12 Guidelines for Choosing a Subject for Your Niche Website

The biggest decision you will make before launching your website is the niche that you will cover.

You should have a good idea about the broad subject area you are going to focus on, but to enable you to dominate a niche you will probably need to identify an angle that is not being covered or at least has weak competition. As a general rule the smaller the niche you choose the faster you will be able to get traction and establish yourself as a leading expert. However you need to ensure the niche is not too small or you will not be able to achieve your financial goals. Here is an example of how a category can be broken down into niches:

• Category: Fishing
• Sub-category: Fly-fishing
• Niche: Fly-fishing for Salmon
• Micro-niche: Fly-fishing for salmon in Scotland
• Nano-niche: Fly-fishing for salmon on the River Spey in Scotland

Below are 12 guidelines to help you choose the subject and narrow down your focus:

Guideline #1 – Be Passionate About Your Subject!

Pick a topic that you enjoy so much that you would be happy to write about it even if you weren’t getting paid. Remember that you’ll be spending most of your time thinking about this subject and speaking to other people who share your interest, so if you’re not passionate, someone who is will probably create a better site than yours.

Guideline #2 – Know Your Audience

The best websites are often written by people who are part of the audience they serve.  It’s important to know who your audience is so you can deliver content that meets their needs.  Knowing your audience will also help you learn how to reach them in the most cost-effective ways.

Guideline #3 – Use Unique and Exclusive Content

Unique content enhances your visitors’ experience and builds loyalty for your website.  Where will you get unique and exclusive content?  What will you do if your sources get cut off in the future?  Do you have alternative sources?

Guideline #4 – Ensure Sufficient Material for Regular Updates

Specialty websites depend on timely and frequently updated content to keep visitors interested and coming back for more.  Does your subject area have a steady stream of fresh news and data that can be updated at least weekly (and preferably daily)?

Guideline #5 – Establish Credibility With Your Visitors

Your visitors will keep coming back to your site only if you prove that you’re a credible and reliable source of information. Do you have the knowledge and experience to be seen as an expert in your subject area?

Guideline #6 – Create Member Interaction

One of the benefits of creating an online (as opposed to print) publication is the ability to create a virtual community online that allows members to interact with each other and with you, the owner.  Does your subject lend itself to this kind of interaction?  Or would your potential members be in competition with each other and reluctant to interact?  Remember that the more communication you encourage, the stronger the sense of community among your membership, which translates into greater loyalty for your website.

Guideline #7 – Avoid Subjects with Natural End Dates

It's best to avoid subjects that have a natural end date for your audience. For example, a website about how to plan your wedding will keep people interested for the 6 to 12 months that it takes to plan their wedding, after which they won’t have a reason to come back to you anymore.  Choosing time-sensitive subjects means that you’ll need to be constantly building your audience to make up for the membership turnover.

Guideline #8 – Make Sure Your Potential Audience Uses the Internet

It may sound obvious, but there are many people who still don’t have access to the Internet.  So make sure your target audience has regular access to computers and the Internet.  You should also make sure that the type of content on your website matches your audience’s Internet capabilities.  So for example, you don’t want to provide a lot of video content to people with slow dial-up connections.

Guideline #9 – Reduce Your Audience’s Pain or Increase Their Gain

Every successful content-driven website must provide information that its audience sees as useful and valuable.  So ask yourself: “Does my website help increase a reader’s pleasure or reduce their pain?”  This is a good guideline to determine if you will be providing information that is valuable to someone.

Guideline #10 – Study the Competition

Spend some time studying your potential online and offline competition.  What is their content like?  Is it free or paid?  What prices do they charge?  What are their strengths and weaknesses?  How can you compete?  A good rule of thumb is instead of trying to compete head-on with an industry leader, find a fresh angle that they’re either not covering or you think you could cover better.

Guideline #11 – Niche is Best!

Before reading this article, part of your strategy may have been to aim for the broadest possible target audience.  This is a mistake that many aspiring editors make.  They assume that by aiming big, they will attract the biggest possible audience.

In reality, this has been proven wrong over and over again for small publishers.  There is a lot of evidence to show that the more specialized a website is, the more successful it can become.

So rather than creating a site about how to buy a house in Europe, it’s better to focus on how to buy a house in Spain.  Or better yet, how to buy a house in the Costa Blanca.

A few more examples:

Instead of writing about how to run a franchise, focus on how to run a successful food franchise in London.

Instead of writing about collecting toys, focus on collecting Beanie Baby stuffed animals.

You should think of a big audience as many smaller audiences bundled together.  So if you simply target the big audience as a whole, what will happen is that specialized websites with highly focused content will enter the market and attract each of your smaller audiences, leaving you with nothing.

Trying to be a jack-of-all-trades, but master of none, is Internet suicide.  So remember to aim for a well-defined audience with a common interest for whom you can provide the most specialized, valuable information on the Internet.  Think niche!

Guideline #12 – Choose a Subject that You’re Passionate About

This has already been mentioned in Guideline #1, but if there’s one thing that distinguishes an extremely successful content website from one that is just OK, without a doubt it would be the author’s passion for the subject.

Summary

You should aim to focus on the smallest niche possible that will enable to reach your financial goals. Remember that once you have dominated a niche you can always launch another niche site to dominate another associated niche, for example, if your first site is salmon fly-fishing in Scotland, your second site could be salmon fly-fishing in Canada. It is easier to grow your business one niche at a time than trying to launch a site that dominates a big category like 'fly-fishing'.