(The Entrepreneur Ridealong) Building A Niche Travel Site From $0 to $350,000: Niche Selection
Updated on September 6, 2023
Niche Selection
Can you guide us through the key factors you considered when choosing your niche?
Generally, I consider monetization and competition, so I like to see if it actually is competitive and if the sites are actually doing well.
Do you have any beliefs about choosing niches that are uncommon in the SEO community?
Not really. A lot of people try to stay out of your money/your life and health niches, which I kind of see the appeal of doing because Google is a bit strict on it. But if you’re building a site properly and if you’re putting your name on or you’re putting a persona as you’re building it up and actually spending time and doing outreach and doing social media, I think you can rank and do well in any niche as long as you put the effort into rank.
If you initially chose one niche and then decided on another niche, can you share in more detail what made you first consider that first niche and what made you change your mind?
I actually chose a niche that I thought was gonna do really well because the monetization was good. It had lead gen, a bit of affiliates, and ads as well, so it was like a trifecta. But when I dived a bit closer into the niche, it turned out that it was more of a sub-niche and a lot of the main top-level term niches, so it was a sub-niche in construction. It turns out a lot of the normal home niches and construction niches were all taking the traffic. There weren’t really too many sub niche sites doing very well so that made me turn against this idea and actually choose the travel niche.
I want to make sure there are other niche sites actually in the SERPs and ranking for the keywords, and I want to try and find monetizations to make sure it’s not just ads or it’s not just relying on Amazon affiliates. I want to diversify.
What niches or factors about niches do you try to avoid and why?
I actually do try to stay away from your money/your life and health sort of stuff, just because I don’t want to spend the time building up an asset like that. I’d rather just build up a regular site talking about other stuff like construction or travel.
Building up your money/your life niche sites can be done but the amount of extra effort to build your authority is just too much. When you can compare it to other sites, it’s kind of pointless.
If I actually wanted to get into finance, I wouldn’t see it as an issue. It’s just the extra time to kind of build it as a side project. I have too many websites to dedicate that sort of time to. I’d rather build more websites and broaden my portfolio than try and narrow it down into one.
When you choose a niche, can you share more about how you perform the research to validate the niche? For example, perhaps share what tools you like using the most for certain parts of the process such as audience research, keyword research, etc.
When picking the niche, what I like to do is totally map it out. So I want to put all the people I can find into a spreadsheet. So when I validate a niche, what I do is put all the competitors into one massive sheet, and then I put their DR. And then do traffic divided by DR to give me a little score so I know how well the websites are doing compared to their DR. So if a website’s got a DR of like 60, we’ve only got like a thousand traffic a month or less than that, I know it’s going to be a spammy website or something’s wrong.
So you can find using the data interest in sites that are doing quite well with a low DR or sites which are not performing with a high DR. So basically I just map out the entire industry, spend time looking through different keywords like “best” or “house” and then put everything into a sheet and just map out all the data and that helps me.
I also do keyword research as well because once I’ve got a massive list, I export all the competitors’ keywords and then change it to under five keyword difficulty then over 10, over a hundred traffic just to start with. And then that gives you a massive list of keywords just after doing your niche selection, which takes a bit of time. The Google sheet runs very slow when you do it because you get thousands of keywords. But, if you’re building a site from scratch, it definitely helps find the selection of all your niche, all your main competitors, and all the low-ranking keywords. They’re the ones you need to target.
So they’re pretty much the fundamental things to do for niche selection. And then that kind of goes into keyword research as well.
Cheers.
