Finding the right niche is the critical starting point for building your niche site and is the most important thing a successful niche site owner can do – and become skilled at. Thanks to a proliferation of junk blogs on sites like Warrior Forum and PLR Sites – many people new to niche site building make the mistake of choosing niches with impossible competition. When it comes to niches like Forex and just about anything Health and Weight Loss – not only is the competition extremely fierce – but the search listings are dominated by major players – not to mention about 10 million junk blogs with spun PLR Content on the internet.
Before you register a domain or type one word of content, you need to make sure that getting to page one is a distinct possibility because that is where the money is. But how do you tell if a niche is a good one or a bad one ?
There are a lot of measurements but the most reliable is to install a browser plugin called the MOZ Tool Bar which is available for Chrome and Firefox. Let’s show you how this works.
As you can see below MOZ shows the rankings for both domain authority ( DA ) and page authority ( PA ) for every website I am viewing in Google’s search results.
The rule all successful and legitimate niche site developers use is that to crack page one of Google – you should look for niches and keywords where most of the top listings show a PA below 30 and a DA below 40. For me to consider a niche – I want to see at least 3 sites in the top 10 with these numbers.
When I search for the popular junk blog term ” FOREX TRADING. ” I get the following results.
When you look at this screenshot from the Google search results – the PA and DA is extraordinarily high and even the best SEO firm spending tens of thousands of dollars on backlink building would have a hard time cracking page one. Expecting a start up niche blog even with excellent content will have a hard time making it to page 20 of Google – never mind page one. By the way – any of those junk blogs you see guys selling for $35 with garbage content is going to appear on page 7206 on Google.
Let’s take a look at another one here for the high search volume search term and popular spam blog niche for Stop Smoking. Again we see that the Page Authority is Impossibly High and a Complete Waste of Time for a Smart Niche Marketer.
Just to make sure everyone gets the point here – let’s take a look at Weight Loss, another popular junk PLR blog that for $25 you to can have a front row seat and be part of the spam blog industry. Once again you can see that the PA authority on the top listings are over 80 and these sites are major web properties. There is no way in hell you are going to rank on page one for this or any other supposed long tail keyword.
But let’s have a look at a niche where Spencer Hawes and his Niche Project focused on in 2013. Spencer’s goal was to create a niche website that would generate $500 a month within 6 months. He found the niche BEST SURVIVAL KNIFE and take a look at the metrics of the Domain and Page Authority below.
As you can see in this screen shot – the page and domain authorities are much, much lower and there fore much easier penetrable for a new niche site. This is even after dozens of copy cats entered the market trying to capitalize on his efforts.
What do you think would be easier to make money one – being on page 456 for a high volume search term like Forex trading or position number 2 on page one of Google for a term with moderate search volume ?
By the way – Spencer made it all the way to $649.78 on Amazon alone and no Adsense income – see his screen shot and details here
Keep in mind that this is just one of the ways to determine if a niche is the right one for focusing on and no single method is going to be 100% accurate including the many popular software titles on the internet.