DAY 1: Analyzing The Viability Of Your Niche

In the next 3 weeks, there will be a guest post series about Search Engine Optimization and how you can improve and optimize any niche website. It’s been a huge topic from within my membership course and it’s something that can be easily outsourced. So let’s get started…

“Money isn’t the most important thing in life, but it’s reasonably close to oxygen on the ‘gotta have it’ scale.”

– Zig Ziglar -

Learn how to pick your own battles.

This may sound like a joke for many of you, but this is the primary reason why many sites or online businesses fail online.

Having a niche marketing strategy, that is focusing on a specific topic rather than a broad query allows you to perform better as you are competing with much less other sites on internet.

Your visitors will be much more targeted and thus will convert better.

Getting yourself into an overly competitive market is a recipe for disaster and a way to ensure that your site will never be found.

On the other hand, entering into an overly niche market may result in insufficient traffic volume to monetize your site or store and ensure your survival.

Remember, because you think you got a great idea doesn’t mean that other people share your feelings!

In the end, it’s all about money

Depending on the nature of your site, the way you plan to monetize your efforts may differ from site to site.

However, as a general rule, you’ll be monetizing your site through one or more of those following methods:

• Ecommerce– selling products, be it physical or digital.
• Affiliate Marketing– selling other people’s product and getting a commission for it.
• Advertising– selling ads space on your site.
• Services– selling your skills.

Regardless of the method you intend to use, you should have a number in mind as to how much money minimum you expect or you need to make out of your website for it to be worth your time.

I won’t elaborate much on it as this goes with all the information you should have gathered already in your business plan. You have one right? It would be foolish to start a business without one!

Ok, for the sake of illustration, I’m going to say that I want to start a new business online selling “nail polish”.

After my estimation, I also know that I’ll be making $1 profit for each bottle sold, and based on the marketing strategy I have established, I estimate that I’ll be able to sell 2 bottles to each customer in average.

Now, based on my expenses and personal needs, I want $2,000 of net profit per month to make this project worth.

Converting Financial Needs Into Traffic Volume

The average conversion rate online is 1-2%, if you do better, good for you, but for our example, we are going to base ourselves on a 2% conversion rate.

Based on the data we have, I need 1,000 orders to be placed on my store each month.

With a 2% conversion rate, that would bring my required traffic volume to be 50,000 visitors each month, or about 1,700 daily.

Analytics in SEO have demonstrated that a #1 in Google will get you about 30% of the traffic volume for that specific keyword, and having #1 and #2 listings (double or indented listing), would get you about 70% of the traffic volume for that search term.

Although getting a #1 listing is our goal, it’s really not easy to obtain, but even so, it would mean that we’d be getting only 30% of the traffic volume for a given keyword, which for us lead to the conclusion that the main keyword we should be targeting needs a search volume of at least 170,000 to be viable for us at the very least.

Just to be safe, I would rather be looking into the 340,000 (double than the estimated) search volume at least for our example.

It’s much safer to be in niche that delivers traffic beyond our expectations, rather than below.

Checking the Analytics

In order to check the search volume for my niche “nail polish” I will be using a free tool called Google AdWords Keyword Tool (another reason to consider SEM part of SEO).

This will provide valuable information as to which keywords are searched on Google and what is the search volume for these searches.

Another great point is that you have many filtering capabilities to target your market effectively including geographic location.

In our example, I’m only interested to sell to people living in the USA.

The process is very simple, just type the search term you want to analyze, enter the captcha code and click “Get Keyword Ideas”.

A list of search results will be populated with different variations based on the popularity of a search term and the relevancy to your search query.

As for our niche keyword, we can see a search volume of 1,000,000 – this passes our test.

Although this passes our initial niche test, this search term is still extremely broad and may not reflect accurately the market we are targeting.

Nonetheless, it’s good to keep an open mind as it will give us some room to expand further down the road as our business will do better.

We’ll learn more on how to qualify our keywords in a later lesson.

Exercise

Whether you are starting a brand new site or currently are running one, check your analytics and ensure that your niche is viable for your business and your expectations (those may be higher than your business needs).

Make sure that your niche is not too broad like “gift” where the competition is unimaginable, or too narrow like “traditional chinese gift” which may not have enough search volume to monetize your work. Keep in mind that because today you are selling “Chinese gifts”, doesn’t mean that later on you may not want to sell “Japanese gifts” or “Korean gifts”; think about that and don’t just corner yourself.

If during this exercise you realize that your niche is wrong, just scale it up or down a bit (if you don’t know yet how to do that, don’t worry, in the next few days, you’ll know how to do all of that on your own).

If you still have questions, don’t hesitate to share your thoughts in the comments below.