(The Entrepreneur Ridealong) Building An Audio Production Niche Site from $0 to $40,000: Niche Selection
Niche Selection
[This blog is a summarized and reorganized version of the screen share video, repurposed for clarity.]Hello everyone, this is Umar. In today’s video, we are going to talk about niche research.
This is my first video of the Empire Flippers ride-along series, where I’ll discuss what methods I use to find and validate niches.
These include using Amazon, Wikipedia, and brokerages as my starting point for niche research.
Using Amazon’s “best sellers” category
The first method I use to find niches is by looking through Amazon’s “best sellers” category.
You can get the product ideas from here and the idea for your niche ultimately. In my opinion, Amazon has the best navigation in the world when it comes to products.
So let’s suppose we are going into “kitchen and dining” as a whole niche, so we can see all of the products here, and if we go further down into “cookware”, you can see the types of cookware as well.
So just spend time exploring the Amazon “bestseller categories” to find the products that you can write content about.
One thing to mention is you mostly find cheap products here just because people purchase them the most. But there’s no harm in using this as a starting point to explore categories and find which one suits your interest well.
Using Wikipedia to research hobbies
Wikipedia has a whole list of hobbies. People spend a lot of money when it comes to, leisure activities or hobbies. So just find which ones suit your interest best and where you can tap into the opportunities.
We’ll get into the criteria for validating a niche later, but this is just to get you a lot of ideas for niches you can explore.
Using Empire Flippers and ChatGPT
This is a method that I use a lot. You go to marketplaces that sell online businesses, specifically niche websites. After all, these business owners have proven that these niches have made money, right?
So first is with Empire Flippers.
You can filter your search on the Empire Flippers marketplace to only show websites that are monetized with Amazon associates, and you can find a lot of listings here.
Now, you just can’t unlock these listings if you don’t have an Empire Flippers account and to open an account you need to show proof of funds and verify your identity.
That said, you can still learn a lot about successful niches without unlocking the listings.
As I’m looking at the different niches, I’ll enter this ChatGPT prompt to give me 10 examples of keywords I could use within a specific niche:
Prompt:
What could be some targeted keywords for {enter_monetization_method(s)} website in the {enter_niche_type} niches? The site features {type_of_articles}. Give me 10 examples.
Note: I’m looking for keywords, not the type of content I should cover in this niche.
I’d then enter each of the keywords into Google search and look for DR < 20 websites ranking with at least 30k domain traffic.
You can also regenerate responses on ChatGPT to give you new ideas and repeat this process to expand your research.
Using Google Search Operators
This method will allow you to find websites that are monetized using Amazon Associates, Mediavine, or AdThrive.
As you’re performing your competitor research enter this into Google Search:
intext:”is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for”
You can filter this down further by adjusting the timeframe.
Using Your Personal Experiences
This method was suggested by one of my friends, Oliver from IMG, Internet Marketing Goal Community.
So I asked him what methods he uses, and he just said, “I use my brain.”
We constantly have a lot of niche ideas around us.
While you are traveling, while you are working, even when you’re in your office. To help you brainstorm, look at the things around you and also the things that interest you.
Validating and Finalizing a Niche
Seasonality:
- First things first is the seasonality to check in Google Trends.
- I like to work in niches that are evergreen, like hobbies.
Personal reason:
- You will likely be building this website for years so it should be something you’re interested in or see enough potential in to stay consistent with.
Target audience:
- What problems are you going to solve for your target audience?
- What is the intent of the niche? (i.e. best product, how-to, step-by-step guides, forum answers, etc.).
Monetization:
- How will you monetize the website once you have traffic?
- Display ads, info products, affiliates, lead gen, etc.
- Think of how you could monetize even with little traffic (email list, Youtube channel, premium paid content, etc).
- If you are going to monetize the website using display ads (Google AdSense), then it’s better to tap into the niche where CPC is high for volume.
Competitor analysis:
- Are there websites in this niche doing really well? Specifically, this would mean sites that are less than two years old and generate over 50k monthly views.
- I also look for sites that have a DR of less than 20 and traffic increasing over the past two years.
Missed opportunities:
- What are some opportunities you can tap into that competitors are missing or you can have an edge?
- Look for high-demand and low-supply kind of niches. For example, there are a lot of websites about dogs/cats in pet niche but I haven’t seen many around chickens.
Topics:
- Have you found some nice-to-target keywords/topics in this niche?
- If you were to write a book in that niche, what topics would you want to cover?
Ease of content production:
- Unless it’s a requirement of the niche, try to avoid complex/technical topics and niches requiring subject-matter PhDs to write the content. These niches might include WordPress troubleshooting, heart disease, life insurance, etc.
- I am not saying these are bad niches, I personally don’t prefer those niches where I have to spend 2 months and lots of articles feedback just to train writers. I would rather spend my time searching for another niche.