Choosing A Niche For Adsense

September 2nd, 2008 by Scot, under Adsense, Making Money. 13 Comments

So, now that you’ve decided to take this journey with me your first step is to choose a niche that you will be developing. There are a few different types of niches and several ways to choose a niche in each type.

Choosing a Hot Niche

A hot niche is what I like to call a niche that has stories in the news or is hot on the press. These niches are easy to rank for if you get them early enough and already have a network of sites in place to promote them (which we will get in to a bit later) but for the long-term they won’t do you a whole lot of good. If your desire is to continue making sites that become popular quickly and die just as quickly day-in and day-out, this is the type of niche for you to get in to.

You can start your hot niche search with of course the main-stream news sites. For instance, CNN has a list of hot topics that updates daily. There are also several other areas depending on the type of niche you want to get in to, to find new ideas. Here are a few sites to check out:

AOL Hot Searches
EBay Hot Categories Dynamic Report
EBay Pulse
EBay Seller Central - What’s Hot
Yahoo! Buzz
43 Things - Today’s Most Popular Goals
Google Trends
Trending and Tracking The Blogosphere - SEO Book

Once you have a few topics, subscribe to updates with keyword in Google News so you can constantly ping updates in that niche. Hot niches constantly need immediate updating to stay on top of SERPS.

Choosing an Expandable Niche

An Expandable Niche is one that has lots of room for expansion and micro-niches inside of itself. These are my favorite type of areas to hit because I would personally rather build my sites up over a long period of time and have them rank for years rather than hit hot topics every single day to see corporate sites knock me out of Search Engine Rankings within a weeks time. These kind of sites are more of a property than Hot Niche sites that only last shortly.

To get an idea of what you are going to create your site about, get out a tablet and a pen and start brainstorming a few subjects to begin with. Think of several general topics and write them down to begin your expansion. For my first site I am going to be using Cooking.

Cooking is a good choice because there are so many different areas inside of cooking that can be exploited. And this is the same for any other niche. I suggest you consider a niche you’re interested in and use the same techniques. So for the subject cooking this would roughly be my thought process on expanding the niche:

Each of these sub-niches can be distilled down to several other sub-niches. Each of those sub-niches can be distilled to smaller, micro-niches. So for instance, Food is a sub-niche of Cooking. Recipes is a sub-niche of Food, and Restaurant Recipes is a sub-niche of Recipes. Arby’s Restaurant Recipes is a sub-niche of Restaurant Recipes and Arby’s Horsey Sauce Recipes is a mico-niche of Arby’s Restaurant Recipes.

Once you have a pretty good idea of the direction you want to go, enter your notes in to Notepad or I personally like to create an org-chart so I can see visual direction of where I’m going. You can find a few places to create an Adsense mindmap here. I will save you some time and recommend MindMeister.

If you have any questions please do not hesitate to send me an e-mail with the contact form or just drop a comment and I’ll be happy to reply. Once you have your niche nailed down I’m going to be showing you how to find what is getting traffic and what is not getting traffic inside of that niche, and how that will better help you determine what direction to take it.

Most things you will read will recommend you do traffic research first, but I believe you can get traffic and rank inside of any niche with sub-niches and micro-niches and it’s more important to choose a topic you’re passionate about before even looking at traffic stats. Don’t forget to subscribe to updates if you haven’t already!