How I Select My Niches
I think its better to start at the beginning. Before I build a webpage, write articles and start building back-links, I first have to decide what the site is going to be about. In other words, I have to decide my target niche. At the moment I have eight sites, each focusing on a different topic. In no particular order these niches include gambling on tennis, how to train abdominal muscles, home maintenance, the wonders of the world and a type of medical calculator.
I started most of these sites because I thought there was good potential to monetize using Adsense, but that’s not the case for every site. For example, my ‘gambling on tennis’ site, isn’t really in a great niche for Adsense. In actual fact I built this website after reading 4-Hour Work Week by Tim Ferris (affiliate link). I had been developing a “contrarian tennis trading system” on Betfair, and was starting to have reasonable success. The system itself works pretty well and I’m confident that someone with a bit of time and good concentration would be able to make a lot of money by following it. The actual trading itself didn’t work out too well for me, and I’ll explain why.
Trading on tennis means sitting down, watching a tennis match and placing bets, or “trades”, after certain events take place during matches. It takes a lot of concentration as individual points move very quickly, and it only takes a matter of seconds to swing entire matches in favour of one player or another. This isn’t so much of a problem if you can trade matches in your own time, however due to the scheduling of matches, a lot of tennis is played during the day, when most of us are at work. In developing and testing the system I found myself spending far too much time streaming tennis matches over the internet during my working hours, opening and closing trading positions at my desk.
Unfortunately my problems arose on those occasions when the boss happened to walk by during an important moment in the match. I’d be forced to switch my screen to Microsoft Excel, thereby missing a trade and ending up out of pocket! I eventually decided to stop trading altogether as I wasn’t able to concentrate.
This didn’t mean I gave up on the tennis trading system altogether. As I said before I read 4-Hour Work Week by Tim Ferris, and decided that my ”contrarian tennis trading system” would make a good muse. I believed my best opportunity to profit from the tennis trading system would be to write an sell an ebook which would explain all of the steps to follow when trading, and – more importantly – how to select which matches to trade.
I had the niche, I just needed to choose a name for the system. When targeting a niche for Adsense, I have found the simplest and best method of choosing my keywords is by using the Keyword Tool from Google Adwords. This tool is designed for advertisers who wish to place their ads on Google, so it stands to reason that if advertisers choose their keywords using this tool, the people who are building sites specifically as a means of generating revenue from those adverts should also use it to select their niche. I will write a post on this as part two on the subject of how I select my niches, but for now I’ll explain how I chose a name for the tennis betting system.
So I ran a search on Adwords to make sure that people were interested in betting on tennis. To search, type a few terms related to your niche idea into the words or phrase box, select the country and language you are targeting and check ‘exact’ match type to ensure accurate results.
As you can see from the screenshot of the results below, there are a good number of people who search for either tennis trading or some related term, which shows two things, that a) the niche is very specialsed and b) there are potential clients
After my search I decided wanted to use the phrase “tennis trading” in the URL as that was really what I would be marketing the product as, and it had a number of direct and indirect searches on Google. I registered my domain name (profitracquettennistrading.com) and added it to my hosting package. At the moment the site, the ebook and the membership format are all under construction and should launch for the start of the new tennis season.
A long winded story, but I chose the muse as it was something I was interested in, and after I ran a few checks with Google, I felt there was a market for the product. I will keep you updated with the success (or failure!) of this site in the future.