Knowing When to Quit a Niche

Having spent many years of my career as a Technical Product Manager, developing and managing product lines, I often had to propose and answer the question: “Should we continue to develop/market this product?” As I’ve been diligently working my first niche, I came to a point where I found it necessary to ask myself, “Should I continue working in this niche?” In asking this question to myself, I found my answer and thought my findings might help a few others that may be asking themselves a similar question.

First, let me say that my conclusion was that I should not continue with my initial niche as my priority. I will say that I plan to retain the site and expect to occasionally add to it so that it will continue to both grow and age in the eyes of Google. At some time in the future, as I learn and figure out better ways to establish this niche, I expect to return to it again. However, at this time, my determination is that I can have greater chances of success in a different niche.

Return on Time Invested

As I worked on building my website with my initial niche of ‘Youth Soccer’, I found a few questions which lead me to thinking more specifically about the “business” of the niche. In any product line I’ve managed, there are bunch of basic questions which the business must answer to a satisfactory level to determine whether to enter into or continue with a product, two of which I found pertinent to my niche:

• What’s the potential Return on Investment (ROI)?
• How long will it take to get to level of return?

In context of a product line, the investment is ultimately in terms of dollars necessary to develop and market the product. Although the time people spend on developing and marketing the product is factored into the investment, it’s typically rolled in as dollars being spent over a period of time.

In the context of affiliate marketing, although there is some financial investment into the website (e.g. domain name, monthly hosting costs, etc.), the biggest investment is my time and how much of it will be necessary to get to my revenue goals.

Challenges with My Initial Niche

As I spent many hours each day for nearly two months, I found a couple of factors that influenced my analysis of the business potential for my first niche:

Limited Keyword Space

I spent many hours, which probably totaled to a few days, looking for keywords. I tried many variations on differing subjects of youth soccer, related products, etc.

In many cases, Jaaxy was finding very few keywords that I could relate to topics on the website. And, although many of the relevant keywords did have low or very low competition, the traffic volume was also very low… not even coming close to the recommended starting point 50 searches per month.

Difficult to Valuable Reviews

In the area of soccer, there are many of the products which can be sold. However, the keyword investigations were showing me that there are not a lot of unique products for which people are looking for reviews. For instance, there are hundreds of soccer balls currently in the market, but there’s only measurable traffic for perhaps 2 or 3 specific balls in the market.

In other areas of soccer gear, the number of searches for specific reviews is a little higher, but in many cases I wasn’t finding searches for reviews… such as a specific brand or model of a soccer goal, etc.

The Analysis Result

Could I make this particular niche work? Probably. Does the ROI look good? Probably Not.

Lots of keywords, each having a little bit of traffic, will accumulate some volume of traffic over time. However, given that the training videos traffic guidance and calculations were based on at least 50 searches per month and much of the keywords I was finding for my niche were half (or less) of that minimum target, then I’d have to assume that it would take at least twice as many keywords and twice as long for the website to achieve the 1-year goals. So, I’d expect the revenue ramp to look shallow and long as compared to the training’s expectations.

So, What’s Next?

Before making my final decision to de-prioritize efforts on my initial niche, and now having a little better insight, I research some other niche topics and have found a new area to focus on. In researching the new niche, I found it addressing the challenges I encountered:

• I am able to find a lot of low-competition keywords with very satisfactory levels of search traffic. Actually, I already have a list of topics and keywords that will easily keep me writing for a year.
• Although this new niche start comes a couple months after setting my initial 30-day, 6-month, and 1-year goals, with so many more low-competition keywords meeting/exceeding the recommended minimum search volume, I expect that my traffic volume will be much steeper than my initial niche.
• With a much higher quantity of searches for specific product reviews, I expect that I’ll have more opportunities on my website for affiliate sales.
• In my research of the new niche, I have quickly uncovered ideas for building email lists and potentially creating/selling niche-related products of my own at some point in the future.

I know everyone’s situation is unique but I do hope this helps someone else who may be struggling with the decision to continue with a niche or to find a new one.