As you should already know, there’s a lot involved with creating a brand new website. You have to worry about the design, the website’s structure, traffic strategies, writing the content and the list goes on and on. But finding the right niche can be the single most important thing you do when you’re dealing with a new website. Whether you’re suffering from “webmaster’s block”, or just need a few tips and ideas to get along, I hope this article will help you in some way.

Determine Your Goal

First off, you need to determine what you want to accomplish with your website – in specific details. Ask yourself, do you want to sell products or do you want to earn money through monetized ads? Do you want to focus on organic search engine traffic or will your primary source of traffic be from PPC advertising? Instead of telling yourself that you’re going to make a website, you should first determine your goals and what you need to accomplish those goals.

Research Your Niche

If you haven’t figured out your niche yet, take some time to do research by looking up a list of niches. Below are a few examples of resources you can grab ideas from:

  • Google Hot Trends – Google Trends is a great tool to find the top keywords people search for. Queries are updated on a day-to-day basis.
  • delicious.com – Delicious Popular Bookmarks lists out the websites with the most bookmarks. On the right hand side, you’ll see website topics that could help you find a niche.
  • Bonus.com Top Searches – Dig through this Google Search Query to find the top shopping searches for a variety of markets.
  • Ask IQ – Find the top weekly searches users of Ask.com type in. Similar to Google Hot Trends, you will notice the Ask queries to be a little more generic than  Google Trend.
  • Twitterverse – Check out what everyone’s tweeting about.

Write down a list of possible niches while going through these lists. Take those niches that you’ve selected and do some additional research into the market. Search for some keywords that apply to the niches in Google, Bing and Yahoo! and look through the general competition. Briefly scan the top 10 websites that are ranking and see how well their site is built, how much content they have, how many users visit/interact with their website, etc,. This will give you a general idea of how popular the niche is and what kind of competition you’re up against.

Take It A Step Further, Broad vs. Targeted

Now that you have your goals and several markets in mind, you can take it a step further by thinking of how a particular niche will fit into your goals. For example, if you want to sell products and you’re interested in the electronics market, you should decide on which products you want to sell. Every market can be driven down to a single product or niche, so you should pick a targeted market that is comfortably sized within your capabilities. New webmasters often dive into markets that are too broad and require too much work to maintain. For instance, a brand new website selling all sorts of electronics will more often than not fail. But a brand new website selling computer networking hardware and software will have a better chance at succeeding. Why? Because more time can be spent on quality and the website is centrally focused around one targeted niche, becoming the resource for that market. Here are some examples of broad niches and targeted niches within them:

  • Broad: Clothing
  • Targeted: Women’s designer dresses
  • Broad: Games
  • Targeted: Computer first-person-shooter games
  • Broad: Photography
  • Targeted: Digital camera reviews and news
  • Broad: Music
  • Targeted: Bass guitars and accessories

Planning Your Website

Now that you have a highly-targeted niche, the fun begins. Planning your website can be challenging and exciting knowing that you have full control over what your users will see and interact with. But this step can also be the reason why you will fail. Take everything into account before you start working. That means website platform, web design, website structure, website content, domain name and marketing. Every one of those listed factors has a deep strategy behind them and you should at least know why and how to get the most out of them (looking at your competitors strategies is highly recommended, think of it as “if it’s working for them, it should work for me”). While I do realize that having a “learn-as-you-go” mentality can sometimes work, planning those factors as much as possible in the beginning will increase the chances and speed of your success.

Good Luck!

After all that, the best advice I can give you is to start small like everything else in life. Don’t try to take on a huge market riding solo as you will most likely fail (unless you have a huge corporation to back you up with a full-time staff and near infinite budget). Just remember that almost every successful website out there was an insignificant nobody at some point.