How to Find a Profitable Niche for Your Blog (7 Simple Steps)

find your niche

Today, I’m going to show you how to find the PERFECT niche for your blog.

(In 7 steps)

The best part?

You don’t have to analyze top 10 competition for thousands of keywords.

In fact, we don’t even do any keyword research here.

What I’m about to show you is a holistic approach to determine the TRUE potential of any niche.

Let’s get started.

What is a Niche?

A niche is simply your site's main topic.

Our job as an internet marketer is essentially finding a niche, building a website and then creating high quality content to solve specific problems in that niche.

This way, you'll build trust with your visitors, they'll perceive you as the expert on the topic, they will trust you and your expertise, and ultimately make their purchase decisions following your recommendations.

what is a niche

The word niche and market, by the way, are used interchangeably.

So, if I say that I found a great market, it's the same thing as finding a great niche and vice versa.

However, not all niches are created equal. There are niches that are far better and more profitable than others.

In fact, there are 5 major verticals where 95%+ of the money is made online.

They are:

  1. Health & Fitness

  2. Wealth & Money

  3. Relationships & Dating

  4. Self Improvement

  5. Hobbies, Interests & Activities

The first 3 verticals represent the key areas that everyone needs to work on in their lives.

As an old saying goes: "Everyone wants to get paid, laid and live forever".

The later 2 are something that people are super passionate about and often spend money on happily.

To conclude:

Any niche or sub-niche that fall into one of the above 5 categories are likely to be profitable.

How To Find Your Niche in 7 Steps

Now you know what a good niche looks like, let me show you how you can actually find your own niche in 7 easy steps.

This is the same process that I’ve used many times to discover high potential niches that have allowed me build a full time income from my niche authority websites.

Let’s start with the first step.

1. Brainstorm Niche Ideas

This step is fairly simple and you shouldn’t spend more than 30 minutes on this.

Just go grab a pen and a piece of paper.

Go do it now. I’ll wait.

Ready?

Now, as quickly as you can, write down your answers to the following questions:

  • What am I personally passionate about?

  • What am I really good at and can help others with?

  • What activities do I love to do in my spare time?

  • What things do I plan on learning really well?

  • What are my problems that I'm looking for solutions online?

  • What types of books and magazines do I usually read?

  • Which blogs am I following?

Don't overthink here.

Just write down any ideas that come to mind.

I’ll show you how to evaluate them later in the next few steps.

2. Select Your Top 3

By now you should have at least 10 niche ideas in your list.

Think through your ideas more carefully this time and pick the top 3 that are most meaningful to you.

Ideally, your top 3 niches should be something that you love and want to build a business around.

Even if you’re not super passionate about a niche, spending a few hours reading about it shouldn’t sound like a boring task to you.

Think about it:

If you can’t stand the idea of spending time researching a niche, how could you actually build something good for people in that niche?

Your top 3 niches should also be under big 5 competitive verticals so that you know there's money to be made.

No worry if you're not 100% sure about a niche, these are not your final picks.

We’ll be diving deep into market research from step 3 to 6.

This is a very comprehensive process that would give you a holistic view of a niche you’re about to enter.

Let’s get into it.

3. Identify Your Competitors

A key part in my niche research process is identifying and analyzing competitors.

This alone would give me 90% of the information I need to know about a niche.

But first, who are your competitors?

Quite simply, they’re blogs and websites that are targeting the same audience that we’re going after.

In other words, they’re targeting & ranking on Google for the same set of keywords that we’d like our website to rank for.

That’s why competitor analysis gives you so much information about the potential of a niche.

Using the tactics that I’m covering in this guide, you’ll be able to to discover:

  • Their content strategy. What topics they’re writing about?

  • Their traffic strategy. How are they getting traffic?

  • Their monetization strategy. How are they making money?

How to Identify Your Competitors

First, you need to brainstorm a list of keywords that people in your niche are likely searching for.

If this niche is something that you know about, you should be able to do this quickly.

For example, let’s say I’m researching the Keto Diet niche. Here’s a keyword list that come off the top of my head:

  • Keto diet

  • Keto recipes

  • Keto meal plan

  • Keto diet food list

  • Keto diet books

  • Keto diet programs

Now, just visit Google.com and search for each keyword one by one.

google search result keto diet

Pay attention to what are ranking on the top 30 results.

Visit each URL to see what it’s about.

For example, here’s what I saw when I clicked on the 1st result.

https://www.ruled.me/guide-keto-diet/

ruled me article keto diet

Perfect! This website is clearly about the Keto Diet.

It is exactly the type of competitors that I’m looking for.

I’d go ahead and add this to my list.

Let’s take a look at a few more results:

https://www.dietdoctor.com/

diet doctor homepage

This one ranked #2 for Keto Diet. The website looks very nicely designed and the content is actually very good too. This is surely a good competitor to learn from. Added to my list!

draxe homepage

This site ranked #3 for Keto Diet. It’s a general health website and covers a lot of sub-topics, not just the Keto Diet. I wouldn’t consider it my direct competitor.

Although, it’d be good to save this site in my list for further research.

https://www.healthline.com/

healthline homepage

This one ranked #4. It’s also a general Health website. The scope of this site is probably too big for what I wanted to build so I’d not spend a ton of time on it.

https://ketodash.com/

keto dash homepage

Finally, another site that I would consider my direct competitor.

The whole site is about the Keto Diet. It’s interesting that they’re putting a sales page for a digital product on homepage. I’d like to learn more about how they’re doing with this product.

You can see how quickly I was able to find my competitors just by searching on Google here.

Play around with different keywords and you should be able to create a big list of competitors.

TIP: USE AHREFS TO FIND EVEN MORE COMPETITORS QUICKLY

When you've identified a few competitors, run them through Ahrefs and click on Competing Domains to find even more sites that compete for the same keywords.

Competing domains for ruled me

Here’s my list after spending a few minutes on this:

URL

Direct Competitor?

Notes

Ruled.me

Yes

Just about Keto

DietDoctor.com

Yes

About weight loss, diet and keto

DrAxe.com

No

General health blog

HealthLine.com

No

General health blog

KetoDash.com

Yes

Sells info product

PerfectKeto.com

Yes

Sells keto supplements

KetoDietApp.com

Yes

Keto Diet planning app

ketogenic-diet-resource.com

Yes

Looks a bit outdated

thrivestrive.com

Tes

Diet / Keto Blog

4. Analyze Your Competitors

Alright, now we’ve got a list of competitors.

Let’s analyze each of them in detail to gather more insights about this niche.

To demonstrate the process, I’m gonna take a look at Ruled.me

Traffic

First, I run the site through Ahrefs’ Site Explorer:

Ahrefs Site Explorer Ruledme

There are a few things that stood out to me:

  1. It’s ranking for 240,000 keywords getting 907,000 organic visits per month.

  2. 4.7K+ unique domains are linking to this website.

  3. The Domain Rating (DR) number is 71.

Those are very impressive numbers.

This website seems to do very well in Google thanks to its HUGE backlink profile.

However, Ahrefs only shows us organic traffic. Let’s run the site through SimilarWeb to get an idea about the types of traffic that this website is getting:

similar web traffic data

Alright, this website is getting a total of 3.95M visits per month from all traffic sources according to SimilarWeb.

The average time a user spends on the site is 2 minutes 41 seconds. And they browse 2.18 pages per visit.

Most of its visitors come from the United States:

similarweb traffic by countries

And here’s the distribution of traffic sources:

similar web traffic sources

EDITOR'S NOTE

The numbers you see in Ahrefs and SimilarWeb are just estimations. They don’t represent the REAL amount of traffic that a website is getting.

From my experience, Ahrefs often underestimates by 2-3x and SimilarWeb often overestimates by 2-3x.

However, they’re still very helpful to relatively compare multiple websites in the same niche.

cloud living tung tran about page

TUNG TRAN

Founder of CloudLiving.com

It’s also good to take a look at their social profiles:

Screen Shot 2018 05 10 at 2.59.01 PM
Screen Shot 2018 05 10 at 2.58.20 PM
Screen Shot 2018 05 10 at 2.58.54 PM

From what we’ve seen so far, I can say that this Ruled.me website is doing very well with both organic and social traffic.

Content

Content is the foundation of every website’s success.

So it’s crucial to analyze our competitors’ content to see what they’re doing right and how we could do better.

First, Click on Top Pages in Ahrefs’ Site Explorer.
Pages with the most organic traffic for ruled me

This report ranks pages on Ruled.me based on how much search traffic they’re getting.

Let’s take a look at #1 https://www.ruled.me/guide-keto-diet/

ruled me article keto diet

This guide is getting 160,387 visits per month from search. It’s ranking for some of the biggest keywords in the niche, such as:

Keyword

Search Volume

Ranking

Keto Diet

423,000

#1

Ketogenic Diet

289,000

#1

What is keto diet

8,000

#3

This guide is very comprehensive (7320 words). It covers everything a beginner need to know about the Keto Diet.

The content was well formatted making it very easy to read.

According to Ahrefs, it’s linked from 719 referring domains. Also, there’s a social sharing bar on the page which shows 46.5K FB shares and 7.6K Pinterest shares.

Overall, I think this is a very successful piece of content and can be considered a pillar article for a website about Keto Diet.

That means if I were to build a website for this niche, having a comprehensive beginner’s guide like this is a MUST.

You can also click on Top Content to see which articles are the most popular on social media.

Top Content ruled me on Ahrefs

Try to answer the following questions when analyzing a competitor’s content:

  • What are the articles that get the most traffic from search? What keywords are they ranking for?

  • What are the articles that attract the most backlinks?

  • What are the articles that do well on social media?

  • What are the articles that lack depth and quality? Can I create better content than my competitor?

Monetization

To identify the monetization methods that our competitor is using, simply visit their website.

Then browse around and pay attention the following:

  • Banners / Ads on blog posts.

  • Product / Shop pages.

  • External link to ecommerce stores.

  • Opt in to their email list and see what’re promoting via email.

For example, just by visiting Ruled.me’s homepage, I can see that it’s promoting its own digital product called The Keto Academy.

keto academy

It’s also recommending some products as an affiliate:

Kitchen Recommendations Ruled Me

There doesn’t seem to be any ads on the website. It’s optimized for lead generation by placing opt-in forms on articles:

Screen Shot 2018 05 09 at 10.45.16 AM

There’s also a mention of Keto Academy at the end of every article:

keto academy mention 1

5. Dig Deeper Into The Niche

Competitor research alone would give you 90% of what you need to know to determine the potential of a niche.

But wait, there’s still some additional research we can do:

Research Niche Forums / Communities

Online communities are the best source of information about your target audience. Just spending some time researching these groups and you’ll be able to identify common topics that people are talking about.

This data is very valuable. It would help you understand your target audience better.

Here are some of my favorites:

  • Facebook groups. Facebook is so big that no matter what niche you are in, you will probaby find at least one group on the topic. Simply go to Facebook, search for your keyword, and then click on “Groups”.

  • Niche forums. Go to Google and type in your keyword plus the word “forum” (keyword + forum).

  • Reddit. Reddit is really big and it covers every topic under the sun. Just go to Reddit, type in your keyword, and press the search button.

  • Quora. Go to Quora, type in your keyword in the search bar, and you’ll see topics related to it.

Any niche that has active groups, forums, subreddit and Quora pages is pretty much guaranteed to be profitable.

Look at Best-Selling Products

We can easily identify best-selling products in a niche by visiting these 3 big product marketplaces:

1. Amazon

Go to Amazon. There, you want to check two things, physical products and Kindle books. You want to look for products and books with a lot of reviews (30+) and good ratings (4+ stars).

keto amazon

#2 Clickbank

Go to Clickbank. Go to Affiliate Marketplace. Type in your keyword into Find Products search field. Then, just look at the products that are being sold. Pay attention to products that have the gravity of 5 or more (the higher the gravity, the more sales are people making with this product).

keto clickbank

#3 Udemy

Go to Udemy. Type in your keyword in the search field. Take a look at the courses that come up in the search results. Pay attention to products with a lot of ratings.

keto udemy

Find Affiliate Programs in The Niche

The more affiliate programs there are, the better, because it means not only that there is a demand, but also that there are plenty of products you can promote on your website.

There are 2 ways to find affiliate programs in your niche:

  1. Google Search. Just go to google.com and type in KEYWORD + affiliate program.
  2. OfferVault. This is a big directory of thousands of affiliate programs in a variety of niches.

6. Do The Viability Check

The final step in the niche selection process is the viability check. Is this niche a good niche for you?

Here are three questions that you need to answer:

  • How passionate are you about this niche? In my experience, the more passionate you are about the niche, the more likely you are to persevere through difficulties and put a lot of effort into the project.
     
  • How knowledgeable are you about this niche? If you know a lot about the niche, you can create really good content in that niche, which increases your odds of success.
     
  • Are you capable of creating content for this niche? Generally, I think that people should write their own content for the first few months, so they could really understand the niche better. Writing your own content will also save you a lot of money!

I really suggest you to seriously think about these questions before starting your website.

If you’re building your site for the first time, then I’d recommend choosing something that you’re passionate and knowledgeable about.

It’s okay if don’t want to create content yourself. You can always outsource writing. Just make sure that the writer you hire knows what he or she is talking about!

7. Choose Your Niche

Congratulations! You should have done all of your research at this point. It's time to make your decision.

Unfortunately, there’s no magic formula when it comes to deciding on your niche. Ultimately it’s up to personal preference. A perfect niche to me might be very different to yours.

But if you've done your homework, you should have a pretty good idea on which niche is a good one for you.

Listen to your gut.

Pick one that you like the most and stick with it.

If you’re not sure what to pick. Remember there are always rooms for you in big markets like Health, Fitness, Beauty, Home, Pet, etc. You just need to dig deeper to find good opportunities.

Don't get stuck here forever. You won't learn anything by thinking about it. Just pick a niche and get started building your 1st website.

Even if a few months down the road you realized this is not a good one for you, you can start this niche selection process again and find another niche.

What’s Next?

I hope you have found this guide helpful. This is the exact niche selection process that I’ve used many times to find profitable niches for myself.

If you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment below.

By the way, if you want to see the video version of this guide and download the market research worksheet that I'm using, join Cloud Living Academy Premium to get instant access.

Tung Tran

I’ve built and sold a bunch of highly profitable internet businesses since 2010. After selling my last one in November 2020, I decided to go all... [Read full bio]