I use different methods to find a profitable niche.
One, I have a coupon site. This requires me to join every program on every network. This gives me the opportunity find out which merchants are dogs, and which "get it"
For example, if Walmart converts on the coupon site, and the AM is approachable, responds to emails, they pay on time, no reversal issues, etc... I investigate a niche.
I go to their website, look at their left navigation bar, and try to make a niche out of one of their sub-categories.
Goes something like this:
Apparel... too broad
Women's Apparel... too broad
Women's Shoes...... too broad
Women's Sneakers...... too broad
Women's Nike Sneakers... that works! That's a small enough niche
Then you just find out if enough people actually search for the term. How many results (competition) show up in Goog
Then you keep re-doing until you find one that has enough searches and not a ton of competition.
Then you seriously look at the top 5 results in the niche you decide on, and make sure you can build a site a good as, or better, then them.
Nine times out of 10, the end niche you decide on is not even close to what you started with.
In the above example, you may find that every variation of women's footwear is either saturated with competitors, or you've niched so much (just blue sneakers for red headed women dot com) that there's not enough searches to justify a website, that you end up with something completely different...
You start out thinking your niche is going to be about some kind of women's sneaker, and it ends up being crystal bar coasters
But when the moment comes... you see 480,000 people search for crystal bar coasters every month, and the results show no competition, or badly designed websites as competition, or the only results are deep link pages on the interior of sites (rather then a site devoted exclusively to the niche), it's a Eureka moment.
If you chose this niche because you decided Wlamart proved themselves to you on another of your sites... contact the AM. They KNOW what works and what doesn't. Tell them you just did the research and want to build a site around their crystal bar coasters. They too will get excited and share iideas with you.
AMs know what works, but they can't build a site because of the conflict of interest. You may luck out and he'll say "Yes! I've always wanted to build a site for our coasters, I have a great idea... it's yours!"
Conversely, and this happened to me, they may say We're gonna be deleting the coasters from our site, as there's no markup in them, so try something else. Or... stall a few months. We don't like our current manufacturer and we'll be swapping all the coasters out soon as we find a replacement.
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Well respected industry expert... or general flake. No one really knows :)
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