And this is even more important if you are a beginner.
When new bloggers on the scene begin blogging on a profitable niche, they are likely to give up after a short period of time due to not getting onto the first page of Google, since there's just so much competition in that particular niche.
If, on the other hand, you were to go for a relatively low competition niche, you can get noticed more easily, which means more website traffic, which in turn means more revenue, however you decide to make on it (affiliate marketing, advertising space and so on.)
So, profitable, low competition, high traffic. It sounds like a tall ask, I agree.
But it's certainly do-able. And in this article, I'm going to spell out exactly how to do it. It's easy when you know how!
In fact, there are a number of different ways to come across great, low competition blog niches, and I'll walk you through several of them.
A quick heads-up, the purpose of this article is not to simply list great, low-competition niches from when this article was written, but rather to guide you so that you can take the principles laid out there and apply them at any period of time in the future.
Here goes!
Many keyword research tools available are often free of charge, or at least have a free-to-use version available to use.
Moreover, they can give you very precise, very up-to-date information.
And you don't even need to be some kind of math wizkid to understand it all.
Sure, you may be greeted with numbers, and maybe graphs, but everything is clearly labeled on them, and if there's ever a term or an acronym you perhaps haven't seen before or don't recognize right away, all you have to do is open another tab and Google it.
To use such keyword research tools, such as Google Keyword Planner, all you have to do is type in a broad niche, and get the tool to bring up a spreadsheet (AKA list) of keywords in that niche.
These keywords are listed according to their relevance. The figures presented include the average monthly search volumes for each of those keywords.
This tells you how many times these words get Googled, how popular those search terms are, and it also hints at how much traffic a blog in this niche could fetch when done right.
And that's not all. Going back to finding low competition niches, the keyword research tools also display a column for competition.
And it's not always presented in terms of a figure, which is perfect if you don't have the best math brain.
Instead, the competition for these niches and keywords is categorized as low, medium, and high. It really couldn't get any easier!
But of course, if you're profit-hungry, then your niche identification does not stop there. And again, these keyword research tools are able to help!
Many keyword research tools also feature a column of bid numbers, which specify the bid range that advertisers have paid per click on these keywords and niches historically.
These tools give you the full picture - niche/keyword popularity, level of competition, and idea of profitability, based on actual historic data.
You only want to look at niches that are increasing in interest and popularity.
Rather than do a catch-all blog about education generally, you could focus on a subsection within that niche. For example, homeschooling, preparing to go into medical school, or preparing to sit the bar, or preparing to become a pilot.
People who share this interest and want to find out more about it, and maybe even join a like-minded community, are going to search for such terms specifically, and not just type in "education" into Google and go looking for a needle in a haystack.
The smaller, and more specific your niche is, the better placed it will be to have less competition.
Especially if the site is not a formal one, but rather one centered around people sharing their views on these matters outside the likes of Quora and Twitter.
Head on over to an online marketplace, such as Flippa.
First, you look for sites that have:
The domain names brought up ought to show you what niche each site is in (for SEO purposes), and of course, it will show you the sale price, which will tell you its current monetary value.
It will also give details on the number of visitors the site fetches, and its average monthly revenue (not net profit).
Once you have your list of attractive niches, you can put them through a keyword research tool in order to determine whether these niches and keywords are low competition or high.
This way, your list of attractive niches gets narrowed down, so you can pick out what niche/s to focus on.
My key piece of advice to you on this subject is to try to use several of these methods in tandem.
The more "tests" that you put your niche ideas through, the better the end result is sure to be, and you'll be onto a winner.
And my last piece of advice on these niche finding methods is to DO IT!