Plots, Plans, and Schemes

My best piece of advice is to do what you love. You’ll have tons of ideas about a niche that you know and love. I have a cooking/foodie site because I know and love a lot about food! *at least that’s what my scales keep tellin’ me*

Then you have to research and decide which topics to pursue for that niche. For my example, I had to think about things like: Do I want to concentrate on one style of cooking, like Italian, Chinese, etc? Do I want to stick to one type of food, like vegetables, desserts, etc?

When you are narrowing down your topics, you need to also ask yourself, “Which topics will be the most profitable?” Simply posting recipes and monetizing with AdSense may not be as profitable as writing reviews about wine refrigerators and offering product links, for example.

Also, you need to research and pick the best affiliate programs for your niche.

Let’s say that you’re going to do a t-shirt shop with affiliated designs. Which do you think you will find more products to choose from, boys and girls?

A. Dogs

B. Warthogs

Well, duh! Dogs, of course! There are tons and tons of dog t-shirts available from a wide variety of vendors.

One caution, though….. make sure your niche is not over-saturated. There are probably 82 gabillion sites on dogs. Sometimes the niche needs to be narrowed…. perhaps a site that focuses only on one breed would be easier to rank well in the search engines with. But don’t narrow it down too far! “Labrador Retrievers” might be easy to find information and products for…… “chocolate labrador retrievers” would be harder……. “blind chocolate labrador retrievers with arthritis” starts to mosey into the, “I’m a tad anal” category.