Several years ago when WordPress didn’t yet exist it was quite difficult to launch a new website (just think of html and all its tags). People really had to be passionate about something to go through all those technical difficulties of creating a new website. But since then things have changed.

Now you can launch a good looking new site and upload your first post literally in only 10 minutes. You can imagine the result, there are tens of thousands of new websites created every single day, you can check these out in our Site Browser.

You may still create a new site about any given topic that you like, but if you want it to become successful (specially if you are planning to make a business out of it) you do have to take some extra steps and have some additional planning instead of just jumping right into it.

You should sit down and think about your niche.

 

What is a niche?

Simply put a niche is what your website will be about, kind of a category. It can be very wide and very narrow. Let me explain.

For example a wide niche is “health and fitness”. Though it’s already specific somewhat, as people will know that they won’t find articles about gadgets and gaming here, it’s still extremely wide, 10% of all websites in the world would probably fit into this category.

We can narrow it a little bit, for example “sleeping”. Now we have a smaller category within “health and fitness”. But it’s still quite wide, specially nowadays, believe me, there are thousands of pages about sleeping.

So let’s dive a bit more into our niche and say, we want to create a site about “sleep disorders”. Now it’s getting narrower. As we are getting more and more precise about our content, there will be less and less competition.

And we can still move one step further and say, let’s make a website about “sleep apnea”. As you see, now we have a very specific subject. If you create a website about sleeping, you will have thousands of other sites competing. If you create a site about “sleep apnea”, then there will probably be only a few other sites competing with you.

These days competition is huge in all categories, so you have the most chance for success if you find a micro-niche for your website.

 

Advantages and disadvantages of micro-niche websites

I think you already have some general idea about the advantages of creating a micro-niche website.

• Your competition will be moderate
• If you can create great articles it will have more chance ranking in Google
• Your visitors/customers will be very close to your actual content. If you create a site about sleeping, someone with sleep apnea may not find relevant information and just leave. But if you create a site about sleep apnea and support it with good articles, it will be relevant to almost all of your site’s visitors.

So what are the disadvantages? If you think about it a bit, it will also be obvious. The narrower the niche the less visitors you will have. If you go very specific with your subject you may end up with only a thousand people around the world who are interested in what you have to say.

If you are planning to place ads and affiliate links on your site, you will need a lot of visitors to come to your site and click these links. If you have a thousand visitors a month and only about 1% of them clicks your ads (which is quite average), then you will end the month with 10 clicks which may give you an income of $1 for that month. Actually it’s not at all that bad to start with, but your site needs to have the potential to grow.

So your most important task is that you will have to find a niche which is narrow enough to have minimal competition, but still wide enough to attract a lot of people and has a potential to grow! If you pick your domain name wisely you can achieve this easily.

 

How to pick a niche that will be successful?

As they say people go online because they either need some information, want to be entertained or have a problem to solve. Your niche has to belong to either of these three categories.

1, Creating an information website

You can target people who need information. For example you can make a site about traveling. Of course, remember what I have told you, you don’t want to create a site about traveling, but traveling to Chile for example. People will want to know what is the currency there, how much it costs to have a meal, what are the major sightseeing points and so on. If you know a lot about Chile or willing to collect all this information on a website, visitors will come.

2, Creating an entertainment website/blog

Everyone likes cute puppies and funny quotes. You can create a site like that and be successful. Of course you can’t compete with giants like 9gag, but you can choose wisely and start a site/blog for cute tiny pigs, or religious quotes or fun football videos, you name it.

Or you can write a blog with articles, fun facts, photos, stories. I think it’s the hardest of the three, but if you are very deep into a hobby then it may work.

3, Solving problems

I believe it’s the best and easiest. What problems do people have? All kinds of problems. They may have medical problems, personal problems, dating problems, addiction problems, weight problems, financial problems and the list goes on forever. You can create a site/blog about a medical condition and its cures, or how to lose weight, how to spare money, how to quit smoking, how to find the right one and so on.

If you have any problems yourself then it may finally be an advantage! You may not be strong enough to lose weight or quit smoking, but what if you created a website about it? You can have the motivation to continue your diet and share what worked, what didn’t work, what new methods are out there and so on.

Of course, as you will see, these are the most saturated niches, so you really have to choose wisely. A blog about losing weight is a good example here, but you may end up with the 10,000th blog in this area, so you should pick a less common problem or be more specific about it.

 

What niche should you choose?

Now you have a general idea about what works and what doesn’t work. But what should you choose? Well, if you have any special area of interest or hobby that you are passionate about, then the answer is easy. Just narrow or widen it to an acceptable level and there you go.

If you have no special knowledge or interest then you can either find someone, a close friend or relative who is willing to help you and passionate about something, or choose a topic that you don’t know much about but you are willing to learn.

I’m sure you can come up with a lot of ideas. But make sure you choose something that seems interesting to you, because you will have to be at least a little passionate about it in the future. Don’t choose a subject that you don’t like, even if you think it would bring a lot of visitors or money. Competition is huge these days and people will feel if you don’t really care about your website’s niche and will ignore your site.

Once you have your niche you will have to write excellent content (or buy it) and for this reason it’s better if you like what your site is about. Your passion will bring visitors.

 

How to check if your chosen niche is good enough?

There are many tricks but none is very exact. You can guess, but won’t know for sure if the niche you chose was good enough. However, you can already use some very common tools to find out a bit more about your chances. What tools I’m talking about? Google for example.

You can open google and enter whatever you have come up with into the search field. Hit enter and see what comes up. Open the first few articles and check out the sites as well. Do you think you can compete with that? Can you do something better?

Also, there are some words that will be your friends along this journey. Words like what, how, why, best. Add these words to your niche in google and see what kind of results you get. It may already be an eye opening for you.

What other tools can you use? Quora for example. Just go and register to Quora and have a look around. Enter your niche ideas into the search field and see what comes up. Is there enough buzz about your chosen topic? Are there many questions with a lot of followers and upvotes?

Quora is a great tool, because you can already see what people really want to know related to your niche and you can use this information later when writing or buying your first articles.

 

Is everything set?

If so, all you need to do is find a great domain name and hosting solution.

For creating domain names we have made a great tool for you, the Domain Name Generator. You just have to enter a word that is related to your niche and it will give you several random ideas for short and memorable domain names.

After that you will need a good hosting plan. We at BrandNewBlogs use WebHostingHub and since we are pleased with its services we recommend it to you as well. If you can, choose the “Nitro” plan which gives you the best value for the price.