If you’re feeling overwhelmed trying to choose a niche, don’t worry – it’s possible to find a profitable niche with little competition. I know that most “experts” within the affiliate marketing field will tell you to choose an evergreen niche like health, weight loss or making money online because those are the most popular and in-demand niches (and they have some serious potential to be extremely profitable).
But with that popularity also comes competition. Don’t get me wrong, it’s possible to break in these niches and find your place if you go about it the right way. However, if you aren’t interested in them or want to enter an area with less competition, I will demonstrate how that is totally possible!
Here’s what you need to get started:
These are the tools I use within my research:
- An idea for a niche, or a few ideas. Don’t worry if it may be too broad because your research will help narrow down more specific sub-niches
- Google Trends
- Ubersuggest
- Jaaxy
The first thing you’ll need to do is choose a niche. I’m going to use bonsai trees as an example, but you can follow the process with any niche you want. Keep in mind if you use a more competitive niche like weight loss, narrowing it down to a specific sub-niche is very important.
Access an entire platform of training, tools and web hosting for creating niche websites
Bonsai Tree Niche Research
If you’re interested in bonsai trees, it’s a good choice – it’s pretty narrow, not highly competitive and there’s still a decent market for information and products within the niche. I will show you the entire process I used to reveal this information. Follow this process for any niche!
Step 1: Check the trend
Go to https://trends.google.com/trends/
Something I like to do is check the searches in Google Trends.
This will tell you a few things:
- If the niche is searched enough in Google to even register on the graph (if the search volume is too low, it won’t produce a graph)
- How consistently it gets searched (I like to check it out over the past 5 years) certain things may be a fad that is not longer popular
- If it’s a seasonal trend
This graph tells us that the popularity has remained relatively consistent throughout the seasons and years, despite the highs and lows.
Step 2: Do a Google search
Google can actually give you a lot of additional ideas for each keyword you enter. The first way is to take advantage of Google Auto Complete to get ideas on popular related searches. Most people know this exists, but don’t realize its true potential.
Here is an example:
Simply typing the letter “a” in front of bonsai trees reveals a bunch more search terms within the niche. You can go through each letter of the alphabet and note the ones you would want to write about.
You can also scroll down to the bottom of the search page to get additional ideas as well:
This can give you more ideas for commonly searched terms within the niche, and often times can give you ideas for sub-niches if you wanted to drill it down even further.
Bonsai tree care or bonsai trees for beginners are sub-niches within the niche of bonsai trees.
Step 3 – Use Ubersuggest
You can find it at https://ubersuggest.io/
Ubersuggest is an entirely free tool and is great for getting more niche ideas or keyword topics for your niche. You can use this either instead or in addition to the Google results. You will find many similar suggestions but Google’s results will include more long tail suggestions than ubersuggest.
Here are some of the suggestions when I typed in “bonsai tree” into the search bar:
Step 4 – Use a keyword tool for more specific search volume/competition results. I use Jaaxy!
To follow along, you can access Jaaxy here.
Note: Jaaxy is actually included with the Wealthy Affiliate membership – which is the training platform that taught me how to create niche websites and monetize them (through affilaite marketing). You can read more about Wealthy Affiliate here!
All the previous steps are great for finding out if a niche is getting enough searches, and what search terms people are looking for within it. However, if you want to get more specific with the volume of searches as well as what sort of competition you’re looking at, a keyword tool like Jaaxy will be a tremendous help.
It’s A LOT easier to be successful within a niche that doesn’t have fierce competition, but you also need your niche to have a decent enough search volume that you will actually have people interested in your site. The trick is finding the balance.
Here’s a quick search result within Jaaxy for bonsai trees:
This is actually a pretty decent little niche because the searches are high while competition remains very low. Within Jaaxy, anything under 200 in the QSR column is good, and actually, every suggested result has very little competition. For the search volume (first column results) anything over 100 is good, but obviously the higher, the better.
You can also use Jaaxy to find additional search suggestions:
You can click on any of these results to easily find their search volume and competition. I clicked on “juniper bonsai tree” to get the results:
This reveals an entirely new set of keywords on bonsai trees and more specific juniper bonsai trees. If you use Jaaxy, you can actually eliminate a lot of the steps above and do all your research within the program since you can find additional keywords, search volume, and competition all in the same place. Although I do still like to use Google’s auto-suggest because it does pull up some very unique terms I would never have thought of, and you can get the most diverse set of keywords when you use multiple sources.
Step 5: Check the first page of Google search results
Now, this is another thing I like to do before I decide if the niche is worth it or not. It can give you more insight into the competition you are facing even beyond what other data can show.
Just do a Google for “Bonsai tree care”, or another popular search term you find with the research in the previous steps. This will give you an idea of your competition within the niche. Just doing a quick search I notice there’s 3 “big guys” in the results:
bonsaiempire.com
bonsaiboy.com
bonsaitreegardner.net
Just take a look at the sites and decide if you can grow your site to eventually be better than them. The last site, bonsaitreegardner.net looks like it wouldn’t be too hard to outrank with a decent effort. The other two would be more difficult, but not impossible given time.
Another thing I notice is the first result is a YouTube video, so starting a video channel in addition to a blog would be a really great idea to outrank your competition and grow your audience.
So then what? How do you know it’ll be profitable?
- There’s an interested audience (if there’s a good amount of search volume within the niche, there is an interest)
- You are trustworthy and helpful, offer a unique perspective
- There are products/programs within the niche you can sell via affiliate marketing (or you have your own products to sell)
With bonsai trees, people are obviously interested in buying bonsai trees and their accessories, so the products are pretty self-explanatory. Not all niches may have such obvious products so you may have to think outside the box in some cases.
The higher priced the products you are selling, the more money you will make per sale and the less sales you have to make to earn the same amount of money. However keep in mind if you sell a $1,000 product that no one buys, you will make nothing. If you sell a $50 product 1,000 times, you will make a lot more. So your ability to be found and sell the product to others is another factor to take into consideration.
Go onward and start your niche site!
Need to start your niche site? Check out Wealthy Affiliate (full review), I can’t recommend them enough for beginners interested in affiliate marketing!
If you’d like more examples of researched niches, check out this list I wrote.
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