Today's excellent webinar reminded me of something I've been considering for a while. In discussing ways to come up wit a new niche, Lynn told of how her daughter stimulated an idea for a music site. Lynn then registered a domain relating to music. I've often heard Lynn say she believes in taking an idea, developing a site, then putting effort into it until it begins producing.
I've never had a problem coming up with ideas. Coming up with a good idea is different matter, though. If I've got a choice of spending 100-200 hours developing a project that will product $50/month or one that will produce $5000/month, I'd prefer to aim for the latter. My thought is that article marketing offers the best way to test a niche. Take a new idea, investigate it, find a product, set up a minimal landing page, then write some articles pointing to it. Squidoo pages and others like that might work, too. Then spend enough time backlinking to the articles to warrant some sort of response. It might take 10-20 short articles for a reasonable test, but the commitment would be much less than charging into a full website project.
Maybe this one of those things that is obvious to everyone but me, but I'm thinking visitors here would benefit from a discussion of niche testing. There are probably good niches for which the article approach would not be very responsive. I'd be interested in hearing other ideas for small-scale niche testing.
That's a great ideal Wade. I would be interested in that discussion. I am doing what you were talking about,without success so far, maybe if some of us talked about what we are trying and what is working and what's not we could help each other.
Those are all good ideas, Wade, but take time developing content and getting backlinks as well to some extent. So I just invest the time into getting the site started myself. Most people use Pay-Per-Click to test niches or to test the commercial intent of specific keyword phrases.
Testing Niche Ideas
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