Previous Ask Marc sessions have shown that one of the most common pimp my site question relates to niche selection: what niche should I go into? Normally, I’d go into the wherever-you’re-most-comfortable tirade but 9 out of 10 people who ask me equate good niches with profitable niches.
I won’t point you to the exact niches that pay unlike Andy who seems to get a kick out of dropping profitable niches in public, but I will tell you the 3 signs to look out for:
- Sponsored Links Count - how many sponsored links are there? Try [scuba] and you’ll have up to 5 pages of AdWords advertisers. If there are that many players in AdWords, then chances are people are spending more to outbid competitors.
- High Value Items - when AdSense displays its advertisers on your site, do you get advertising from expensive products/services like surgery, diamonds, legal, etc.? Most items are expensive because of the added cost of marketing. If you’re ad units are displaying expensive items, then you can be sure they’re investing more on those AdWords keyword bids. High bids mean high CPC.
- High Searched/High Tagged - is your niche constantly in the Technorati Top Searches and Hot Tags limelight? If your niche is heavily tagged, advertisers can’t be far behind.
If you’re thinking about creating blogs to service the above niches, please think again. The blog route has been tried and tested and chances are you’ll just be adding more backlinks to Wordpress without even seeing a $5 per day AdSense day. I said it before and I’ll say it again: for the 98% of us who don’t belong to the A-list, blogs and AdSense don’t mix.
Sometimes, it’s really not a question of niche anymore:
If you launch a witty blog in a sexy niche, if you’re good at scrounging for news nuggets, and if you’re dedicated enough to post around the clock—well, there’s nothing separating you from the big successful bloggers, right? I can do that.
In theory, sure. But if you talk to many of today’s bloggers, they’ll complain that the game seems fixed. They’ve targeted one of the more lucrative niches—gossip or politics or gadgets (or sex, of course)—yet they cannot reach anywhere close to the size of the existing big blogs. It’s as if there were an A-list of a few extremely lucky, well-trafficked blogs—then hordes of people stuck on the B-list or C-list, also-rans who can’t figure out why their audiences stay so comparatively puny no matter how hard they work.
Still want to join the A-list? Maybe the Scobleizer has the answer.