Choosing a site category or niche is one of the first things you would want to consider if you have monetization in your future plans. The first idea could be to create a website or blog with a range of topics to attract a bigger audience. Well, the practice shows, this is not a good choice.
According to ShoutMeLoud, blogs that try to cover multiple topics perform worse than those concentrating on one single niche and digging deep in it. Of course, there are different definitions to “perform good/bad”, we’ll take monetization as a main determining factor.
Why do you need a site category?
What affects monetization of a website in the first place? Correct, it’s traffic! The more traffic comes to your site, the more money you’ll be able to earn. Now come two reasons that prove that a specialized site is going to be more profitable than a generalized one.
What affects monetization of a website in the first place? Correct, it’s traffic! The more traffic comes to your site, the more money you’ll be able to earn. Now come two reasons that prove that a specialized site is going to be more profitable than a generalized one.
- A too general subject of a site makes it difficult for you to get a loyal audience. As the readers don’t know what to expect from following your site, they may hesitate while subscribing to your news. In the modern world, we don’t have time to read all the information that’s coming to us, and prefer to get the most relevant and interesting features on the most needed topics.
- Acquiring organic traffic by search-engine optimization gets extremely hard if you target a huge variety of keywords. Moreover, if you follow SEO-changes that are happening at the moment in the online world, you know that search engines, namely Google, value authority, and competence. It’s hard to demonstrate a high level of proficiency on different topics and be a valuable source of information in the eyes of Google. On the contrary, extremely specific blogs tend to demonstrate impressive results in search engines even with basic SEO.
In addition to these factors, there is also a fact that targeted traffic is more useful in terms of online earnings. 1000 perfectly targeted visitors will bring more money from the ads than 5000 visitors who see the ads of the products they are not interested in.
Questions to ask yourself when choosing a niche
So what exactly matters in the niche-picking process?
Do you like it?
The first question most successful bloggers suggest you ask. The easiest for some and the toughest for others. We all tend to show better results when doing something we enjoy and have a strong interest in. There is a pretty good chance that if your blog succeeds, you will spend years of your life working in the niche of your choice, so try to be honest with yourself when answering the question.
Do you have enough knowledge about the topic?
If you want to create an authoritative source of information, you almost absolutely need to have a good base of theoretical and practical knowledge of the topic.
You can, of course, take up a kind of project where you start learning or doing something from a scratch, and share your insights with the readers at every step of your work.
However, if we’re talking about other cases, you want to show your readers that you are the right person to read and to take advice from. That’s why make sure your level of understanding helps you provide the most up-to-date, deep and useful information. What’s more, spend some quality time improving your skills, reading fresh news, participating in workshops or conferences to share the knowledge and opinions with experts in the field.
Is the niche profitable enough?
Yes, unfortunately, not all the niches are of the same level of profitability, and not all site categories provide the same level of income when you decide to monetize your site. We’re not saying that there are niches where you can’t make any money at all, but there are surely some that are very competitive or too narrow to attract the required amount of visitors.
It is also important not to choose the category you think is gainful or in-demand just because of its profitability. In this case, you may get the reverse effect and disappoint expectations of the potential buyer if the content of your site doesn’t have the expected quality.
