How to Choose your First Niche Website

Previous Post: Choosing an Affiliate Marketing Project

If you are starting out in affiliate marketing, it is absolutely essential that you choose a topic that you are passionate about. Your first website should be viewed as a hobby, a learning tool which will help you understand what works and what doesn’t work. At times, it will feel as if you are making no progress as in the initial stages, you won’t rank on Google (don’t worry – you will soon if you follow our guides). One of the key success factors is going to be regularly supplying new content to your blog, which is why it is much easier to write about something that interests you than for something that doesn’t.

To help you choose your first subject, here is the process that I undertook at this stage of my affiliate marketing career.

Identify areas of interest

The first thing I did was think about what I do on a weekly or day-to-day basis and made a list of areas that interest me. Here are some of the things I do on a routine basis.

• Go to football on a Saturday
• Go to cinema with friends
• Watch TV
• Keep fit at the Gym
• Collect vintage race cars (models, not the real thing sadly!)
• Bird Watching

Some of those are made up, but lets use them as examples. First of all, we must consider what areas of expertise we can use to work on our blog.

Consider your area of expertise on the topic

Lets break the above examples down one at a time and consider what we can add to our chosen topic. At this stage, we are NOT thinking of how we are going to make money from our blog – this will follow naturally later if we produce good content.

• Go to football on a Saturday

As a supporter of my club who regularly attends matches, I am in a position to inform other, perhaps less dedicated fans of the latest news and events about my club. This was actually the topic I choose for my first blog. I wrote news articles (transfers, injuries, team news) as well as match previews and reports as well as opinion articles about some of the teams players, the managers, etc. This was of interest to fellow supporters and within two weeks, I was getting good traffic on my blog.

• Going to the cinema

If you are a regular cinema visitor, or you enjoy watching films on DVD, perhaps you might consider a site reviewing the latest cinema releases. Or perhaps you want to consider choosing a specific film and creating a fan site dedicated to this.

• Watching TV

Everyone has a favourite television programme. A site dedicated to a TV programme has good potential. If it is a reality show such as The Apprentice, a site with an opinion page about the candidates, updated regularly with latest news about each episode, the candidates, future Apprentice news, etc, could prove very popular with fans, just to get you thinking of a potential idea.

• Keep Fit at the Gym

If you have a knowledge about fitness (perhaps you are a personal trainer) why not develop a website around a particular type of fitness training. One site I saw recently which I was very impressed with was www.hundredpushups.com. It’s a great idea and is done very well – can you devise a similar strategy for a different muscle group or fitness training?

• Collecting Model Vintage Race Cars

If your passion is cars, you are not alone. Collectable items are a great way of making money online and if you have a knowledge about your subject matter, then you can turn it into profits very easily. Find a retailer who sells cars and then blog about each model, posting your reviews of the cars and give the extra detail and information that someone who lacks your passion for the subject can’t match.

• Bird Watching

If your passion is bird watching, or something similar such as hiking, camping, etc which takes you around the country, a blog focused on your topic can do very well. Give guides to the best beauty spots, recommended areas, travel information, hints & advice and reviews of essential equipment. It might not seem like a profitable idea, but if done right it will do a lot better than you think.

Summary

So as you can see, the most important thing you can do at this stage is choose something that you are interested in and can add your own unique knowledge to the subject. Once you have mastered the ropes and learned what works by doing your first project, you can choose more generic topics, but for now, stick to something you know a lot about, even if it seems like it won’t make you a penny. It will, but even if it doesn’t, sooner than you think you’ll be on page 1 of Google and ready to tackle a more ambitious project.

Next: In-depth guide to creating your first affiliate website