Niche or no Niche? That is the question!

[eurospurs]

Hi all!

I'm new here so I thought I'd post my dilemma up!

I've been researching niches, now I know that the super hot niches are taken up by the pros in a couple days of knowing them... however I still think it would be a good idea to look at niches that are still hot and still have enough interest in them to make the site profit.

Now my thoughts are as follows:

1. Niches to me in general sound like they won't attract enough visitors as a comparison shopping site where you have everything you could ever want under one roof so to speak. So traffic-wise would you receive many visitors in a particular niche?

2. Are niches profitable enough?! I know this is impossible to say as it would depends on various factors such as site design/seo/adwords etc. The reason I ask is surely you would have less visitors than a general site so the amount of people that would actual buy through merchants on your site would be far less.

Now I know that if someone is interest in a particular niche then there more likely going to be a repeat visitor and that you wouldn't have so much competition on Google.

This post probaly sounds daft and doesn't make sense, but I'm in a rush to get home in the "9-5"!!!!.

Kind Regards,

Steve

[pricethat]

I would not worry about it too much, there are people that will buy anything, even rubber chickens. Yes you will get less traffic but then it will not cost you anything or much to get higher up the engines to get those customers. You could probably have 50 niche sites if you worked hard all bringing in a small amount rather than 1 big one that brings in nothing.

The one thing i think you have to work on with niche sites is actually making them really worthwhile for people. Articles, news a community sense of spirit perhaps. I have seen many "niche" sites that were nothing more than links which is not what niche is all about really.

If you spend your whole spare time on one subject each and every one of us in here would be more qualified in that subject than anyone else, combine that with a little commercial common sense and any project can do well.

You have to understand that online use will esculate far more than it is now so your potentiol is increasing all the time and there are millions of people in this one country alone.

I think the biggest thing people get side tracked with is greed rather than the desire to build something people really really want. You can work on monetisation after you know you have the traffic to support and perhaps the lack of serious hard hitting commercial stuff will help build your community as well.

Take this forum as an example, nothing more than a cheap forum script to begin with just sat here. Slowly it is now the number 1 resource for this kind of thing. Remembering how old it is Matt could not of been more niche if he tried at the time.

[eurospurs]

Thanks pricethat, much appreciated.

Now this has got me thinking (Oh dear!) before I wrote that post I had a good indication of what I was going to achieve in my particular niche ie. good designed site, news, forum, events, etc. etc. Basically a full monty portal site of my niche and build on that to include a 'shop' type thing when the traffic builds up and of course with the forum taking off and having a 1000+ memberlist to send out mailshots to etc.

Now your post about having around 50 niche websites all being small got me thinking...

1. How big should one of this mini sites be? I mean sure you'd have to have a few pages to get the content, but would this really bring the traffic?

2. How would I manage 50 websites? I could manage a few I'm sure but with this many I'd struggle to keep track on adword campaigns, if any of them needed updating etc.

I know 50 was a ballpark figure, I'm just using it in my examples here.



This has sort of thrown me off slightly, mainly due to my own ignorance no doubt!

Hope you can help.

Cheers

Steve

[Aceicol]

Originally Posted by pricethat I would not worry about it too much, there are people that will buy anything, even rubber chickens. Yes you will get less traffic but then it will not cost you anything or much to get higher up the engines to get those customers. You could probably have 50 niche sites if you worked hard all bringing in a small amount rather than 1 big one that brings in nothing.

To continue that point I know a few people who have lots of small websites generating little bits of money each month, nothing big but collectively they earn a bit. It's a case of all your eggs in one basket, if you have one large sites and Google change their algo, you could be left with nothing, whereas in the small ones you'd more than likely still have a decent income coming in from dew sites.

[pricethat]

I did not just mean to make 50 sites, 1 site done exceptionally well is better than 50 crap sites, but i was just illustrating if you pick a niche and write good content people want to read then making 50 sites all with good content and really what people want is probably easier, faster, less investment, less skill totally combined than it is to go after something like "credit cards" for example.

Stick to making one site now for your niche, i think you have a lot of learning to do before you move on but you can look at making even more niche sites as you get more experienced with what to do with them.

Regards