Picking a niche can be one of the most important and overwhelming tasks that you do in the beginning of your online career as a marketer. Many people simply choose something someone else mentioned that was profitable, which is the wrong way to go about the process.
You should be choosing a niche that you’ll enjoy participating in for the long-term. You’ll be writing content about it, answering questions, researching, creating info products and more.
The last thing you want is to be chained to a topic that bores you or that you don’t truly care about. That said, there’s another aspect of the niche selection process that you have to consider – drilling down until you find the sweet spot of the topic where you have the right amount of interest and profit potential, and the least competition.
Popularity & Profitability of Broad vs Drilled Down Niches
When you’re newer to the online marketing or entrepreneurial world, you might just think bigger is always better. But that’s not true – whether for list building or niche selection. Having a huge list doesn’t mean it will be profitable if the audience is too broad and generic to care about everything you send to them.
The same holds true for niche selection. Think about the creation of a blog based on dieting. That’s such an enormous topic, but you will need to cover everything under the umbrella of that broad keyword.
That requires tons of content on topics like calorie counting, meal prep, fasting, cooking, shopping, fasting, keto dieting, vegetarian diets, and many more. Now think about what your content schedule might look like for the upcoming months. It would be an enormous undertaking without hiring a large staff of writers and editors.
You would need to cover such a wide spectrum of topics, that your site would struggle to be seen as an expert site in any one area. For example, week one – you might write one post about calorie dieting, one about meal prepping, one about fasting, and so on.
Search engines might index your site, but trying to rank for dieting as a broad keyword is an uphill battle against all of the established sites who have tons of competitive content while you’re just getting started.
Now consider a week where you focused on just one topic, such as meal prepping for weight loss. Suddenly, the field has narrowed. You’re able to post a week’s worth of content all about meal prepping for dieters and every time someone is looking for those ideas, Google will be able to send them to you over a broad site that may have 1-2 articles on the topic, and thousands on other topics.
You won’t actually be missing out on profits. Instead, you’ll be positioning yourself to thrive because you’ll be viewed as an expert site that’s focused and the increased traffic you enjoy will result in sales and commissions.
Think of it from your own point of view as a consumer. If you were searching for a lawn mower, and you found two sites: a broad lawn mower site that included all sorts of mowers, from riding to push mowers – and a drilled niche site that only discussed battery operated mowers, which is what you wanted, which would you choose?
Well if you knew of the drilled down item you wanted, you’d probably go to the site dedicated to exactly what you want. When you go to a broad site, they may not have as much information for you because it’s mixed with a lot of irrelevant information that doesn’t apply to you.