How I Find a Profitable Niche to Generate Passive Income

If you are interested in starting a niche site but you are stuck and have no clue on how to find a profitable niche to start generating some passive income, then you’re not alone. I was in the same boat as you not too long ago so I understand your pain and frustration of not knowing if a niche is good (profitable) enough to compete in.

So today, I will be sharing with you my technique and I hope by the end of this, you will be able to go out and confidently find a profitable niche to compete in and create a new stream to start generating some passive income.

What do I consider as a profitable niche anyway?

1. Passion- Generally if you’re passionate about something, it’s (almost) 100x easier to do it better than if you are not.
2. Skillset- It’s important to either posses the necessary skills, learn them or have funds to hire someone that does.
3. Need (Demand)- There has to be enough need/demand for the solution that you hope to offer otherwise you’ll create something that only a handful of people want.
4. Low to Medium Competition- If the competition is too high, then being someone new about to enter this competitive territory might hurt you.

How I used to do it

I have proudly used all sort of tools to do my research in the past. From Google’s free Keyword planner (now Google Adwords Keyword Planner), Traffic Travis (free edition), to the Moz Toolbar. Although this was a good starting point, it didn’t get me far enough to uncover the “hidden gems” I was after. So most times, I just went into it blind and I’ll be the first to admit that I have failed a lot although my current technique has proven successful.

So my goal is to help you avoid the mistakes I made and be more successful in your research- faster!

The Challenge

In my opinion, when you’re starting out, one of the biggest challenge you face money. For that reason alone, you don’t want to go out and spend too much money on fancy tools because that might put you out of business before you even start.

So for the longest time like I mentioned earlier, I used free tools like Google’s KWP and Traffic Travis (the free edition). I did this until I had enough to invest in a “pro” tool. But looking back, I wish I just dove in right away and started paying a “pro” tool because it would have helped me save on so much time! I currently use a paid tool called SEMrush and I gotta say, I love it!

I’m not trying to get you to run and subscribe to their monthly service because I believe that at the end of the day, the tool is as good as the user right? That said, I just want to clear something- I don’t consider myself as a pro, I’m just a dude that has tried a ton of stuff and I know what has worked for me so that’s what I will share.

With that, let’s jump straight into it…

My 10-Step Process to Finding a Profitable Niche to Generate Passive Income

I realize the steps below might be a bit vague for someone just starting out online, so I plan to develop this post into a series explaining each step in detail. When I do, I’ll update this with a link.

1. Plug a domain, URL or Keyword into SEMrush’s Research Tool
2. Check the traffic, backlinks, keywords, similar sites etc that displays in the results
3. I normally repeat 1 & 2 until I find one that I believe pulls in enough traffic, is somewhat new (I don’t want to compete with a 20 yr old site with millions of hits because it’s kinda late to play catch up).
4. After I indentify a site that fits my criteria, I’ll start going through the keywords and gauge how hard they are to rank for as well as their CPC value- SEMrush helps with this because the results display the keyword’s difficulty.
5. I then take a look at the competition and see how easy/hard they are to beat. If the competition is too high, then I drop them. I line competitors up on a spreadsheet on Google Sheets and analyze them one by one. I even go as far as really digging into their sites and reading comments from people to uncover any opportunities, check their social media to gauge how big of a loyal fan base they have for their brand etc.
6. Once steps 1–5 are completed, I have a good idea if it makes business sense to compete in that niche or not. At this point, I’ll then “scrape” all these keywords and load them up in a spreadsheet for analyzing.
7. My criteria for analyzing keywords is a combination of highest search volume, lowest competition and highest CPC. I pick top 10 keywords and focus on ranking the first 3 then move down the list as I go.
8. I do a brief brand positioning strategy for my new brand then I’m ready to start rolling out.
9. At this point, I’ll start building the website and loading up content based on the keywords I selected in step 7 above and then once again work my way down the list.
10. The last step is to set up ads, affiliate links, value proposition, sign up forms, auto-responders, newsletters etc and as usual getting the word out.

That’s my 10 step process in summary 🙂

I’d love to hear what methods you have used in the past and whether or not they worked for you. I’m also open to hearing methods that work better than mine because I like improving.

Leave your comments below and tell me all about it!

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