The first step is picking a niche. But how do you do that?
You want to start a website to make money. But what should it be about? How do you go about picking a niche for your content marketing site? Should you pick a subject you love or a subject that is super-profitable? And how do you know what is super-profitable anyway? A lot of people quit right here. This open-ended question can get us stuck in endless analysis paralysis.
But there are ways to get out of the morass. Let’s start by thinking about what factors we might want to consider in order to pick a great niche. Luckily, we don’t have to start this analysis from scratch. The Japanese have already done the heavy lifting for us. A Japanese concept– Ikigai– is a conceptual tool for understanding “your reason for being.” Take a look:
Ikigai is obviously a useful way of looking at the big choices in our life. Whether you are picking a career, gig work or a side hustle, Ikigai has a lot to say about our eventual job satisfaction.
I have had jobs in every one of the three-circle intersections. Yet, I haven’t hit that winning lottery ticket of work that is true Ikigai– ie. at the intersection of all four circles. But hey, I’m not giving up on the dream! To level with you, in the big picture of my own life, I don’t think my content marketing business is going to hit the Ikigai bulls-eye. But even so, using this framework to pick our niche is going to be super useful.
Cool idea, but what if I’ve already picked a niche?
The Ikigai framework is so useful, I would argue that even if you have already chosen a niche– but you have not started any work on it– you should run your niche through the 4-step Ikigai analysis. I am living proof that this is a good idea. When I started Crunchle, I had already chosen my “money site” niche. I was going to build a site about homeschooling resources. Keyword competition is fairly low, and I have a jump start on article ideas since I have had a few years of homeschooling under my belt.
Oops. Not a good move. When I put my decision through the Ikigai test, it totally failed. As I wrote this article, I stepped through the Ikigai process. Through asking myself the four Ikigai questions, I figured out my original niche choice (homeschooling) was sub-optimal and I could do better.
Homeschooling as a niche fails for two and half reasons. First, when I thought about the Ikigai notion of doing something that I love, I realized I love thinking about education, but not specifically about homeschooling. In fact, the articles I was most excited to write had little to do with homeschooling, and much more to do with how to support a child’s education with supplementation.
Second, and this is the half failure, as I thought about what my theoretical readers needed (the Ikigai category of “what the world needs”) I realized that the needs of the homeschoolers was much more narrow– too narrow probably– relative to the scope of needs of readers who just wanted to augment their kids education.
The third Ikigai failure was obvious when I looked at which niche could make (more) money. The profitability of keywords related to education supplementation were higher than homeschool related keywords, despite a similar keyword difficulty.
This analysis pretty quickly let me know that I needed to pivot. I had already bought a domain name for the homeschooling site. Realizing I needed to pivot, I went back to step three. I bought a domain name much better suited to educational supplementation. TLDR; Even if you have picked your niche, use IkIgai to double check your assumptions. Don’t be afraid to pivot!
Ikagai as a framework for picking the best niche.
Ikagai begins by imagining that there are four metrics we can use for evaluating our work decisions:
- What we are good at
- What we love
- What the world needs
- What we can be paid for
Let’s use these four questions to guide us in deciding the best niche for us to run with.
Ikigai #1: Understanding what we are good at.
There are certain things you must be good at to be successful at this (content marketing) business. You must be patient. (It will take six months to a year, possibly more, to see results!) You must be organized (there are a lot of moving parts to content marketing.) And you must like research (even if your research is limited to figuring out ways to outsource everything.)
Can you succeed if you suck at a lot of the work involved? Sure, as long as you are good at finding someone else who can rock it. Anywhere you have a weakness in your skill set you can find a freelancer to do that job. For more on what skills you need exactly, see this post where I breakdown all the sub-jobs required to launch, grow and sell a website.
So, for our Ikigai analyis, we are just going to check the “Yeah! I’m good at this stuff” box as a big yes.
Ikigai #2: What the world needs.
I’m not going to tell you that the world needs another review site of hockey sticks or scented candles. Nor will I lie and tell you should only publish content on something you fiercely believe the world needs like veganism or cheaper heart stents. But understanding the Ikigai idea of “what the world needs” doesn’t need to be ignored, nor does it need to be interpreted literally.
For a second let’s consider our theoretical reader. If everything is going well, he or she ended up on your website from searching for something in particular. If you are crushing it, you’re going to be ranked at the top of the search results. But why did the user search in the first place? You guessed it, because that reader needed some specific information. And Google (or Bing, or whatever) told them that you were the best place to resolve this need.
Don’t ask, “what does the world need” in the sense of: “what would make the world more like the utopia I imagine”. Instead, ask the related question, “where can add I value” or “what do my readers need”. Posing the Ikigai question this way will move us toward picking a great niche. When we shift the question, we use “adding value to other peoples’ lives” as one of the measuring sticks for our choice. If you use this question to inform your choice, the niche you choose will be more useful, valuable, and eventually successful.
Getting down to the actual step-by-step plan of picking a niche, we’ll use this litmus test: “Can I add value on this subject”. In other words: “Do people need this (information)”. If the answer is yes, we know that niche can be put on our best candidates list.
Ikigai #3: Do what you love. And if that isn’t an option, do what is interesting.
Do you have to choose a niche that you love? Nope. But if you pick something that you are at minimum interested in– something you could grow to love– you will dramatically increase your odds of success.
Look, the fact is that to succeed at this you are going to have to generate 200,000 to 300,000 words of great (or at least very good) content, and likely more. Even if you outsource all of that writing, you’ll still have to create outlines and find keywords; you’ll still have to re-read, edit, and otherwise engage with the material. Can you do that for 300,000 words if the subject bores you completely?
That was supposed to be a rhetorical question. And the right answer was obviously, “No! I won’t be able to do it if it bores me completely!” But here I want to add a caveat. There are some people who love making a lot of money more than any possible topic they could pick for their niche site. If this describes you, then yes, a niche that has high earnings potential will be inherently interesting to you. If this is your outlook, then literally anything with low competition and high earnings is going to appeal. This outlook tends to be more realistic for people who are starting with a reasonable budget who plan on outsourcing the writing.
Fact: In general, the higher odds winning niche is going to be something that 18 months from now you are still looking forward to learning more about, or at least sharing more about.
Reasons to not pick a niche on a topic you love.
This brings up a huge question that pops up all the time on forums where people discuss content marketing. Should you pick something you already know a lot about? Of course, choosing something you know about will make launching and generating the first 75,000 words easier for sure. But there are a lot of reasons you might want to avoid picking something you know a lot about like:
Knowing a lot about something and wanting to think about it all the time are very different. (You might love your day job and be an expert on the topic, but to think about it hours more every day might lead to burnout.)
You might know a lot about a subject, but want to keep it off-limits to keep it fun. (I love ice hockey, but that’s how I relax. I don’t want hockey to become a job or a chore.)
You might love a subject, but you are starting a business, not a vanity press. (This one is pretty obvious. The next Ikigai concept will help us make sure we optimize for profits.)
The big take-aways from this section should be:
You don’t have to already know all about a topic to love a topic.
You don’t have to love a topic right now. Being super interested in it can grow into a love of the topic over time.
You don’t have to be super interested if you just love the money. You can outsource the writing and wait for a payday.
You do have to love something (the niche itself; learning all about the niche; or the money) to have the best odds of sticking with it long enough to get paid.
Ikigai #4: Do what makes money.
Now we get to the question that can really slice through the bad ideas. Ikigai: Do what makes money. But how do you know what is going to make money?
Do you have three hours? Good. Because that and a credit card number (that you’ll use for a free trial) is all it will take to find out what makes money. One quick note: knowing what makes money is different from knowing if it will make you money. I can’t predict if you will be successful at this. I can’t even predict if I’m going to be successful at this. But there is a very straightforward way to figure out which niches make money.
There are a handful of amazing tools that tell you everything about the profit potential (and difficulty) of niches your considering. The two most popular tools are Ahrefs and SemRush. They are pricey, but they both offer 7 day free trials if you have a credit card to sign up with. As long as you cancel within that 7 days, you don’t get hammered with a $199 charge. (If you have a bigger budget to start, either of these tools is amazing and you might want a full month of service.)
If you sign up for either service with your initial list of possible niches ready to go, you’ll know what your best option is within a few hours, Later in this article I am going to walk through my exact though process of finding my niche, and highlight exactly how I used my tool of choice (Longtail Pro) to evaluate my money niche.
Putting all of the Ikigai steps together. A checklist for choosing the best website idea.
OK. Now we know what we need to do, so let’s do it. But let’s really do it, as in: here is your checklist! All you need to do is grind down and do each step. (Hey, there are only four steps, with a max time investment of five and a hlaf hours!) One foot in front of the other, and at then end, you’ll have a niche picked and you’ll be off to the races!
STEP 1: What are you good at? Total time = 5 minutes.
Gut check. Can you do these 18 different types of work an affiliate marketing site needs? If not, can you hire someone for each type of work? Stop for a minute and really decide if you’ve got the chops for this business. If you’ve gotten this far in this article, you probably don’t need to think about too long. You already know you are good to go!
Cool. The answer is yes. So Check this one off and let’s hit the next step.
STEP 2: Making an initial list of ideas you love, or could grow to love. Total time = 30 minutes.
This can be easy or hard. Don’t lock up. Don’t judge the worthiness of your interests. Just write it all down. Maybe this list will have two things on it or twenty. Do you play a sport? What do you read about in your down time? What was the last thing you did for yourself? The key here is to set a fifteen minute timer. Our goal is to have an absolute answer by the end of this article. No analysis paralysis! Ready. Set. Go.
Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
Got your starter list? Great. Now we want to make it a bit larger. Let’s check three sources of niche ideas. As we look at these sources, as quickly as we can, we’ll add anything that catches our eye.
As you look at these three resources don’t be afraid to pick something you know nothing about. Do focus on picking things that are interesting enough that you could sustain your focus for 18 months. For example, I love ice hockey, but I don’t want to focus on it as my niche. I don’t want what I do for fun to turn into work. Yet floorball– something I know nothing about– could be a good niche pick for me given my interest in hockey.
Resource 1: Crunchle!
Here is a video of 426 niche ideas for you. If you’d rather look the list, or copy and paste it into a spreadsheet, here is all 426 niche ideas in one place.
Resource 2: Ali Express Category Headers
If you have ever dabbled in selling on Amazon, or you have ordered stuff directly from China, you are probably familiar with AliExpress. If you haven’t used it, AliExpress is an eCommerce site that allows you to order every type of schlock you can imagine directly from China. Using AliExpress, you can skip the middleman who is selling the same cheap junk through Amazon; you’ll spend 70% less as long as you’re willing to wait 4 to 6 weeks for delivery.
How can AliExpress help us choose a niche? Simple! AliExpress does a great job of laying out category and sub-category headers. By looking at these lists, you can find a ready-made idea that you know people are already spending money on. Any of the categories you find on AliExpress would also work for drop-shipping. You might want to keep that possibility open as another way to monetize your traffic later.
Here is an example of AliExpress sub-category listings. This is just a screen shot I took of one category. If you head on over to AliExpress and hover over any of the category listings, you’ll be able to find a huge number of great niche ideas.
Resource 3: Reddit List. (Reddit, but only indirectly.)
Here is one of my favorite sites on the web, RedditList. It isn’t reddit itself, but it’s a tool that analyzes data scraped from reddit. When you head on over there, you’ll find three columns of data: (1) recent activity, (2) Subscribers and (3) Growth (24 hours). These three lists, which go on for pages and pages, simply look at all the different subreddits, listed by traffic and growth.
I love looking at this stuff! (Warning, this can be a real time suck.) If it is a subreddit that is growing fast, or if it already has 50,000+ subscribers, or if it is a topic with a lot of monetization possibilities, it could work for your niche!
Here is a screenshot from RedditList. Clearly, not every topic here works as a niche, but many of them do. Oh wow, just looking at this short list, I could get excited about starting a fantasy baseball site or a pre-med site. I’m not sure if either of these have much profit potential, but that analysis comes later. For now, let’s just brainstorm and get our initial target niche ideas down on paper.
OK. So hopefully you’ve brainstormed using these resources (and hopefully you set a timer and spent no more than 15 minutes on it!) Now you have an awesome list of ideas. Our next step is to analyze these starter ideas using the next three Ikigai questions. Let’s do it!
STEP 3: Do the readers need it? Will it make money? Total time = 4 Hours max. Shoot for 3.
To answer the two Ikigai questions of “Do the readers need it” and “Is it profitable”, we will need a research tool that allows us to look at keyword competitiveness and the approximate number of searches for each of the ideas we have on our list so far.
There are so many tools available to do this keyword research, but the sad fact is that the two killer tools are super expensive. Also, I like one cheap and awesome tool that works for this step, but later (like in month 2+) you’ll likely need one of the two expensive tools. There are also a whole lot of tools in between, but I was disappointed in most of those so I’ll save space and not cover them here.
As an aside, I’d love to toss up an affiliate link here and send you to one of the tools that pay a high affiliate commission, and that’s what most blogs do, but I’ll never cheat any Crunchle reader just to make a dime. My reputation and integrity matter way too much to me to do that. So, I’ll just focus on the two exceptional– but insanely pricey– keyword tools: Ahrefs and Semrush, and one cheap tool that I like: Longtail Pro. And yes, on two of those links (Semrush and Longtail pro) if you click through and purchase, I’ll get a commission. As always, I deeply appreciate it if you give me a small tip this way. Thanks!)
The good news is that even though each of the two expensive tools will set you back around $100 or $200 a month (depending on the plan you sign up for) they both offer a 7-day free trial that will allow you to get a ton of research done before you pay a cent. Can you figure out everything you need in 7 days? Yes, definitely. You might need another subscription at some point (perhaps around the end of the second or third month) but for now, you’ll be able to decide on your niche, and create an initial content plan by really grinding during your 7 day free trial.
Of course, the other way to go is to use the cheap tool– Longtail Pro– at only $37 for a month, you’ll be able to get all the critical starting info you need and not bust your budget; you’ll also have a whole month to look at the data.
If you are going the free trial way, which is better, Ahrefs or Semrush,?
Here is a curious fact about the two tools that left me scratching my head. When I would read reviews for both of these tools, virtually every website and blog post I found gave the edge to Semrush. Review after review: they all said Ahrefs was good, but that Semrush was better. Nothing odd about that. But here is where it gets weird: in every Reddit post I read where someone asks which tool was better, there was a preference for Ahrefs. Bottom line: in forum posts, Ahrefs is considered better. On blogs, Semrush wins. Strange, right?
Well, it’s only strange until you look at affiliate commissions. Ahrefs has no affiliate program! If a blogger gives a slight edge to Ahrefs, and his/her user subscribes, there is absolutley zero payoff. But, when the blogger gives the advantage to Semrush they get paid, and the Semrush payment is pretty sweet. It reminds me of this Upton Sunclair quote:
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
So yeah, I’d like to recommend Semrush to you 🙂 I’d love to get paid for my content! But more seriously, what are the differences and why should you pick one over the other? Having used both, I’ll tell you that Semrush gets me so depressed that I am ready to quit building my affiliate sites before I’ve even started. Semrush just doesn’t show any keyword as having a competition level (on a scale of 1 to 100) of less than 55 or so. Everything below 55 is listed as “N/A”.
Semrush depressed me. But, if you can ignore what it has to say about competition, it’s a great tool.
Semrush will make you feel defeated about how hard this is going to be. Yet, if you compare keyword difficulty across three tools– Ahrefs, Semrush, and Longtail Pro– you can see this is a quirk of Semrush, and may not tell the whole story about keyword difficulty. Ahrefs and Longtail Pro give you a much more nuanced view of competitiveness.
If you feel brave and can stay tough in the face of depressing keyword difficulty ratings, and you want to avoid spending any money (in other words, you are going to rely entirely on free trials), Semrush is great for our first free trial. Since Ahrefs and Semrush both offer a 7-day free trial, our strategy will be to use Semrush for picking our niche and for creating our initial article (and keyword) plan. Between the two, I like Ahrefs better. It has more nuanced information about keyword difficulty and deeper analysis of backlinks. So, a month or two after our launch, we’ll use the 7-day free trial at Ahrefs to do a second round of keyword research, and to push hard on our backlink research. By saving our Ahrefs free trial for when we know more about what we are doing, we can get more out of it.
In the next section I’m going to go through my detailed process of looking at keywords of my targeted niche topics. But I’d like to shamelessly ask you to use my Semrush affiliate link if you decide to try the Semrush free trial. If you want to use Longtail Pro, here is my affiliate link for it. Using my affiliate links does not cost you anything, it just means Semrush will give me a commission for sending you over there to try it out. Another way to help support my efforts to share everything I learn, is buying me a virtual cup of coffee on Patreon. Thanks! Now back to the important stuff 🙂
Sites don’t rank, content ranks.
I’ve already shared the story of how I decided to start a content marketing site, and one of the keys was sitting next to the SEO dude at my last job. I learned a lot from him, and one of the most important takeaways he would say again and again, “sites don’t rank, content ranks.” His point was that Google won’t put you at the top of the results for your website, they will put you up there for a specific piece of content you’ve written that best satisfies the search intent of the person searching.
This point is huge. It means that when we are looking at keywords to determine if our site can be profitable, we need to look at the keywords for the articles we are thinking about writing, not for keywords for the big ideas of the website itself. In other words, think of the niche site you want to launch as a big circus tent. Your keyword research should be focused on the acts that will perform under the bigtop. Your circus tent is youth soccer? Your performers might be, “what is the right size soccer ball for my kindergartner?” Your circus tent is Latin? One of your performers might be, “National Latin Exam registration rules.”
Once you have signed up for your keyword research tool, you can put in keywords that are all about the tent, but we only want to use those to find the kind of keywords that would qualify as performers. I put in homeschooling (my circus tent) and Longtail Pro gives me a lot of ideas for performers:
I’ve highlighted what jumped out at me here: homeschool computer curriculum. Hey! This is something I could write an article about. The keyword competitiveness (34 out of 100) is something I feel good about tackling. The search volume looks low, but that is because we are looking at one variant. If I put the larger idea here into Semrush, I can see that the monthly search volume for the majority of the variants, is much larger at 3,400. Of course, not every variant will be applicable, but it give me a good idea of the possibilities.
When is it ok to choose a niche with very low volume keywords?
Remember the Ikigai idea of “Does the world need it?” Which we are translating as, “Do searchers need it?” We’ll use the keyword variations to determine this. If the keyword variations (in total) are only a few hundred, you might have to ask yourself if the searchers need it. Of course, this analysis is hugely impacted by where in the purchasing funnel that traffic is, and what the possible commission is.
In other words, if,
- Two hundred people a month search for widget-x, and
- they only search for widget-x at the moment they are about to pull the trigger on a purchase, and
- the widget-x costs $10,000 and you’ll get a cool grand for sending a buyer to the Widget-x website, then
- Sure(!!!), get click-clacking and get some widget-x content up.
But, for most keyword variations with incredibly low search volume (versu the widget-x example), facts are that you won’t be able to make much money.
Before you dig into the Ikigai question of, “Is it profitable” look at keyword variations of article topics you are thinking about. If those aren’t in the thousands, you might want to rethink how much the searchers need it.
Metrics for Evaluating Opportunity: What is the K.O.V.
Digging deeper, I’d like us to focus on CPC as one of the most important evaluation metrics. Why am I looking at cost per click (CPC)? Cost per click is what an advertiser is willing to pay (Google adwords for example) for an affiliate marketer who sends one user (“one click”) to their money site. This CPC is a great proxy for how valuable the traffic is. In fact, looking at the CPC numbers for “performers” in the homeschooling tent led me to understand that I needed to change my focus to a broader educational resources site. By making my circus tent bigger– holding a greater variety of performers– I saw very quickly I’d be able to compete for lower competition keywords that were simultaneously worth a lot more to advertisers.
When you are looking at all this data, there are two approaches to the analysis. The first is too sift through, thinking of article topic after article topic and entering the keywords for those article ideas. As you look at the Semrush, Ahrefs, or Longtail Pro output, you’ll get a gut feeling for the CPC and the traffic.
If you’d rather work through the data more empirically, the other way to break things down is to download the data for a list of keywords and open it in excel. All of the keyword tools allow exporting data with one-click, so this process is very straightforward.
Once you have the data in excel, there are a lot of ways to slice and dice it, but I like sorting it by keyword difficulty, adding in a column where I multiply traffic by cost-per-click to give me a value I can assign to each keyword phrase. Basically I am just multiplying the size of the opportunity (the traffic) by the value of the opportunity (the CPC). Lets call this metric “keyword opportunity-value” or K.O.V.
Then I look at the average of the K.O.V. across keyword difficulty groups. In other words, I average all the K.O.V.’s of the keywords with a keyword difficulty of 20 through 29, then I get the average of keyword difficulty 30-39, and so on.
When I am evaluating my own opportunities, I focus on keywords in the easiest group. If I am feeling ambitious, I might tackle one of the easier keyword difficulty phrases in the medium group. These last two paragraphs might be confusing without visuals, so here is an example of K.O.V. analysis– using Longtail Pro as my tool, and using the “seed” keyword phrase, “Homeschool How To”
If you aren’t going to evaluate your potential niche picks via the “gut check” method, this is just one analytical approach you can use. The idea is to take the list that you made in Steps 1 and 2 above and to dig, dig, and dig more into the keywords looking for opportunities. If you can find 20 to 50 article ideas with a decent K.O.V. that can all fit in the niche “tent” on your list, then that niche can work.
Observations on the relationship between profitability and difficulty.
One quick– perhaps obvious– point. In general, there will be a relationship between profitability and difficulty. For example, personal finance has huge affiliate commission possibilities, but those keywords are super difficult to crack Google rankings for. In general, this relationship will hold true, which probably will end up steering you toward lower competition keywords, which sadly pushes you toward less lucrative payoffs.
The good news is that there are exceptions. You might find a neglected back-alley in a hyper-competitive niche where you can rank with content that the big players haven’t yet covered. But I think what is important is to make sure that your “tent” has enough space to cover plenty of “performing” low competition keywords.
Google’s YMYL. A critical point about how much harder health and money niches will be to rank with.
One more important point. If you are thinking about launching a niche site that has to do with health (e.g. vitamins, a particular illness, diets) or money (e.g. investments, savings, banking), Google is going to be extra harsh in handing out tippy-top rankings to you. Google has publicly stated that these topics– they call them YMYL, “Your Money, Your Life” topics– are subject to extra scrutiny and more challenging benchmarks for ranking. If you want to read more about this– and read more about Google’s efforts to fight disinformation in general– check out this amazing white paper they published, “How Google Fights Disinformation.” The YMYL stuff starts on page 13, but the whole thing is interested if you enjoy reading wonky stuff :).
What does it look like to dig, dig, dig in to the data? Looking at my excel screenshot above, I see that “homeschool kindergarten” is a pretty great article topic. The K.O.V. is almost $8,000 a month and the keyword competitiveness is below 30. Cool. Now, I throw that term– “homeschool kindergarten”– into Longtail Pro, and analyze those results. This is what I get:
Here is a quick note on using K.O.V. as a metric… K.O.V. doesn’t literally tell you what the actual profit opportunity is for you in this niche. A single piece of content will (hopefully) rank for many keywords. And, the dollar value we are using for our analysis is what advertisers are willing to pay for a click. You may not be monetizing your content through these ads. Further, because these CPC’s are determined through what is effectively an auction, these CPC prices may not be stable. Another crucial point: even if you are Google’s number one result for a keyword, you won’t get all the traffic. So K.O.V. isn’t the be-all-end-all in metrics. But, what K.O.V. does do well is to give a snapshot of relative opportunities across related keywords, different keywords, and different niches.
The $1000 question: is gut checking an ok way to evaluate? I personally don’t feel comfortable without throwing a lot of data into a spreadsheet and getting an apples to apples comparison. In fact, doing this sort of evaluation and spending about three hours with a spreadsheet I think helped me tremendously.
When I started Crunchle, my plan was to have my money site be about homeschooling. But looking at the K.O.V. of homeschooling keywords revealed that broader educational keywords (for example, educational apps) would be a much better “tent” for me to have better array of “performers.” Having confessed that I prefer crunching numbers, what truly matters is that you JUST START! If looking at the data, but “going with your gut” as you digest the data, will get you to the next step (buying hosting) without locking up and losing a month of progress to analysis paralysis, then do it!
If the golden rule of real estate investing is “location, location, location” then the golden rule for our business is “content, content, content.” A fear of producing content, (also: fear of starting, fear of failing, fear of succeeding, etc.) can manifest as spending way too much time trying to figure out a niche. That’s why we limit Step 3– analyzing the two Ikigai ideas of “what the readers need” and “is it profitable” to a maximum of four hours. Look at numbers, yes, but after a certain amount of research you will be subject to the law of diminishing returns!
When you start this step, set a timer. Commit to choosing your niche by the end of the morning, the end of the afternoon, or before you go to bed. This doesn’t mean you should be in such a hurry to commit you skip the keyword analysis altogether; it simply means that every hour after the inital chunk of work, will give you less and less actionable insight. What you learn in a few hours will be enough. This isn’t a law like gravity. If you are four hours in and you feel like you need another hour to really feel solid, take it. The important– the critical(!)– point here is to not let your niche picking turn into a way of not starting. We have domain names to buy! We have websites to launch! We have content to write! Let’s get cracking!
STEP 4: Congratulate yourself! Total time = 1 Hour.
Did you pick a niche! Yeah! Celebrate! Grab your favorite beverage, kick your feet up and know that you just lept over one of the biggest hurdles: just starting. Give yourself a moment to savor your decision. Take a little bit of time to imagine all the cool articles you’ll write (or outsource, if you hate writing.) It’s a big deal to not only know your niche, but to know that you’ve committed and that you are on point to tackle the next task and keep this momentum going. Congrats!
As a final note, I always appreciate comments on my articles. And– if you like my content and find it useful– l always appreciate it if you’ll send it on to a friend. This next ask feels crass, but I am working hard to be able to do this full time. If you get any value out of what I am sharing here, I definitely appreciate anyone willing to buy me a virtual coffee over at Patreon. Good luck with your site!
Oh yeah! Head over to the next step, which should be posted soon: Action Report #2: Choosing Hosting. See you there 🙂
