Youtube video transcript
Hello, YouTube and a very special hello to all my subscribers. My name’s Phil. I’m the Income School student. If you’re watching this for the first time, this is my channel. All about my journey as a real Project 24 member. And that’s the cool setup by Jim harm and Ricky Kessler over at income school.
And it’s all about trying to build your own business online. And they say that if you follow their course in about 24, You should be able to replace your income. So this channel’s all about my personal journey. So if that’s something that you think you’re interested in, then don’t forget to subscribe to the channel because every week I’ll be releasing a new video about what I’m doing and how well I’m doing it.
So today we’re gonna be talking about one of the most important questions: the most important decisions you’re gonna make as an internet marketer. And that is the. About your website now. One of my viewers asked me to create this website. So if I say this wrong, you have to excuse me. This is a Bashi.
And they asked me exactly how do you pick a niche? So this is for them. And I’m going to explain how you can choose your niche in three pretty easy steps. Now, the first thing I should say is that this is all to do with the Project 24 method, which. Relying on organic traffic from SEO methods. Now, if you were deciding to build a website with paid traffic, my advice would be totally different.
So this is mainly building traffic through Google and other organic sources because. You have to approach it in a slightly different way. Okay. So let’s get into it and talk about those three steps. So if you are already a Project 24 member, you know that Jim and Ricky already have an excellent course about this, how to pick profitable niches, but I’m just gonna take this from a slightly different perspective.
And it’s just from my experience after seven months following the course and just how difficult it can be when you are new to this. And you’ve never built a successful website before and just how to keep motivated. So my steps are really about picking niches for that type of person. So if you think that sort of covers your case, Then this is the video for you to watch.
Okay. So if you haven’t chosen your niche yet, if you haven’t got a website and you are still arming and ironing about whether you should do this, what I want you to do is to set yourself a challenge. You’re gonna, firstly, set yourself a deadline. Two weeks in two weeks, you’re gonna choose your domain and you’re gonna start your website and start creating your content.
So over the next two weeks, what you’ll be doing is trying to be inspired, to think of niches, to research those niches, and then to choose the one that’s best for your case. And I don’t want you just to focus on one thing. I want you to create a short list of about two to five niches. And then at the end of the period, you’re gonna choose one to get started with, and you might have a couple more in your back pocket for the future.
Okay. And once you’ve chosen your list of niches, if you’re still a little bit unsure of which niche to choose, you can actually send me an email and I’m gonna try and help as many people as I can. And just give my point of view and maybe. Play devil’s advocate and help you make your decision.
If you want to do that, just send me an email at contact income school, student.com. And I will try and get back to as many people as I can. Okay. So let’s move on and talk about the three steps that you can follow in order to choose a niche that is perfect for you. So the first step is the brain.
Okay, so brainstorming, I think you should spend about a week doing this. You give yourself plenty of time and get as many ideas down on paper as you can, because a lot of those ideas you’re just gonna have to throw away. They’re not gonna be good niches. So there’s about six techniques that I can give you for becoming inspired and finding inspiration about niches and the first.
You probably heard this one before, but I’m gonna mention it anyway. The first one is to check your internet history. Now, guys, if you’re clever, you know how to keep the things that you don’t want other people to see out of your generic internet history. But basically what you’re looking for is if you have internet history from the last six months, a year, even longer, go back and just look at.
That you were researching, maybe it was a problem you had that you needed to find an answer to. Perhaps you had a project or you were trying to learn something new. Those are the sort of things that can be great niches because. Probably now you learn how to do it, so you can actually impart that knowledge onto other people.
And also you may remember that you were searching for something where you couldn’t find the answer as easily as you should have, and that would be a perfect niche. So go back through your internet history and just see what you were looking at a year ago. And, is that something that you are fairly interested in?
And could you write about that? Over the next couple. Technique two is all about using your friends and family as a resource. So basically what I’m saying is you can poll your friends and family just to see what they are doing at the moment. Any issues that they have, that sort of thing, any projects let’s say, so you can do this directly.
Facebook, for example, you can send out a general. Maybe put a post on your wall and, in your story and say Hey, I’m looking for ideas for a website. Does anyone have a cool new hobby? They’ve started to have an interesting project that they’re starting. Anyone had an issue that they couldn’t solve, or if you want to do it more.
In a clandestine way, you can just engage your friends and family in conversation and just see what they’re doing at the moment. And often it sparks a bit of. Bit of inspiration in you. And another great thing about this is if let’s say a friend is into a cool hobby, that’s a really good source of collaboration.
So maybe you could even start a website together, or you could ask them to use a lot of their photos, which will save you a lot of money in the long run. Actually using friends is a great way to get into a new hobby into a new niche, but also to use them as a resource. So technique three is all about just going out into the world and seeing what’s on offer.
So if you go to your local shopping center, your shopping mall. Into your local town center and just look at the shops, the stores there, and just see what services and products are on offer. Often you can have a look around and it’ll just remind you of something that you’ve probably thought about in the past.
Maybe it was a project that you had years ago that you did, maybe extending some of your house or you had some sort of issue that you had to solve. Just have a look. Take a notebook and just note down some of the more interesting products or services that you see as you walk around your local shopping center or town. Technique four again is going back to the internet.
And it’s just using those online forums like Quora or Reddit, just to see what people are asking questions about or talking about. If you go into Reddit, you can find sub-Reddits on lots of different sites. Interesting niches and often it’s things that you maybe haven’t thought about before, and it’s a great way to get inspiration.
And also it just gives you access to the people that are actually interested in the niche. So later on, it’s something that you can use to maybe bring a bit of traffic back to your website. So this is a really great way. To brainstorm new niches by using the user generated content that’s already there on the internet.
Technique five is actually to go to a local bookstore or even to go to Google and just search for a list of magazines. Basically if a company has gone to the effort of producing a weekly or monthly magazine, it probably means there’s people that’s interested in that niche and there’s magazines on all sorts of things.
So this is a really great way to just, again, Inspire yourself and to see what kind of things people are interested in. You can just type it into Google list of magazines and you’re gonna get lists of hundreds of different types of magazines and just browse through them and see if anything sparks your interest.
And that could be a great niche for you. Now, the last technique that I’m gonna give you is perhaps the worst technique I wanna say. It’s just, this is what people mainly tell you. If you watch a lot of gurus, this is what they’re gonna tell you how to find your niche. And it’s by searching products directly.
If you go onto Amazon or click bank or onto eBay even, and you just search by the category of different products, and this can reveal some niches. But what I don’t want you to do is I do not want you to base your niche on a product. That would be the worst thing in the world. But still, this is a way that you can get into the niche through the products that are being sold, but make sure that you think more of the niche rather than just the dollar signs and the product that you can sell.
So you would not want to base an entire website or an entire YouTube channel on one product, because if suddenly something happens to that product and it’s no longer available. your website’s dead. So make sure you focus on niches here and not just the products. The products are a means to an.
So once you have your short list of two to five different niches, you want to go into the next step, which is research. And I recommend that you spend about one to two hours minimum on each niche, really doing research and reading through. The different sort of results you get. So what we’re looking for here is to actually view the niche as a beginner.
This is ideal because there’s a lot of beginner type queries for people. Actually search for, but some, maybe more advanced experts in that niche may forget or may think are just, not worth their time answering. And that is gonna be your bread and butter especially for following the Project 24 style websites.
So always think as a beginner and always. Read what your competition is writing. Okay. So the best way to find out what types of queries you should be targeting is actually to use Google itself. Now. If you followed Project 24, if Jim and Ricky a little bit, that they are totally against using keyword research tools.
Now I released a video about this and I’ll link to that up there. And the basic idea is that keyword research tools do not give you accurate numbers on things like search volume. They are an ideal source of inspiration for queries, but make sure that you start your journey of researching your niche with keyword research tools, but you don’t end it there.
What I mean is use it for inspiration, but make sure you go back into Google and actually search everything or the queries that you found. If you do that, then you’re gonna. Basically be more successful than if you just use the keyword research tools. Okay. So the best method that we found is to use what’s called the alphabet suit method.
Now. It’s basically what you do is you put in a query and then you go through the different letters of the alphabet in order to give you some autocomplete suggestions. So for example, if we put in SEO, and then we put a, we’d get a list of different queries that people are actually searching for, then if we’ve put B, we’re gonna get another list.
Et cetera, et cetera. You can also, in addition to using Google, you can actually go to duck dot, go.com because they will give you slightly more suggestions. But again, whatever query you find from duck dot go or Bing or anything like that, make sure you go back to Google and see that it comes up as a suggested auto search.
If it doesn’t, I would probably avoid that as a. A query for a post. Okay. If you dunno anything about the alphabet suit method, income schools have already put up a couple of videos about this. So if you go to an income schools YouTube channel and you search for these titles, take a blog from a hundred page views to a hundred thousand page views.
I think that Jim and Ricky and Freddy go into a lot of detail about how to. The alphabet suit method. There’s also another video which stopped using keyword research tools. And again, they go through how to use that method in order to get queries. So that is the best way to research the competition whether or not you can find queries that are underserved.
And ideally if you can find about 30 underserved queries in the niche, then you’re probably onto something good. The other question most people have is about search volume. How can you tell whether or not a niche is just too small? You can’t basically say the only people that have those numbers are Google and they’re not sharing that with anyone.
However, you can guesstimate an idea of it by going over to Google. and looking at the proportion of searches over time. So this won’t give you the number of searches, but it will just tell you the proportion of searches over a period of time and you can compare it to other queries.
So if you take the main query from your niche, and if you put it into Google trends, the first thing you want to make sure is over, let’s say. 2004 until the present look at the proportion of the searches and the trend. Is it going up? Is it going down? Is it flat? Does it fluctuate? What exactly does it look like?
This is a really great way to find out whether or not a niche is becoming more or less popular over time. And also if it suffers from seasonality I E is it more popular? Is it searched more in the summer? Is it searched more in the winter? Things like that. So that’s the first thing to find out. What does the trend look like after that?
You can actually compare it to other niches and just to get an idea of search volume. Of course, you’re not gonna get the number. But if you compare it to any of the income school niches, we know how many page views they get a month. So this is a great way to get a guesstimation of the search volume you have for your niche.
So go over to dirt. By planet go over to camper report.com and you can see that these types of websites are getting around. I think a hundred thousand page views a month. You might have to check the up to date information about that, but it’s around that figure. So if you were to put in the main keyword of your niche, let’s say internet marketing.
And if you were to put in a dirt bike or to put in. Camper van. And you can just see the difference between the proportion of searches over time. And this can give you an idea of search volume. If you are around the same level as a dirt bike, then you’re probably gonna get a similar search volume if you are more or less.
Again, you’re gonna get more or less in search volume. It’s not a hundred per percent accurate and it just gives you an. The only way to really understand how much search volume is gonna get is to write the content and put it on your website, but a little caveat to this. Don’t forget that Jim and Ricky actually put up a video about a woman who has a website in a very small niche about ments.
I think that’s how you say it’s like this plant like Avera, that kind of thing. And she gets more than 200,000 page views a month and that is considered tiny. So don’t let this put you off a niche that you are really interested in. It’s just to give you a general idea of search volume. If you wanna find out a little bit more about Google trends, then again, income school, have a great video on this.
And if you need help picking a website niche, use this free tool, then they’ve got an excellent video all about the Google trends that you can watch.
Okay. So once we’ve gone through the brainstorming step and we’ve done lots of research on our short list of niches. Now you want to verify each of those niches before you make your choice. So I’ve got a list of things that you should ask yourself, and if the niche passes all these criteria, then definitely this is what you should choose.
Okay. So the niche, it must. Something you are interested in, if you have no interest in writing this, or you can tell that your interest is going to wane over time, don’t write it. I remember setting up websites about reviews, reviewing. I think it was pool cleaners after making two videos. I was bored as hell about that.
So that would be a terrible choice for me personally. Maybe you find pool cleaners. Very interesting. And you could write about it for days and days. It really is a personal choice. So it should be something you are interested in, or you could be interested. The next thing I would say, especially with the way that Google’s changing with establishing, eating and things like that.
It should be a niche that you can either do already or something that you can learn. So if we’re talking about a hobby, it should be a hobby that you could take up, even if it was just for a single day, you can get those red letter kind of gifts wherever you go. You drive a rally car or something for the day, even if you could do that for one day and get a bunch of pictures, then it’s something that you should consider.
The other thing is all to do with research. So the next thing is, if you cannot find at least 30 underserved queries, so that’s queries where the the website’s already in the se either don’t answer the query completely, or they’re a little bit off topic, or there’s simply nothing there where you consider it’s quite an important part of the niche.
So if you can find at least. Queries like this, then you’re onto a winner. If you can’t find anything or everything is being covered, move on. I’d probably choose a different niche. The next thing, and this is a tip directly from Jim is. If there is not a magazine that is published in your niche or the niche you’re considering then probably it’s not a good indication.
If a company is producing a weekly or monthly magazine, that’s probably a good indication of fairly good search volume is a fairly popular niche. So if you can’t find either a magazine in print or a magazine for your niche, I’d cross that off the list as well. Another thing is to avoid any topic that is your money, your life, YMYL.
So this is anything to do with health, anything to do with big financial commitments. Now, if you’re a doctor, if you can prove that you are a financial expert in some way, then this doesn’t apply to you, you should be able to prove to Google that you are an expert in this already, but for most of them.
Just avoid anything to do with health or to do with large investments or financial commitments. Now, every niche has this to a certain extent. So I would say at the beginning, just avoid this in general. Certainly do not get into you don’t wanna compete with web ND or you don’t want to compete with big financial experts out there.
It’s just. Worth your time as a beginner, I would say it is possible. It would take a lot of work, but there’s easier ways to make money online. The next thing on my list is about establishing EAT. So EAT stands for expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. It doesn’t mean you have to be an expert on anything when you start.
It just means that if you show that you do what you’re writing. Or you can even just have some pictures that make you an amateur expert. If you are learning about it, that’s gonna give you authority because you can talk with confidence about it and trustworthiness. That just comes down to things like, are you gonna rip people off?
If they buy you a product and that kind of thing, you can fix down the line, basically. If I give you an example, if you are writing about the shark swimming niche, if you are prepared to get in the water with a shark, then you’re gonna be fine for EAT. If you’re someone who’s gonna be writing from the beach, probably don’t choose that niche.
Okay. You get what I mean? Okay. And the last thing, and this might sound crazy as the last thing is, can you monetize that niche now? Basically, if you can get traffic to a website, you can monetize it in some way, but always look at this last, don’t choose a niche based on the dollar signs. Always choose it on something that you can be interested in.
This is going to be much better for you in the long run, but the last thing. Yeah, can you make money out of it? So when you’re thinking about ads, make sure you’re not choosing a niche that family kinds of companies may not want to advertise on. So things may be about, I don’t know, hunting, maybe that’s a little bit of those kinds of things.
So consider that for. Also think about affiliate programs. Amazon’s great, but there are other affiliate programs out there. So just choose the main query of your niche and put it into Google and then put an affiliate program and you can find all sorts of affiliate programs out there for all sorts of niches.
Then also think. Info products. Could you eventually in the future think of a video based info product or an ebook or something like that you could produce and then sell to your users? If you can say yes to at least one of these things. Then that is a niche that you should choose. Okay. So once you’ve gone through the three different steps, you’ve done your brainstorming, you’ve done your research and you’ve verified your niche.
And you’ve got one that you are fairly confident in. You can put your time and resources into it. My advice is go back and research some more. You want to come up with about 30 to a hundred. Underserved queries that avoid Y M Y L in particular, but you are fairly sure that haven’t been answered properly that you can produce a much better resource than anyone else online.
If you have that list of 30 to a hundred at this stage, you’re ready. You’ve got your hit list. And now by your domain, make sure that you get a.com domain. Start creating that content. So that’s my tip for picking a niche. And it’s a niche that you are going to be enthusiastic about and not lose motivation over time.
So if you found this video useful, don’t forget to share it with a friend. If you have any questions about choosing niches. You can send me an email. And also if you have any questions that you want me to answer, leave me a comment in the comment section and I’ll try and get back to you. So thanks very much for watching.