gardening
- Playing the keyboard
- Playing basketball
- Swimming
- Reading books
- Statistics
- Economics
- Mathematics
- Finance
- Architecture
- Philosophy
- Movies
- R&B and hip hop music
- Living in Cincinnati
When creating this list yourself, think about things you naturally do in your free time or topics that you find yourself researching and learning just for fun.
2. You should possess knowledge about the niche.
I enjoy collecting plants and succulents, but I don’t actually know much about best practices for taking care of plants, the difference between different types of plants, which plants grow best in different environments, etc. It wouldn’t be a good idea for me to start a website about plants because I simply don’t have en edge in terms of my knowledge about the topic.
With this in mind, narrow down the list that you made in the previous list to niches where you actually possess knowledge. Here’s what that looks like for me:
- Statistics
- Economics
- Mathematics
- Finance
- Living in Cincinnati
3. The search volume to competition ratio should be appealing.
Once you have a list of niches you’re interested in and possess knowledge in, the final thing you want to consider is how appealing this niche is in terms of search volume and competition.
Search volume: How many people are actually searching for topics related to your niche?
Competition: How many websites are already writing about the topics in your niche?
The ideal niche is one that has fairly high search volume, yet fairly low competition. To gauge the search volume and competition for a certain niche, I recommend typing in some popular topics around your niche into Neil Patel’s free Ubersuggest keyword tool.
For example, if I was interested in starting a website about living in Cincinnati then I might type in the phrase “living in Cincinnati” and check out the search volume and difficulty metrics:
We see that this particular phrase gets searched 720 times per month and the difficulty is 15.
Note: Difficulty is measured on a scale of 0 to 100.
When I look for popular search phrases about a certain niche, I like to see a search volume of at least 300 and a difficult below 25. This indicates that a search phrase like “living in Cincinnati” gets decent volume but has low competition.
Fun Fact: When I created my site Wander Cincinnati, this is one of the phrases that I actually researched before creating the site. I saw that this was a good phrase to go after and as of this writing, Wander Cincinnati shows up as the top search result for the phrase “living in Cincinnati.”
Another example of a phrase I might search for is “things to do in Cincinnati” and check out the metrics on that as well:
The volume to difficulty ratio on this particular phrase is excellent. Tons of people are searching for this exact phrase and the difficulty is quite low.
I could then repeat this process for different phrases in my niche and get an idea of the general volume to difficulty ratio for common phrases. Some other phrases I actually checked out included:
- “Best restaurants in Cincinnati”
- “Best neighborhoods in Cincinnati”
- “Best parks in Cincinnati”
- “Things to do at night in Cincinnati”
Once I saw that there was decent search volume for these phrases and fairly low difficulty, I made the decision to move forward with Wander Cincinnati.
You can perform this exact process with any niche you’re considering as well.
Note: You can also perform this research using ahrefs.com. Check out this tutorial on how to use ahrefs. Then check out this video where I walk through a live example of how to use ahrefs to perform keyword research for a brand new site.
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