The Only Two Questions That Matter

byAJTrimble1

9.1K followers

Updated 5 years ago

The question comes up almost daily. A new member – and even some experienced ones – ask if a particular topic is a “good” niche. Responses vary, and everyone tries to give their best advice. The challenge is often this advice is based solely on opinion or “gut feeling”. Alas, most of the time, gut feeling will only get you so far.

While it can be helpful to ask others their opinion when trying to decide on a niche, at the end of the day, there are really only two questions that matter, and only one way to find the answers.

My “Magic” Questions

Whenever I am analyzing a new niche, I always begin with two questions. If the niche doesn’t pass the “magic” questions, I will pass. While any niche can work depending on how you come at it, failing one or both of these questions from the start really decreases your odds of success.

1. Is there an audience?

In other words, is this something you can get traffic from? Is there enough general searches that it's worth your time going after?

Now this is sometimes a call on your part. It depends. I will share a good test I use a bit later to determine exactly where you should be within a niche, but here we are just concerned with the overall numbers.

For example, let’s look at WA for a minute. Overall, does the make-money-online niche have a big audience? Of course. There is a ton of traffic out there in general.

Now, what about hand mixed seed for parakeets? Nope. Trust me. I ran the numbers. lol

2. Can you make money with it?

There are some niches out there that are very popular and receive a lot of traffic, but there's no really good way to monetize it.

For example, I knew a guy who tried to market a "course" to kids on how to beat a certain video game. The problem was his audience was all 12-14 years old, and he wanted $97 for the book. See the problem here? He thought it was worth that much because of all the work he put into it. But how many 12 year olds have a credit card to buy such a thing? And mom certainly wasn't going to buy it. Dead end.

The Numbers Don’t Lie

Now, once you understand those two questions, where do you find the answers? Research. Just good old-fashioned digging. Going back to gut feelings and opinions. They can be good, depending on who is actually giving you the advice, but nothing tells the real story like the numbers.

You must plug your ideas into Jaaxy and see what the data says. Then you have to go to Google and do the same thing. See what’s out there. Check out sites, forums, social media, etc. You can answer question number one fairly quickly.

Next you research the monetization opportunities. Is this a good niche for ads? Are there products out there you can recommend? Are there affiliate programs available? Is this something someone might pay you for a course or book of your own on? Do they have the ability to pay (see story above)? And so on.

If there is no money to be made, you should probably move on. Unless, of course, this is just a “spread the word” passion project of some kind, which is a perfectly noble reason, but know that in advance.

My Super-Duper Top Secret “Sweet Spot” Test

Now, let’s for the sake of argument, say that you find a niche that passes both magic questions. Now what? How do you decide where – meaning what level – you should be at?

That’s where my “Sweet Spot” test comes in…

Give some thought about the niche itself. How big it is. How small it is. In other words, how far down do you need to “niche”? Where is the sweet spot?

Make money online? WAY too big.

Hand mixed seed for parakeets? Way too small.

The easiest way I have found to determine a niche’s sweet spot is to use the 3/30/300/3000 Formula.

Think about how many articles you can get out of that niche. If you were to take everything you know about a topic, and add in as much research as you could find on it, how many articles could you honestly write on that topic before you just run out of stuff to say?

If you think the topic could easily cover 3000 articles, it’s likely too big of a niche for a brand new site. If you think you could only get 3, there’s no point in messing with it.

It typically takes approximately 30 articles to start getting some traction on a new niche site. Could you write 30 articles on this topic? Cool. That’s your sweet spot.

That’s for a niche site. But what if you hope to eventually become THE go-to authority on that topic? That’s probably going to be closer to the 300 article range. Do you have that in you? Is there even enough information to get to 300 articles if you wanted to?

That’s my evaluation process in a nutshell. Two questions and a test.

• Audience
• Money
• Sweet Spot

Now, go forth and CRUSH IT! :-)