Creating a niche

[Ironside]

I've read loads of information on doing well with AdSense and on more than a few occasions people have suggested that you find a good niche. Obviously it does help if you know what you are talking about, but how many people have chosen niche that they know nothing about? Is it a case of finding something and researching it?

From my experience it doesn't matter what niche you are in, you're not going to guarantee that you will continue to do well. For instance, the amount of people who visit my website has not dwindled at all in the last couple of years, in fact it's increased. However, my AdSense earnings have dropped to a ridiculously low level, I don't have an answer for why this has happened. I feel I AdSense is tormenting me at the moment. I'll get a couple of days where earnings seem to be picking up, then the next day it's absolutely diabolical again.

[Leosghost]

but how many people have chosen niche that they know nothing about?

ehow* is full of posts/articles/images from people who know nothing about the subject they are writing about but have researc^^^spu^^^^lagiarised what they found elsewhere..ehow's* adsense earnings seem healthy, as does their relationship with G..

I suspect ( from many years of browsing ) that well over 90% of the sites running adsense are owned by those who know nothing about their "niches", but are "researching", "spinning", plaigiarising, or stealing the content of others and slapping adsense code around it..describes 99% of blogger.com sites too..<= owned by G themselves and thus G are taking two bites from the cakes baked from the ingredients of other sites..

[IanCP]

Obviously it does help if you know what you are talking about

It is absolutely VITAL. Otherwise you are dead in the water before you even start.

How will people find you? Just submitting your site to Google and others will get you nowhere. You need to alert similar minded people to the presence of your site, this is usually through forums. Those forums quickly expose you as either being a voice of authority, or simply just another person with a half baked idea of the genre.

but how many people have chosen niche that they know nothing about?

I'd say over the last 20 years, about 90+% of sites created fall into that category.

A clue to that, albeit a tiny clue, on the standing of many sites on the internet is the quite low bar AdSense have set for people eligible for email support.

None of us know how many people have accounts with AdSense, certainly it must be a very huge number. Imagine the support required if so many of them contacted Google with real or imagined problems. Yet AdSense offer it to anyone earning $100 a month. This suggests to me?

a) The vast majority of sites across the internet with AdSense don't generate a great deal of traffic or revenue.
b) Without a great deal of traffic, they likely are not valuable sites because they don't contain valuable content.

On the other side of the scale:
Having said that in a long winded way, I know of many valuable sites with compelling content in my genre which wouldn't even appear in Google. They are simply not presented in a searchable form. One startling example I know of had each page name...

Lecture 1.txt, Lecture 2.txt...

Those pages were pure gold from a physicist friend who could blow me out of the water. I offered to help him fix it up and was snarled at - he wasn't interested in search engines [Google had only just started] he was only interested in his friends.

[netmeg]

You can either make yourself an expert or authority in a niche and rely on knowledge differential, or you can find a problem that you can solve better than anyone else has solved it. I wasn't an expert in a few of my niches when I started out, but I *was* an expert in digging out information and presenting it in a useful way for the people who were looking for it. Because I know how to find stuff that the casual user can't.

If you can't think of an area to make yourself an expert in (that's also likely to attract lucrative ads and not too much competition - hard to find now!) then you might start listening when people start sentences with "I wish...", "I need...", "I want..." and so on. I've tried several niches that way - a couple have worked, most haven't. But it's a worthy exercise, even if you don't follow through with it, because you just might hit on something good.

[hannamyluv]

an expert in digging out information and presenting it in a useful way for the people who were looking for it

This combined with IanCP's comments, I would agree with in regards to niches. I am not a big fan of picking niches because they are profitable (they may make a profit but you will come to hate them if you don't like them and it will show), but niches you want to know more about or love but are not an "expert" can be very good - as long as you know how to access the inaccessible info on those topics.

I will freely admit that our site is largely based on this concept. We have a very broad topic and no one can be an expert in all of it. But we have passionate people, who love the broad topic, who love to learn about the very detailed nuances within the niche. Even when it was just me, I am passionate about a topic and loved learning about the tiny parts of it. It makes for great content, which has set us apart in our niche. We frequently access "hidden" content on topics and we then package (repackage?) that information it in a way that average people can find, understand and enjoy. To be honest, that idea is literally written into our mission statement - that idea of taking information too technical for most people and making it understandable and findable. People love it. And we provide support beyond that too, which was mentioned as well.

Every person I have ever coached about doing this, I have told they need a topic they love for it to be a long term prospect. You don't need to be an expert but if you want something that lasts, you do need to be at least interested. Passionate would be better, but let's just take baby steps here.