We are building a Make Money Online niche site right here on my blog and we will give it away to a reader in a future contest. If you missed the start of the project then you can read the links below to get up to speed.

• Project DIY Niche Site is Born
• Project DIY Niche Site Gets Underway
• Project DIY Niche Site Domain Acquired

When last we visited this project I had bid on my domain name and won the auction but I still was not the official owner of the domain. The way these auctions work, the original owner can still claim the domain and renew the registration if they so choose. If you win a bid on a domain then you have to wait approximately 7 days for it to “clear” and then you are the rightful owner.

My Domain Choice

The good news is that my domain cleared the process and I am now the rightful owner registered at GoDaddy. I would avoid GoDaddy hosting like the plague but for domain names they seem to be ok. When it comes to expired domains they are one of the biggest so they can be a necessary evil.

My time has been served and the domain now belongs to me free and clear. The domain name that I selected is http://paintballfun.info and the more astute readers will quickly surmise that it will be a paintball niche site. I plan to monetize via Adsense and the Ebay Affiliate program.

I should post a disclaimer here before we get started that you will see that paintball is not a niche I would recommend for a site that you primarily intend to monetize via Adsense. It will produce a pretty low EPC compared to other niches that you can find. I am willing to show you my process, but for the really high paying niche sites you are going to have to build your own.

I WILL share with you some quick and easy ways to find some top paying niches, but the rest is up to you. Paintball will still return an acceptable EPC and we should be able to make some more coin from the Ebay affiliate program.

How to find a Niche

A few fairly simple checks will tell you whether you have a good candidate or not. If you have an idea for a niche here is a simple process on how to investigate it.

If you are going to build niche sites I would recommend a keyword tool like Wordze but if you like you can use the free tool at Wordtracker.

The free tool works fine but is not even close to a paid service.

# Searches:

How often is your main keyword searched on a day? Obviously the higher the number the better BUT you have to balance the number of searches with the amount of competing sites. The fewer competing sites then the better your chances are at ranking for your keywords.

My main keyword is Paintball and that keyword (and it’s variants) produces just over 14k searches daily. I don’t know that there is an ideal number of searches per day but I like to see at least 300 as an absolute bare minimum. A more important factor though is the relationship between number of searches and number of competitors is critical.

Amount of Competition

You can have the most popular keyword on the planet but if everyone else on that planet has a similar niche site then it will be difficult for you to rank very high in the keyword serps. If you are planning on using PPC to drive traffic to your site then this isn’t as important but opens up an entirely different can of worms that we won’t discuss here.

I know everyone wants a black and white formula to follow but unfortunately it doesn’t exist. Depending on the niche that you select then you might be able to rank pretty well with 2 million sites or even 3 or 4. It is my experience and preference that you want to keep the number of competing sites to less than 1 million. The fewer the better as long as your # searches is still ok.

The process to find the number of competing sites you are up against is to do a Google Search on your keyword or phrase with quotes around it. This will give you the number of sites that have that exact phrase on it.

My Niche Stats

I did a search on my main keyword “paintball” only to find 63 million sites that have that exact keyword show up. You find the number in the upper right hand corner…take a look and see where it says 1-10 of 63,xxx,xxx.

This is way more than I’d like to see but I also know that most people aren’t going to search on just “paintball.” They are more likely to search on something like “paintball guns” or “best deal on paintball guns” or “where to buy paintball guns” or something similar.

These are called long tail keywords and if you can master them then you can drive a LOT of traffic to your sites.

Compare these search terms.

• Paintball – 63 million competing sites. Way too much.
• Paintball Gun – 3.9 million competing sites….Getting better.
• Paintball Guns – 3 million competing sites….slightly better.
• Where to Buy Paintball Guns – 865 sites….very “nichey.”
• Cool Paintball Guns – 1460 sites.
• Spyder Paintball Gun – 35k sites. (Spyder is a popular brand.)

See how as we increase the size of the keyword phrase the sites can drop dramatically. It might be tough to rank #1 for “paintball” but “Where to Buy Paintball Guns” doesn’t look so tough. Don’t get completely hung up on the # of competing sites as depending on the niche you may still be able to rank quite well even with 3 millions sites if you know a thing or two about SEO.

Search on your keyword and then go check out some of the sites on page 1 of your search, examine their SEO and see if you think you can beat them. You will be surprised at how many of these sites have horrible SEO, especially the “nichier” a site you find. The smaller sites that were not produced by a big company can be very easy to outrank for your keywords.

As an example…take a look at this site…it ranks #1 on Yahoo Search and the front page is…well….just look at it. I would expect the forums must be the main draw for the search engine results but the homepage still has the lorum ipsum text on it. Right Click and select View Source….see any keywords?

How to Find HIGH Paying Niches

I told you above that paintball isn’t the best choice for an adsense site and I mean it. Sorry but that’s what you get for a free niche site. What I will show you here is how you find a high paying niche and then the rest is up to you.

Keyword Competition - If you are going to be using Adsense then you want to take into consideration the EPC that your site will generate. You won’t know for sure what each click will earn but you can get a good idea by simply checking the competitiveness of your keywords and what the current estimated CPC is for your keywords.

You can do this using your Google Adwords tools. If you select the Traffic estimator tool and enter your keywords then it will show you an estimate of what advertisers are willing to pay for a click on that search term. You can see what this looks like in the picture. You can get much more in depth than this but for the purpose of this article you should get the idea of the process. You can master it later.

This is the area that this particular niche site is NOT a strong performer. The CPC for the main keyword of paintball is about 1.00 as you can see in the ad. This is an estimate only but if the CPC is 1.00 then you can expect .50 cents or so per click from Adsense at most. The actual EPC that your site will receive is very complex and is dynamic. It’s hard to predict what your actual EPC will be.

The beauty of this experiment is….we’ll see. We’ll know what it earns when we get to that point.

This isn’t too big a deal for me for this site as I intend to use Ebay affiliate income as well as other forms of monetization. If you are building your site for adsense then I would tailor it around keywords with higher keyword terms. If you take a look at say DUI Lawyer…the CPC goes from 1.00 to 18 dollars. Your Adsense earnings would likely be MUCH higher with a DUI site than say a paintball site.

This will take time and experience to know what pays and what doesn’t. No substitute for simply spending a few hours poking around this site.

If you’re thinking like a true niche siter..think about this….how nichey would DUI Lawyer Houston or DUI Lawyer Charlotte etc be? Could you dominate the rankings there? Is the lightbulb going off?

Conclusion

So in a nutshell the basic process to identify a potentially strong niche has 3 parts.

• Select a niche idea.
• Check # Searches Daily. (300 or better minimum)
• Check # Competing Sites. (1 million or less is better…stay away from anything over 3 or 4 million…that’s TOO much)
• Check competitiveness of your keywords. The higher the cost for PPC advertisers will usually mean a higher EPC for the niche site. The EPC is only important for Adsense income.

If your site passes these 4 simple checks then you probably have a reasonable candidate for a niche. This may seem too easy but it’s not. This IS the easy part.

Once you have a suitable niche then you need to identify an acceptable domain name. This will be the topic of my next article….we’ll see where and how you find expired domains and WHY an expired domain gives you an advantage over one that is newly created.

Until next time I would love to hear your initial thoughts or answer any questions you have.