If you haven’t read the first part of this series “What Is Niche Blogging” go back and do so now. If you have read it, congrats… we are going to start learning how to make some passive income using niche blogging as the vehicle.

Now don’t get a niche blog confused with a regular blog. Although it looks like a blog, it’s more of a static site in a blog costume. The idea here is to produce 10 posts, rank in the top 3 on Google, and forget it! No need to update daily. Just update once a month or so!

The first lesson was an overview of our topic for this week - niche blogging. But today, we are going to dig in and start to get our hands dirty as we research a profitable niche.

How Do I Find A Profitable Niche?

Go to your bookstore! Look through all of the magazines on the magazine rack that look interesting (and by interesting, I mean curiously interesting) to you and may serve a small niche. These are the topics we want to target. You can pass over the broad topics that are served by magazines like Sports Illustrated, Star, Cosmopolitan, GQ, and any other “big” magazine. We are only looking for smaller, and more focused topics. A good example would be the magazines you see about knives. I can’t say that I’ve ever picked one of these magazines up, but I’ve seen them on the stands. And as far as a narrow niche is concerned, these are it.

The goal here is to find a niche that there isn’t much competition for. I’ll show you an example of my research at the end of this post. But we are really looking for smaller, and targeted niches so that we don’t have to compete for months or even years to obtain high search engine rankings for. The reason? We want passive income, not something that just takes more time out of our already busy lives. Although the income will be smaller, so will the time requirement. Since the time requirement is smaller, this leaves us time to create hundreds of these.

Research

So we know we want to find a niche that is busy enough to attract a few readers, yet isn’t overcrowded. We want something narrow enough to miss the masses, yet popular enough so that we aren’t our only readers. So let’s do some research.

For the sake of argument, lets say that our topic is “weddings”. This is a huge niche, so lets drill it down a bit with some research using Google as our guide.

Weddings - 97,100,000 results in Google - This would take years to rank for. So let’s drill it down a bit.

Wedding Food - 8,050,000 results in Google - Better, but still pretty crowded. Lets keep going.

Wedding Hor d’ oeuvres - 73,700 results in Google - Perfect! We could rank #1 for this in just a few days or weeks.

See what I mean about drilling down your niche? Weddings is a huge niche, and although that means more traffic, it ultimately means more work. You’d have to work hard to get to the top of Google, and work even harder trying to stay there. This isn’t what we want. We work hard enough trying to get our regular blogs to that level, we don’t want these niche blogs to be as involved.

So now we have to choose our keywords, and figure out what it’s going to take to get ranked. And, we’ll do that tomorrow. Be prepared to open your wallet for this one, good keyword research isn’t free. Although there are free services on the market, none of them will give you the kind of research tools that you’ll need to make real money.

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