[winningratings]

Finding your first niche is a really important skill to grasp - in fact finding a niche full stop is a vital part of your online success

The basics are that there are millions of websites out there and so if you try and compete against keywords or themes where the interent is already crowded, then your site wont be listed high enough in the search engines for anyone to know its there

Its a vital part of getting traffic and generating sales to pick the right kind of niches, and therefore get lots of free traffic every day from the search engines. these visitors are highly targeted and that means they are really interested in your website content. These people are thousands of times more likely to buy than say some guaranteed traffic service or even an advertising campaign. You will find that you don't need a huge number of quality visitors to actually start making quite alot of money, say $500 or so - this is my experience anyway

So how do you go about it

A simple approach I use is first start with a main keyword - notice I say a keyword and not a keyword phrase. Its best to start "at the top" of the keyword structure so to speak, and work down

So say if you are going to be an affiliate for a product to do with "fishing" - then I would go to google and type in "fishing" You will see probably loads and loads of sites in the box at the top where it says 1-10 out of xxx,xxx. You want to get this "out of" number down - if you look at something like "mobile phone" or "business opportunity", "work from home" etc you will see its way way too high

Now I would look down the ads and the main listings - but especially the ads down the right hand side, and see if you can find another word which you can add to your main keyword - in this case "fishing" - so say we found "fishing tackle" that would make a 2 word keyphrase.

Then you can go back to the search box and see how many sites you get when you type in your 2-word phrase. It might still be too many so you might need to try other keyword phrases - but fairly quickly you should be able to find something that you can "go with"

One final point is that if you type in a keyphrase and you see that there are very few ads down the right hand side - then this is a warning point. Discard this keyphrase immediately and go back to finding more. You should have at least 8 ads otherwise forget the niche. The advertisers are important because these people are paying a huge amount of money to get their ad on the first page. There is a kind of auction, and only the people who have either paid the most per click or get the most clicks on their ads that will get them on the first page - so they can't afford to be paying say $2 a click unless the ad really is working, so this gives you a clue