If you’re looking to start an online business, one strategy is to find untapped niche markets online to rank a website for. This isn’t easy and does require some research.
Take this website for example, which is a niche website. Although I’ve gathered small trickles of traffic from building the site around the topic of Autopilot Money Making Software, there’s a limit to the potential traffic (and sales) which can come from this main keyword.
Untapped niche markets are those which you can more easily rank a site for and get free traffic. Once you’ve done that you also need to make your website profitable; more on this later.
Untapped Niche Markets: Where To Start
I have built a few niche websites around various keywords I’ve found which have either:
- Proved themselves in the past to actually convert into sales
- Shown promise because they have very little competition on Google
If you don’t already have any stats to use to determine which keywords are brining you sales, you’ll need to determine whether your keywords are good enough to start building a niche website around.
Some keywords look good on the surface, but won’t convert into sales. You need to find those keywords which are relatively uncompetitive on Google and which have a good search volume already. You also need to think into the search intent behind the keywords you are hoping to rank your website for.
Untapped Niche Markets: Examples
This starts with Google’s Keyword Planner. There are also paid-for keyword tools you can buy, but if you don’t want to pay, there’s always Google’s free keyword planner.
Look for long tail keywords which you would like to build a site around. Start with the kinds of things you’d like to write about. Starting with your passion or interest is a good place because you’ll need to create some content on a regular basis, even with a good niche site.
Here’s a couple of example sites I built: Whentoharvestgarlic.com, Tedssheds.net, and this one of course too “Autopilot Money Making Software“. You can see the step by step strategy I used to find the keywords and build this site in my article Create Free Website And Earn Money on this site.
When To Harvest Garlic
The garlic site I found through the keyword planner. I built the whole site around the main keyword “when to harvest garlic”. However, I’m using this as an example of what not to do since it wasn’t a great success! I ranked the site at the top of Google for some time however. But, it didn’t convert well into sales.
The topic didn’t have great products to sell on my site and if you look closer into the topic, you’ll see that it’s not really ‘geared’ to sell anything – just to impart knowledge! If I had stuck with it, I could have created products around the topic. However, the main problem was that I wasn’t interested in the topic myself! I worked on it for 6 months or so and then left it. It soon dropped off the organic listings and disappeared!
Teds Sheds
Ted’s Sheds was a success in terms of that it ranked and got free traffic. I even made a few sales. I promoted Shed Plans which I found on Clickbank (see clickbank autopilot money making software). Again though the keywords were focused on a UK based company called Teds Sheds. Visitors mostly wanted to buy actual physical sheds and have them installed, not buy shed plans and make a shed from scratch themselves. Hence the site didn’t do very well, but was a learning experience.
Monetising A Website
Having found a good niche topic which is aligned with some interest or passion, you can start building your site. On this site I used the keyword in the domain name. This can help rank a site for those keywords providing you build some quality content on your site too. Ideally, choose a number of keywords to write articles on. You can find these on Google’s Keyword planner by typing in your main ‘seed’ keyword and looking for any other longer tail keywords which come up.
When you have a few articles on your site for derivatives of your main keywords, your site will have more authority for those keywords if you’ve chosen a relatively uncompetitive niche to build a site in. If all goes well, (and there’s no guarantee of this), your site should rank and start getting some free traffic.
Build An Email List
Turning traffic into subscribers and sales is your next priority. But you should firstly aim to build more traffic by creating content on a regular basis. Affiliate links on your site can affect it’s standing with Google. So be wary of using them too frequently or too early in your site’s development. Focus on providing quality content first. Thinly disguised affiliate websites with little or no actually useful content seldom escape Google’s all seeing eyes!
Ideally, build an email list by offering some great giveaway to your visitors on your site. This can be a good way to connect with your visitors, offer value and build an email list, without spamming your content full of affiliate links.
Ideally you’ve built some great content which attracts the right visitors. Matching your affiliate product/s with your visitors should be a priority from the start when you did your keyword research. If you get this wrong, it’s much harder to promote and sell products to make sales.
You can find a product within your niche by searching for “{your niche} affiliate programs”.
Untapped Niche Markets
Untapped niche markets are few and far between. There’s millions of affiliates who have been trying to tap into these markets for years now. Even with a tonne of competition though, you can still be in with a chance. Look at your competition before starting out with a niche market. Create something better than whatever currently ranks on Google.
Finding an untapped niche market is the hardest part of niche website building. So you should aim to spend some time on this part of the process to get it right. Here’s a quick video to help with the process of keyword selection.