Mind Map Your Way to a Lucrative, Targeted Niche Topic
Mind maps are a wonderful tool to help you visualize what drilling down a niche means. You start off with a very broad topic in the center and then branch out repeatedly until you hone in on a topic that looks like a good fit for you.
You’re looking for something narrow enough for you to attain easy leadership in, while maintaining enough profit potential to make it worth your while. You can create a mind map online using a tool like Mind Meister – or just whip out a pad of paper and a pen and start drawing one.
You’ll put the main topic in the center, inside of a circle. For example, you might put something like Marketing. That’s a very broad topic to cover. Then you’ll begin branching out by drawing a line to another circle, with a narrower topic, like: affiliate marketing, info product creation, traffic, list building, social media, and more.
You continue doing that for each circle you create until you’ve exhausted all ideas. For example, your circle for social media might branch out to each site or app, like YouTube, Facebook, Pinterest, etc.
For the Facebook circle, you might narrow it down to Pages, Groups, Paid Ads, etc. You’ll need to decide where in that mind map it makes sense for you to position yourself as an expert.
You could technically target marketing as a whole, or drill down and become known as the social media guru or the Facebook expert. You may not want to build an entire business just targeting the topic of Facebook pages, but Facebook Ads or paid ads in general might be doable.
Play around with it and bounce ideas around to see what seems like it would be a good fit. If you feel like you may not be able to write enough content, or that there aren’t enough products to promote with that narrow of a topic, then you’ve probably drilled too far.
Use Keyword Tools to Come Up with Different Niche Paths
Keyword tools are a great resource for helping you drill down into a niche to see what’s viable when it comes to profiting from a narrow niche. There are dozens of them – both free and paid.
Some aren’t even marked as tools at all, such as when you go to Google and type in a keyword and watch it autofill with 10 possibilities as you type. You can enter an asterisk and then a broad keyword or use the keyword first.
So if you enter * gardening into Google, it will show you phrases like square foot gardening, container gardening, hydroponic gardening, and more. If you just typed the word gardening into Google, you’d get different results.
You’d see things like gardening tools, gardening zones, no dig gardening, and more. So on your mind map, you might have a mix of both – and consider making a site just for gardening tool reviews, or only about container gardening.
If you want to reach a specific audience, you can type in another word like gardening for and see what comes up. You have results such as for beginners, for kids, for seniors, for mental health, and so on.
While two are based on an age demographic, kids and seniors, the others are more about status (beginners) and purpose (stress relief). So those are slants you could use for your site.
Slanting something this way, like gardening for stress relief, will be specific enough to target a detailed audience, yet broad enough to allow you to cover a wide variety of topics – container gardening for stress relief, senior gardening for mental health, and more.
Don’t just use Google. Use a variety of search engines, including YouTube! This video site is actually the second largest search engine in the world. Using this tool, if you type the word gardening in, you get different results.
These include phrases like gardening ideas for home, gardening hacks, urban gardening, vertical gardening, kitchen gardening, raised bed gardening, and the list goes on and on.
Eventually, you’ll find ideas that sound good on their own – or two that you feel could be good combined, such as raised bed gardening for seniors. As your mind map or list expands, you’ll scour through the results and see how it all fits together like a perfect puzzle you feel you can master as the content host presenting ideas to an interest ad engaged audience.
There are paid keyword tools you can use, too. WordRecon is one of the best and most comprehensive keyword tools, and they have a tutorial built in to help you think of additional ways to search. Sometimes you’ll see a result and instantly know that it might make a great blog post, but it’s not meaty enough for an entire site.
That might be something like best types of soil for gardening. It’s good information for your audience to know, but an entire soil site for a product people will likely be picking up locally isn’t very feasible.