5 Tools to Find a Profitable Niche for Your Next Online Venture

Finding your niche is the most crucial step in starting an online venture, be it a blog or an ecommerce site.

How do you know you’ll love working on the site consistently? How do you know writing content for your site will be enjoyable (and not boring!)?

Here are a few tools to find your next profitable niche.

1. WebCEO: Find popular angles with lower competition

Keyword research tools can help you find a great niche by answering these questions:

• Is there enough interest in the topic? You don’t want something too saturated, but you need to make sure there is enough demand that you have an active and recurring audience.
• Are there interesting angles that haven’t been covered enough that would help you stand out? Nothing too narrow but something that will at least help you break into the niche (You can always expand later).

WebCEO is a cool keyword research tool that comes with many free features. One of my favorite options is an ability to see search volume and organic competition for each keyword it generates. Here are the metrics helping you pick a niche:

• KEI (i.e. “keyword effectiveness index”) represents keyword competition. It is calculated based on global searches for a keyword divided by its bid competition coefficient. The higher the KEI the better (meaning it has a high bid competition but fewer pages ranking in search for that term.
• Global/Local monthly searches represents the number of searches done from anywhere in the world or from your chosen area.
• Search trends column visualizes the keyword research volume over the last 12 months, so that you didn’t choose a keyword that has been steadily declining in popularity.

2. Keywords Everywhere: Discover Ideas When Searching Google

Perhaps you know all about chocolate. You love chocolate. But, you are not likely to build the next chocolate empire. However, maybe you can find a single niche within that empire to generate a business idea.

Rather than just aim for the entire market of chocolate eaters, what if you developed a product or site that crushed it in the health and happiness space for chocolate lovers. Digging deeper, you would then drill down through Google to look at all the things said about the benefits of eating chocolate. The benefits to your skin, your love life…. whatever.

If you don’t have anything of your own to sell, perhaps their products you could promote on this narrow, but popular niche in order to build or expand an existing business idea?

Use a Google Chrome/Firefox Add-On called ‘Keywords Everywhere‘. When you search for anything in Google, it will return a list of related ideas along with average monthly queries for Google.

• Install the App
• Search Google
• Take a look at the related results and monthly searches

The app shows the list of related keyword phrases every time you search. You can find a new niche without even looking! This tool also shows monthly search volume and cost-per-click both reflecting demand and competition:

• High search volume = high interest in the topic
• High cost-per-click = high competition (Plus in many cases, it may signal of too many commercial / high-budget sites competing to rank)

3. Text Optimizer: Find related concepts

If you have a website now, you can search for related and neighboring topics to expand to with your new project. The advantage of that approach is that you won’t have to research the new topic from scratch while being able to diversify what you are doing to a new niche.

Text Optimizer is a great way to discover new concepts that are relevant to your main keyword. It uses semantic analysis to cluster your term into underlying concepts. Simply scroll through the suggestions and add any to your wishlist to download and check later.

4. Buzzsumo: Discover what goes hot!

Buzzsumo will help you understand which type of content tends to go hot in the niche. This will give you some ideas whether you’ll feel comfortable and excited to be in the niche, build your community and write your content.

It also shows you “related topics” to help you expand your search or pick a more specific angle.

You can also filter results by content type to get more ideas: For example, you can see if there are cool expert interviews in that industry and if there’s an opportunity there.

5. Scapple: Use mind-mapping tools to formulate your angle

Finally, when you have brainstormed and validated a bunch of ideas and angles to focus on, use mind-mapping tools to formulate your final niche.

Scapple is a cool mind-mapping tool that supports both Mac and Windows and costs only $20.99 (and also comes with a free trial). It’s a great tool to work on different angles you can take when considering any niche.

More ideas

Solve problems you are dealing with yourself

I run a number of blogs in a variety of niches, but the one thing they all share in common is they were born from my personal experiences. I think too many times bloggers looking to make money get so focused on trying to chase down the next trend that shows monetization potential without really stopping to think if it’s an area they have experience, expertise, and passion. I keep a running list of experiences I have or problems I encounter that I think are ripe for blogging. Focus on what you like doing! Elevate has a cool guide on how to turn your hobbies into extra income.

Talk to other people

Colleagues, friends, your current readers and followers. It’s hard to generate new ideas in a vacuum. Sometimes, you have to step away from your desk if you want to see what lies beyond the horizon. So, talking with others about how their business is going, especially the obstacles they are facing, will often spark an idea for new opportunities.

Listen to yourself

Can you look at yourself in the mirror if marketing this niche? Believe it or not, ethics are important here. If you aren’t comfortable marketing this niche, avoid it. Another question to answer: Will you feel excited creating content? Interest and passion are just as important as knowledge and expertise. You don’t want to corner a topic you hate, and wind up resenting your own work. First Page offers a detailed guide on marketing your business for you to better understand what kind of tasks you are going to deal with when starting your online venture. Make sure you will be comfortable and efficient when performing those tasks in your chosen niche.

Take a look at what others are doing

The fastest and most effective way to identify a profitable niche is to find a profitable blog (or multiple successful blogs) and craft your niche from there. Similarly, if you are trying to validate a potential idea to check if it is profitable, check if there is another profitable website out there blogging about that exact topic. With so many websites and bloggers online, any niche that you can possibly think of has already been thought of before by someone else. Finding another blog that is successful gives you concrete proof that your niche works. If you cannot find another successful blog in your exact niche, you need to change your niche – it is either too narrow or too broad.

“Do what you love and the money will follow…” That’s the typical advice, but you can go broke following it. The correct rendition is “Find out how to turn something you love into a product or service others will love too.” Make sure enough people want what you have, then get it in front of them with an appealing message. That’s marketing.

About the Author

Ann Smarty is the Brand and Community manager at InternetMarketingNinjas.com as well as the founder of ViralContentBee.com. Ann has been into Internet Marketing for more than a decade, she is the former Editor-in-Chief of Search Engine Journal and contributor to prominent search and social blogs including Small Biz Trends and Mashable. Ann is also the frequent speaker at Pubcon and the host of regular Twitter chats #vcbuzz.