Why is niche selection so hard?
I have been rebooting my efforts over the past few weeks with stoic determination to set my path on the affiliate marketing journey to be a positive one, starting the training again after "tinkering" last year I decided to go for it, however I may have fallen at the first hurdle yet I don't really understand why?
Finding a Niche
When it comes to selecting a niche I often hear things like "write about something you're passionate about" or "don't select a niche that's broad" but here is what I think my problem is, my passions seem to either be too broad or to narrow, I am really struggling to find something in between.
I am happy to share my preliminary selections on here purely because they are not yet my niches, and right now I feel like selecting a decent Niche is more important than worrying about someone else jumping on my ideas, anyway here are a few I have been looking at this week and my thought processes along with them.
One thing you might notice is that I am very good at talking myself out of ideas after being passionate about them for a few moments.
Niche Idea #1 - Simulation Racing Hardware
So this is something I am passionate about and also it's very niche, there are a subsection of people who have racing simulators at home (I am one of those people), my idea around this niche was to create review type content in the form of blog posts where I either write about a specific product or compare it to another, both will affiliate links for income later on down the road.
I was also going to write helpful content with the intent to help rather than make money, just in the name of helping people and building trust.
Talking myself out of Niche Idea #1
My initial thoughts about this niche were great, I am passionate about the niche, it's something I am involved in and there are quite a few products I could write about.
Looking on Jaaxy I see low competition but also low volume, in my head I started to ask myself if this was "too niche" as I was searching for terms like "sim racing" and "best sim racing wheel"
I do still like this idea, but I do wonder if I should aim to go wider.
Niche Idea #2 - Matched Betting (UK Only)
So my next niche idea is something that I am actually doing already, but not in the form of blog posts. As you know, gambling is mostly considered bad, but there is a method of placing bets that can net you a small income every time, this is called matched betting.
The quick simple explanation for it is this, you place a bet on a football team to win a certain game, say a £10 bet, but you can also use a betting exchange to bet on that same team to not win (a draw is considered not winning) which basically means you have covered all outcomes, if the team wins, loses or draws you get your money back.
So you might be thinking well, where is the profit? well a lot of betting companies in the UK offer promotions to get you to bet, so they will say things like "Bet £10 with us and we will give you a free £10 bet", now if you remember what we did above, we placed the £10, and regardless of the outcome we get our money back but we have now been credited with a £10 free bet.
You can then rinse and repeat this process with the free bet and then lay againt it at the exchange, this means that regardless of what happens with this second bet you will always bank at least 80% of that free bet.
You can literally do this method over and over and over again to make some huge profits over time, last year in 10 months I managed to make £10,000 doing just this.
At some point last year I really wanted to share this with everyone else, I helped a lot of friends make some extra money and I also setup a YouTube channel and blog. My blog is pretty much dead as I never created content for it, but my YouTube is almost at 1700 subscribers strong, this feels like my niche but there are some problems ...
Talking myself out of Niche Idea #2
The biggest problem I see with matched betting is that it is specific to the UK, it also seems very competitive when it comes to keyword research (UK ONLY) for terms like "matched betting" and "no risk matched betting".
It's also very hard to target new people who don't even know what matched betting is and are just looking for ways to make extra money online, these are my ideal target audience but targeting "make money online" seems like a mountain that's impossible to climb.
I am making some money out of this already because of YouTube and a few affiliate offers where I promote some membership sites, but I feel like stepping my game up to the next level might be fruitless.
The other problem is that the niche is slowly dying, there is probably another 5 years left in matched betting, bookmakers are getting wise to this and are restricting free offers to those they feel are using bonus offers too much.
What next?
These are just two examples of areas that are causing me conflict when performing niche selection, it's like I am my own worst enemy and just heavily procrastinating at the first hurdle, any advice, help, thoughts are most welcome
Richard
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I like niche #1 and suggest that you go with what you love, and if competition is low you can use it to your advantage to rank high in it. You will be surprised as you start by how much you will find to write on it - like not just about products but on many other things that you would never have thought of, and later when you get comments, some of those comments offer up great ideas also...
Hey SnazzyIT, thanks for the reply, yeah I really like the idea of sim racing, it seems similar to other niches I have seen other people being successful in, not sure why I am so good about talking myself out of it :)
Lol, that's what I did with my first website...it was the easiest option yet I tried to think of every excuse not to do it, but after I looked at every other niche idea, I ended up coming back to it.
I believe it's because I didn't think that the info I was going to offer was going to be unique enough for anyone to read and the other thing was, I felt like I would miss out on something better lol.
Actually now I have no regrets with starting my first site on what I knew best...because I was able to write my contents from my heart rather than my head...and people gravitate to that personal touch, esp when you place little anecdotes of your own little personal funny stories...and that way it's not just info and sales pitches but creating a relationship with your readers...:)
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You have really interesting ideas!
Don't worry too much about the advice not to go too broad. Think of all the people here in the Work From Home type niche. They cover everything from filling out surveys, working for Fiver or other online writing platforms and tons and tons of business/scams/shady platforms that they review in comparison with WA. That is a very broad niche. There are people in many broad niches here.
There are definite advantages to staying narrow but there are downsides too such as running out of things to write about, losing interest in such a narrow topic, putting all your eggs in one basket etc. Like you said, if something is dying that might not be a niche you want to get into.
There are successful people in both broad and narrow niches so do what makes you comfortable!
I am like you. I have a lot of interests. I couldn't stand the thought of one narrow niche. I have two broad niche sites.
I don't know if this post I wrote might help you, Generalization vs specialization in choosing a niche and domain name.
thanks so much for your reply, I will take a look at that post right now :)