Website Niche

How to choose a topic for your website or online business

Figuring out your website niche first before you actually start the website will help you determine if a topic will be profitable to begin with. It will also help you in choosing domain names and planning your website.

Most of it is really about doing keyword research and then learning to 'spin' the words into a niche or concept for your website.

The best place to start though is with what you are passionate about. Make a list of the top three things that you really love talking about, doing or engaging in. Think about hobbies, places you like to travel to, things you know about in your line of work...what makes you get out of bed in the morning because you can't wait to start doing it or talking about it?

Start with the keyword research section and just start looking at what people are searching for in relation to your topics. Just start from a perspective of gathering data. Don't let anything get you discouraged or overwhelmed at this stage of the game. Start looking for products on Amazon.com and see what books show up on their best sellers list even in the other categories besides books. Cameras, computers, games...

Visit ebay.com and do the same thing- look at what people are selling and what things are selling for. It isn't about opening an ebay store in itself but you are just looking at what people are selling and buying.

Take a look at this popular website used by online marketers - www.ezinearticles.com. Do a general search for your interests and look at the bottom of the first article that comes up and you will find a list of the most popular articles on that website. This site is really used to promote websites and products.

You can also take a look at Google Trends search engine and see what things are popular and how they have changed through time.

After you get some ideas of what people are searching for do just a regular search at Google and Yahoo! to see how many pages of results are showing up for those specific keywords. If there are millions and millions of results the best guess is that you will have a hard time getting to the first page of search results for those keywords.

Analyzing the keywords is really the hard part. It takes a lot of time doing it this way but it can give you some ideas and just get your ideas flowing. When you get really serious you can use the Brainstormit! software that comes with Site Build it! to get further data on your keywords so that you can choose a website niche for your online business. You can see a little bit about how it works in this quick tour (see the second slide).

But keep playing around...Find what you are passionate about and figure out how to spin it around into a website. Even if the idea doesn't show much potential- your passion will carry you through. You will just have to put more time into it than you would usually do.

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