How to Pick the Most Profitable Niche

How to make big money picking the most profitable niche is easy - you just don’t know it yet.

I must apologize to my loyal readers, it’s been nearly a week since my last post. This isn’t normal for me, but I’ve been hard at work on a new site day and night - so far investing more than 50 hours in about 6 days. This is a new web site, a new venture, a new blog I’ve been setting up and now that it’s almost done I think that I can use it to teach you how to pick the best niche for your next venture.

I read in webmaster forums a lot, and blog comments, and I get a lot of email. It always seems like one of the top most frequently asked questions is “how do I pick the best niche for my web site or blog (or BANS niche store, or mashup, or Squidoo lens, etc.)”. I hear this OVER, and over and over again. Usually the comments that follow are all kinds of ways to pick the hottest keywords. There are all kinds of lists you can buy, eBooks you can get, software to purchase, or “guru” programs to follow - but I’m telling you that the most profitable niche is easily found not in these things - but IN YOU! Don’t think at this point that this will be one of those fluff motivational posts, because I will show you directly how I have used this techniques in the past week to create what may become the most profitable web site I’ve launched to date.

Quit reading all the hype, all the garbage, and non-sense because they don’t know what you know. What I’m saying is (and I’ve talked about this before in many, many posts) - you are already good at something, and you can make more money at that than any “hot keyword” on the market. And that’s because of two things - sacrifice, and passion.

You’re not going to have nearly the passion for say, the latest LCD TV as you would Golden Retrievers (if you breed them). You wouldn’t sacrifice nearly as many hours working on a web site for say Air Purifiers if you loved to purchase and smoke the best Cuban cigars.

Sacrifice and Passion are characteristics that you normally don’t see or use that often, unless you’re in love for the first time or having your first child. With sacrifice and passion you’ll work harder, longer, and be more innovative that for regular tasks. Think about this for a second. What things in life interest you the most? You surely have some hobbies, or skills, or traits that interest you outside of work. Do you like baseball? Do you love to cook? Do you love animals? Trade stocks? Go hunting? Like guns? Gardening? Work out or run excessively? Collect figurines? Addicted to porn? Obsessed with Sesame Street? Teach homeschool? Love to remodel? Go garage saleing or clip coupons a lot?

I once saw a woman who had collected over 2,000 Precious moments figurines and had them displayed on over 200 custom shelves and lighted cabinets in her home. I knew a guy who spent two years translating and comparing the entire bible from the original Hebrew text into English to compare to King James Bible. Obsession. Sacrifice. Passion. Compulsion. It’s these things that drive us to “go the extra mile” for things that we already love to do.

Why on god’s green earth would you want to create a dozen web sites about plasma tv’s, digital cameras, ipods, and laptops if your day job was an insurance salesman and your hobby was collecting coins? See what I’m getting at?

The Most Profitable Niche is the One that YOU can IMMERSE yourself in

In the beginning of my Internet money making journey I made the mistake of buying dozens of domain names based on “hot keywords” like myspace, ringtones, song lyrics, ipods, and the like. I could have setup a bunch of cookie cutter web sites with minimal content hoping to convert some sales - ever worrying about getting a google penalty and constantly trying to send traffic to them and build links for them. It occured to me that this model is BACKWARDS. At good site ATTRACTS visitors, and you should constantly be coming up with ways and schemes to get traffic.

Now, having said that it’s true that not absolutely everything can be monetized like a digital camera. But there are ways…

Now, about what I’ve been working on for the last week. If you’ve been reading my blog for awhile you know that I’ve been in a live cover band for the last 3 years playing 2-3 weekends per month in area bars. At the beginning of the summer I quit the band to take some time off, regroup, and form a more modern band later this year. I live 30 minutes from Toledo, Ohio - which around her is often called “T-Town”. The name of my band was called “T-Town Sound”, which many say sounded like a DJ or something. Now that I’m out of that band I had to figure out what to do with the web site.

I started that band and I did all the booking. It was a constant struggle to figure out all the bars, directions to the bars, who was playing at what bars (to give us ideas where to play at next), and being a “web guy” I just spend hours and hours and hours online surfing band sites to try and research it all. The bars were even worse, since 99% don’t have web sites. Most bands and bars now may have a MySpace profile, but have you ever tried viewing 100 odd MySpace pages?

I decided to use T-Town Sound to create a live music listing web site, a local “band calendar” if you will. I’m much better suited to something like this than I am say blogging about “cruise ships” - because this is something I know about, I am involved in, and I have first hand knowledge of what will get used most. I think that the most successful blogs are heavily visited because they supply knowledge in some way to people that need it. They “solve a problem”.

How can you profit from using your knowledge to “solve a problem”?

I’m going to keep an updated online calendar of local events (which is tedious), and that’s something you can’t find anywhere. But I’m going to add to that by providing directions to all the venues and descriptions of all the bands. I have a forum where fans can talk about the bands, you can find a band or advertise for band members, and you can buy and sell gear. I have dozens of ways to monetize this site, 10x more than I would have for a BANS site. Heck - I could include a BANS store IN this site!

My advice to you is to take your knowledge and build a blog or niche site and provides knowledge or solves a problem or provides a service you can really get behind. Flesh out how to do this on paper and build from there. The most profitable project you create won’t end up being a niche store selling laptops. It will be something very near and dear to your heart.

Tags: niche site, niche store, profit