There are two main things you need in order to make money from a website – traffic and ways to monetize that traffic. The traffic ideally needs to come from search engines and the monetization options can range from ad programs such as AdSense to specific affiliate products that you can sell. In this article I’ll show you how to research both these factors to determine how profitable your niche could be.

Does Your Niche Have Good Traffic Levels?

I have been making a good 4-figure income from my blog based on around 500 visitors a day so you can aim for a number based on that but the trouble is that it is very difficult to predict exactly how much traffic your particular site can get. However, we don’t actually need to do that as there is an easier way.

A much more general ballpark is simply to see that there are a nice handful of sub topics within your topic that are being searched on within Google and are getting several hundred (or ideally in the thousands) of searches. If there is and you write about them on your site then you’ll grab a share of that traffic from a multitude of different sources.

Google provides their own keyword tool and they made a recent change to it to show actual numbers which is immensely helpful for the research we want to do here. Just do a search for “google adwords keyword tool” to find it. The tool doesn’t cost anything to use. Now I’ll show you a very simple technique for estimating the traffic – it won’t be 100% accurate so don’t obsess over it. We just want to get an idea.

The first thing you need to do is make sure that the tool it set to examine all data. There is a link ‘Results are tailored to’ which will default to your country and you want to set this to show ‘All Countries and Territories’. Now to get started just start typing in some very broad keywords relating to your topic such as ‘gardening’, ‘golf’, ‘money’, ‘cats’ etc. Pick single-word keywords to begin with.

Obviously these big words will show lots of results but what you’re looking for here are all the related keywords – this tool will bring back ideas for keywords relating to the one you typed in and shows the traffic potential for them. If you type in ‘cats’ for example, you get tons of keywords back that show you potential sub-topics such as cat grooming, Persian cats, cat diseases etc and all of these are potential blog topics.

What we should now have are potential sub topics and depending on how broad you started out each one may even have the potential to be a website in itself. But from here we can do down further. Type in one of the specialised keywords to get even more specific keywords. So a search for cat health might show topics such as dental issues, fur condition etc. If you see several levels of keywords like this then your topic has great potential.

On the other hand let’s say that you’ve chosen Carp Fishing as your niche but you are only interested in Carp Fishing in France. If you type in ‘carp fishing france’ into the Google keyword tool you get quite a few related keywords come up but they each have very small traffic numbers – each has less than 100. This is not good. You’re looking for a topic where the top level topics are getting thousands of visitors so although Carp Fishing is a great niche, specifying France only is too small.

Researching Monetization Options

In order to example the profit potential of the niche we first need to look at who else is already making money in it. We can use the same tool to do this. Look for a column labelled ‘Advertiser Competition’. A high number here shows you that there are lots of advertisers bidding on that keyword which is a good thing. What you are looking for is lots of keywords with high advertiser competition.

Now of course this only shows you the number of advertisers, it doesn’t show you what they are selling. You might be worried that perhaps these advertisers are all selling their own products and you won’t have anything to sell. If that’s the case we can do some additional specific research to find some products that you could sell.

Now one place where you are almost guaranteed to find an affiliate product for absolutely any niche is Amazon.com. Go to their website and simply type in some keywords relating to your topic. If something pops up (and it will!) there are products to promote as Amazon have an affiliate program for everything sold.

Of course Amazon only pay a small commission so you might not make a ton of money but that’s not the point. If there are products being sold at Amazon then it means your chosen niche is one that people are interested in. There are other places such as ClickBank and Commission Junction that carry products paying commissions as high as 75%. This is where you can make some serious money!

Caroline Middlebrook has been blogging in the Internet marketing niche since August 2007 and her popular blog generates a 4-figure revenue-stream each month. She teaches people how to make money blogging and offers downloads of her free guides & courses on her blog.