How the heck do you pick a niche for Internet Marketing?

One of the toughest parts of SEO is starting out and trying to choose a great market or niche to enter. This can be tricky because you have so many choices and because every good SEO will know that if you get this stage wrong, you will be destined to reap extremely poor rewards. If you are selecting a market specifically to gain organic traffic from through search engine optimization, then there a few things you should be aware of:

Saturated Markets

There is nothing wrong with competition. In fact, active competitors will usually mean that a market is alive and kicking, and that can be a good thing. You should steer clear of markets that are ridiculously over saturated. Even though most markets are still growing, if there are thousands of extremely active and strong competitors, your chances of ranking well may be reduced.

There is no point going after heavily saturated markets because there are other markets out there which you can generate huge amounts of money from that have minimal competition. Some markets that you should steer clear of are the internet marketing, weight loss and car insurance markets. They generate huge amounts of money, but it’s the big guys that make most of it.

Authority Markets

Another type of market that you want to avoid are authority markets. These can be almost impossible to break. Just like saturated markets, they are profitable and they can make you money. Why waste so much time and effort when you can use it in another market that you will make you twice as much money with the same amount of resources?

You can tell an authority market a mile away. They will usually have lots of .gov or .edu pages in the top 10. It is not impossible to outrank these sites, but because these sites are so trusted they attract a lot of high quality backlinks from other authority sites linking to them. This means these pages are constantly growing in power with high PR, high quality backlinks.

The health and business markets are some of the most powerful authority markets and you will be facing an uphill struggle to take any significant foothold away from the dominant sites.

Search Trends

If you are choosing a market based on organic traffic, then you will need to make sure that it is getting constant and steady traffic via the search engines. If you want to use the search engines as a major source of traffic, you don’t want to suddenly find out half way through ranking a site that nobody is searching for your market.

Best to do a search for the market’s main keyword in a traffic analysis tool like Google Insights. Take a look at the traffic trends and make sure that it is steady and either has a constant or increasing traffic trend line.

You really do not want to enter a market that has a decreasing trend line. It will mean your traffic numbers will only get smaller. It will also seriously affect the re-sale value of whatever domain you purchase, as people do not want to buy websites in dying markets.