David Fiske Affiliate marketing & web development musings from Fiske Towers

OK, here we go. This is where the learning starts.

Before we can do anything creative (or fun), we have to find an opportunity.

Opportunities exist everywhere and anywhere. They can be small opportunities or huge ones.

In terms of this project, we are looking for a niche.
 
A niche is a small area of the Internet that has potential for growth. For example, when eBay was set up, it was set up to service a niche. Who would have thought Internet auctions would have taken off. But they did and they have grown into a huge area of the Web.

So what niche should you be looking for and how easy are they to find?

Firstly, make a list of everything that you are interested in. This can be weird and wonderful but it needs to be almost a list of what you are most passionate about.

For me, my list goes like this:

• Computers
• Logistics (transportation including freight and passenger)
• Gadgets
• Food and drink
• Music

Taking Computers, this is a subject area. It is not a niche. I use PC's (I used a Mac a couple of times in 1996 along with a BBC computer. That was when floppy disks used to be 5.25 inches and floppy!) so I could focus on this. However if I want to create a good niche site, this is still too vague. So I need to shrink this topic down again.

When looking for a niche, it is best to make a list breaking down a subject into a niche. For Computers, mine looks like this:

• Computers
• PC's
• Peripherals
• Printers

I chose printers because I like taking photographs and printing them out. I could have chosen anything else. I could have gone for hardware or software. Webcams or speakers. All that matters is the subject at the bottom is something you are genuinely interested in.

So how good is printers as a niche? A search of Google for the phrase "printers" (without speech marks) reveals 120,000,000 results. Your one website will take on 120,000,000 other websites. In this case, it would be easier to find a needle in a haystack than it would be to find your website.

Let's narrow it down then. Printers could include computer printers but it could also include stationery printers and the like. I use an inkjet printer so let's focus on this. A search of Google for the phrase "inkjet printers" (without speech marks) reveals 3,940,000 results. That is much better.

We could go further an search by brand. A search of Google for the phrase "epson inkjet printers" (without speech marks) reveals 2,690,000 results.

It is about now you should be thinking about content. What would we write on an Epson inkjet printer website? Sure, we could write reviews about all the printers. But is that enough? Sites like Ciao and Review Centre offer reviews. They pay people to write reviews or they test the products themselves. Either way, it is probable that these sites can out rank you in search engine ratings.

So what else do you need?

Sticky content. It is not as bad as it sounds! It is content that keeps visitors coming back. It is content that visitors can trust, rely upon and can understand easily. This could be delivered through a forum, a price comparison site, a reviews site to rival sites like Ciao and Review Centre.

Forums can be as vague or as niche as you want them to be but they can take a long time and a lot of effort to get started and maintained. A example of a vague forum is SitePoint. They have content on just about every web design topic under the sun. However, at the time of presenting this lecture, they were the 279th in the Alexa rank (the smaller the number, the more popular your site is. This site is currently not listed in Alexa so we can safely assume the rank is lower than 2,000,000.

An example of a niche website is Hyundai Forums. It is a forum designed to allow Hyundai car owners the chance to talk to each other and help solve each others problems. This is niche because whereas SitePoint aim for an entire profession (of web designers), Hyundai Forums is looking for Hyundai car owners. It is not interested in Vauxhall car owners or Mercedes-Benz car owners. The Alexa rank for Hyundai Forums is 293,908 so it is no where near as popular as SitePoint but it is more targeted and specific.

Price Comparison is what it says. There are many Price Comparison sites on the net. Shopping.com and Kelkoo are the two most popular in my eyes. However, there is room in the market for more. I set on up over at DBFCS with an un-catchy name of UK Price Comparison Search. I am going to set something similar up with the demo site so the software that powers this will be revealed later.

Reviews sites we have gone through earlier.

So what is the point of this lecture then?

It is to get you thinking of a niche. You now know how to create a list of interests and you know how to drill down to a niche. You know to use Google to find out the competition.

One more point - Start off with a niche site and let it grow. Too much to do will bamboozle your visitors and eat into your time. Think of your website as a plant - it starts off small and grows and blossoms into something much bigger. Though without the seed (the idea), the pot soil and water (the ground work), it will never grow.

(I never thought I would use an analogy of a plant to represent a website!)

Here enduth the lesson.