How To Find Your Niche in 2024 [GUIDE]

Here’s the thing, before you start making money online, you first need to know how to find your niche.

Finding your niche sounds difficult, and it can be sometimes, especially if you don’t know what to look for and how to do it.

Don’t worry though, in this blog post, I will teach you exactly how I find all my profitable niches.

This way you can better understand how to choose a profitable niche every time you need to create another website, blog, online shop, affiliate marketing campaign, etc.

Note: This guide was written a couple of years back but it’s still accurate for 2024 and beyond, the process remains the same, even though nowadays you can use AI such as ChatGPT and get help from them and new ideas regarding niches that might be suitable for you.

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But first…

What Is a Niche?

A niche is a specific category or subject that acts as the foundation for your online marketing strategy.

Without a clearly defined niche, your site or online business will have no direction and no real way of knowing what things you need to do and how to do them.

So a niche is a topic, subject, category, or specific idea, that you build your whole marketing around.

A common example of a profitable niche:

Weight loss.  This is a niche, albeit a very very broad one, but it’s still a niche. It has millions of searches all around the world all day every day, and people are making a ton of money in this niche.

You create a blog about weight loss, post content about weight loss, such as videos and articles, and you go and create backlinks on other weight loss-related websites.

Your whole business needs to be focused on weight loss.

Why Do You Need to Find a Niche?

Ok, you might be asking yourself why do you really need to choose a niche…

Can’t you just have a site that’s about everything?

It’s simple really, you’re not going to build the next Google, or Amazon, or Facebook. Those are 3 giants that in a way…have no niche because they literally have all the content in the world for all the niches/categories.

You could say that their niches are Social Media or e-commerce, but that doesn’t really work since they feature content about everything in the world.

They also afford to do that, and guess what these 3 big sites have in common?

NONE OF THEM WRITE OR PRODUCE THEIR OWN CONTENT.

NONE.

They all rely on others.

So even though their sites contain content and products for literally everything that exists in this world.

They don’t do any of the writing, video creating, they don’t create their own infographics, or do backlinks, etc.

The users do all the work.

We as website owners are Google’s content. Without us, there will be ZERO content on Google’s search pages.

Facebook works because of our content and what we post daily.

Amazon has their own products sure, but they started up and still are largely just a big shop for other businesses to sell their products on their platform.

So you see, having a website about everything that you want, might sound good at first because you think to yourself:

Hmm… I could write content about everything that it’s profitable online and make money.

Sure, that can work sometimes (I know, I tried). But it’s very hard, expensive and time-consuming.

Why do you think news websites can afford to write articles about everything? ALL THE TIME. Multiple posts a day.

They have dozens or hundreds and even thousands of writers and content producers, that can write for every category that they have on their site.

I had a news site once, even one that was indexed by Google News (that’s a big thing since it’s very hard to get into, and only sites like CNN, Times, etc are in). The traffic was instant, for example, if I wanted to write about McDonald’s, I would get on the first positions of Google in minutes or hours.

But do you know how much I had to work for that? 12 hours a day, helped by different writers, VAs, and content producers that I would outsource on different freelance websites.

Eventually, I sold it, because I got tired of it. Too much work, compared to the rewards.

Anyway, my point is this:

You need to find your niche. You need to find a profitable niche.

A specific topic that you can write or make videos about.

A niche that you preferably know stuff about.

It will be much easier for you, in the long run, to maintain and create content that website, or youtube channel, or whatever you decide to do if you just focus on one subject.

You will also have a much easier time monetizing it.

Even if you don’t know anything at all, even if you don’t have hobbies or interests or problems that you can build around.

Find a niche and get good at it, learn from it, become an expert in that niche, write and publish content only for that niche, and in a few months or years, you will see the benefits.

How To Find Your Niche, the “Regular” Way

There are many ways to find and choose a profitable niche.

Lots and lots of articles about this online.

You will find that most of the articles about how to find your niche will write the same thing over and over again.

The first step is to find a niche that you know stuff about, or simply just to find a profitable niche like:

• Make money online
• Lose Weight
• Travel
• Parenting
• DIY Crafts
• Business
• Personal Finance
• Auto
• Sports
• Tech
• Games

You then do your keyword research in the niche that you picked, and always:

Focus on a main low competition keyword that has a bit of search traffic.

Sometimes, a few of these articles will advise you to go for the broader keywords that receive a bit more traffic.

And then create a website around that keyword, and write content on keywords related to that main keyword.

Yes this method is good, and most of the time can work, but it has a major flaw in my opinion and I don’t like doing it like that.

Feel free to do what you feel it’s best for your business, I just know myself and I know what I like and what I don’t like.

I’m not saying that the above method doesn’t work. It does. But, for me, it’s not optimal, so it’s up to you to decide what you like and what you feel comfortable with.

And I will explain now why is that.

I never choose my niche simply by looking at the SEO numbers.

Here’s why I think that concept is flawed a bit:

You base your whole business on whether or not Google will rank your site high in their search engines.

If they don’t do that, and they don’t rank your site or don’t rank it high enough, you won’t receive any traffic, and you won’t make money.

If they do rank your site at the top and have the first position in the SERPs (search engine result pages), it will be great for your site and your business.

Now you will get free traffic daily to your site, and depending on the niche you choose, you will make a lot of money for “free”.

But… everything can change in a second

Google might do one of their thousands of algorithm updates that they do every year, and your site is now instantly vanished from the search results.

Your niche site went from #1 position in Google to #90 or in some cases gone completely.

You never know when a Google update will come.

You never know how it will affect your site.

You might have the most perfect niche site out there, Google might still decide to rank someone else higher than yours, simply because they have maybe more authority, content, backlinks or whatever they care about.

There are hundreds if not thousands of criteria that Google takes into consideration when ranking a site.

They change those a lot almost constantly, sometimes without the SEO community even knowing about the smaller changes that are happening.

So in my mind… it’s a stupid decision to base my whole niche website solely on free traffic from Google.

I know that’s what most marketers do, I know that’s what most online marketing coaches teach and recommend, I know that’s what many noobies and experts do.

I don’t do that.

I don’t like having my whole business (remember a niche website is a business like any other), depending on one single factor or player (Google in this case).

For me, that’s not secure enough to invest time and money into something.

Also even if you never get penalized by Google, and you will rank on their top and first-page position for ages…

You still have to wait at least 6 to 12 months before you see any real traffic from them.

Let me give you an example of why that also sucks:

Say I want to open up a donut shop in real life, I choose the best name for my donut shop, get the best logo, ads, location, employees, and also I have the best damn donuts in town.

I worked 1 month or more on the shop, perfecting every donut recipe, making sure all the tables are aligned, the decor is nice, the workers are clean, etc…

Now it’s time to open the doors and get clients in to get some sort of revenue going.

After all, I just spent a large sum of money investing in the shop, and I need to get some of it back, to be able to pay the rent on the shop, pay employees, and bills.

Guess what though…

The mayor of the city that you just opened your donut shop in, tells people that your donut shop is too new for them to enter and buy donuts just yet.

Your donut shop has no authority or any way to distinguish yourself from all the other thousands of donut shops around the town.

It will take you months of convincing people that your donuts are amazing, made with fresh ingredients, and at a good price.

These months, that can take up to a year in some cases, will bring you almost no profit at all, maybe just enough to keep the lights on.

In some cases, you won’t even have enough money for your rent, lights, or employees.

So you have to have enough money to survive and keep the shop open for at least 6 months, regardless if people come in and buy or if you make a profit or not.

Does that make any sense to you?

Do you think a struggling businessman will be able to cope with that?

Will someone guarantee that after 6 months you will make a bank with your donut shop?

What if after 2 years, your donut shop is suddenly not good enough because you changed some recipes and the mayor or whatever health organization tells people to try other donut shops in the meanwhile.

See for me that makes no sense at all…

I know I’m against the current here, the majority of you will probably disagree with my logic, and other marketing experts as well…

The thing is though…

I don’t care. It’s my business after all, and I decide what makes sense and what doesn’t.

In real life, nobody would survive without profits for 6-12 months. That’s a fact (I know because I had a club and a cafe at some point).

If you don’t get customers and clients right away, there’s no way you will make it 1 year until you will see the real benefits.

Luckily for the offline businesses, for them, it’s not really the case, because obviously, the above scenario doesn’t really happen.

But in the online marketing world?

Haha, yea…it happens all the time, the mayor is as you probably guessed it, Google.

Google doesn’t send traffic to my niche site for at least a few months. Because you have to build authority and links.

I can’t afford to have content writers, pay hosting bills, keep motivated, and create backlinks and all the perfect things that the mayor/Google wants from me before they decide to reward me.

I mean I can afford it (now), but sadly most young marketers just starting out, have probably little to no money to invest at first.

How can you tell these guys that they need to be able to afford and pay hosting, write and keep their whole site afloat for at least 6 months?

That’s crazy to me, and I know that’s one of the reasons why many people struggle to make any money online.

Because even if you did all the things right, in the end, it’s not up to you to decide whether or not you make money or not.

It’s up to Google.

And because of the large amount of time you need to wait before you see any results, most people will quit by the time they see success or their first position in Google.

They will quickly move on to try other things, things that probably they will fail at too…because nobody explained to them the whole picture.

And that is why I don’t agree with that concept, of choosing a niche solely based on Google searches and competition and stats.

Sure, it’s a good step to start, but it’s not my whole process.

So here’s what I do instead:

How to Choose a Niche, the NetHustler Way

You don’t care too much about SEO stats and searches

*SHOCKER*

I know…

It’s like against everything you ever read online about this subject up until now.

I’m not saying or writing this article just to be different by the way.

I’m doing it because maybe you’ve been stuck for a while and don’t know why, and sometimes this is the reason, why you failed or will fail.

And this is what worked for me, because up until a few years ago, I was following the “regular” way of creating a niche website, and it didn’t work all that well.

So I said f*ck it, I don’t care about SEO, competition, free traffic, and what Google might say or do.

And you know what?

It worked… better than ever, so much so that I started to replicate the method immediately for every new website that I would create since that moment.

Here’s what I did:

I based my whole idea and concept of creating a niche website and making money from it, on paid advertising.

Ok, don’t get scared now that you read about paying for traffic… hold up just a second, I’ll explain.

You see, with paid advertising, the traffic is instant. You can immediately make money, exactly like I talked before in the donut shop example.

In real life, the donut shop will be able to sell donuts and sell on the first day of opening, without SEO or other bullsh*t.

From the hundreds or thousands of people walking by, some would stop and buy a donut, it’s that simple.

I want that in my online marketing business as well.

I want RESULTS and preferably PROFIT from the first day of launching a website.

The only way you can achieve that is by paying for traffic.

Sure you can do it for free too, by doing social media, or leaving comments, or spamming, etc..

But that’s time-consuming and also not guaranteed.

With paid traffic, you instantly get clicks to your site, and if the niche is good, and you’ve built the site correctly and have a solid way to monetize it, you will start earning immediately.

Even if you don’t make any sales, leads, or get any AdSense clicks, you can at least learn some things from paying for traffic.

You learn if the niche sucks if there is potential if you’ve done mistakes if your niche website layout sucks if your content is not converting etc.

Here’s the beauty part of all of this:

By paying for traffic, and optimizing your niche site constantly, in order to get back the money you have invested into paid traffic, you will indirectly help your site to rank in Google as well.

Did you know that…

Google pays attention to the traffic your site receives.

This is a big ranking factor when it comes to Google. Especially if you have analytics installed.

You see in their mind, your site getting traffic means that there has to be something about it, that’s appealing to all these people.

They will HAVE to acknowledge your site.

A brand new site receiving thousands of clicks every single day, that’s not from search engines? That’s important for them.

So you see, by paying for traffic, and basing your whole niche website around it, will have many benefits.

1. You don’t rely  and base your whole business on Google
2. You can immediately earn revenue and even profit
3. You know what things work and what doesn’t
4. You are able to optimize your website more
5. Test different monetization techniques and making money with different products, services, and ads…
6. Indirectly you also help your site rank faster, from all the traffic that you’re getting

This is why I recommend you to find your niche based on what it’s hot all the time and based on paid ads.

The SEO and free traffic will come later by default if you also do some On-site SEO for your articles.

If I base my site around SEO first, I lose out on early revenue, and potentially won’t even earn at all.

If I base my niche website around paid advertising first, I get all the benefits and the SEO and free traffic later anyway.

Does it make sense to you? For me it does.

Alright, enough theory and talking, let’s see what’s up.

So here’s the actual step by step of how I do it:

How to find a profitable niche for affiliate marketing:

I will try and keep this short now, since I had to write a bunch of boring stuff above first, but don’t worry this is the most important part of the post, so read carefully.

Taking all the things that I wrote above into account, the way to find a profitable niche, you want to find and build on a profitable niche that also benefits from the regular way of creating a niche website, and also from the paid advertising and my way of doing things.

So…

I start with the offers and things that I see that are hot that I can build a niche site around and promote first of all with PAID traffic, and then put out more content and wait for SEO to pick up.

If a niche or a product can’t earn me a profit if I send paid traffic to the site, while waiting for SEO to pick up, I don’t do it. Because for example certain websites and niches are only profitable with free traffic, so I never look for those.

The goal is to be able to make a profit by simply sending paid traffic straight to an article or landing page on that niche website and then to afford and wait for SEO to pick up.

First of all, look for affiliate products, CPA offers, and pretty much anything that is selling a lot online all the time. Certain evergreen niches like losing weight, make money, finance, credit, travel, etc, comes to mind.

You will always find hot offers to promote and people will always buy or sign up for things in those niches.

Once you see a bunch of good offers for certain niches, write them down.

Use sites like Affplus, odigger, Clickbank / cbengine, Amazon, to look for hot products and offers that are always in demand.

Different platforms and networks have different metrics for their offers, services, and products, but most of the time it will be easy to see what’s hot and popular and what’s not.

Amazon has a Best Selling page and CBengine or Clickbank will show you products with a high gravity (which means people are buying those products), etc. Affplus and Odigger will show you all the offers for all the niches, and all the networks that you can find them in.

At first, you will have a bunch of offers/products in a bunch of different niches.

So the next step is to choose only one niche from all them, and find more products, services and offers specifically for that one niche.

After you have a couple of these products and offers for a single niche written down, it’s time to go to the next step:

Doing it the “regular” way.

Yes even though I don’t agree with it completely, this method is still good and can still be used in your niche choosing process at first.

These days I sometimes skip this part altogether, but that’s because I already have all these things in mind and know what to do and what to expect. I can always research for keywords related to that niche or products later when it’s time to write content.

But for now, I strongly recommend you to also add the regular way to your whole plan.

So, after choosing a niche that you like, a niche that is profitable because you now have a bunch of offers and products that you know are selling well.

Look and research for one main keyword that you can use for that niche, a keyword that you will build everything around on tools like UberSuggest, Ahrefs, and SemRush.

Make sure to also note down related keywords. This will come handy later on.

You can take into consideration the SEO numbers such as difficulty, competition, searches per month, etc… but don’t take it 100% literally as it is, and also don’t be afraid of those numbers, because like I said previously, you don’t care about SEO at first.

Create a website around that niche and main keyword, and use the related keywords to create content for your site.

After you’ve added content, if you decide to do affiliate marketing, now is the time to add on the site all those hot offers and products that you have researched earlier.

If you don’t want to do affiliate marketing or CPA, you can simply just apply for AdSense, after you have a good number of unique articles written on your site. You can also use only AdSense to monetize the site.

Find more about AdSense on my other post: How to make money with Adsense.

Make sure to have a monetization strategy in place on your site before doing the next step. Check out my guide on how to monetize your website.

If you have a bit of money to invest in paid advertising, this is where you can start deviating away from relying on SEO and Google all the time and simply create your own rules and your own business lane, based on your abilities and decisions.

You decide where to buy traffic from, what to monetize, what pages receive that traffic, etc.

Head over to Cheap Traffic Sources to see a bunch of networks that I recommend that are not that expensive, they work for almost any budget that you have.

For example, there are networks in there that you can start from a minimum deposit of simply $10 or $25, $50, or $100. You can go higher if you want later on if you see good results.

What to do if you don’t have money to invest in traffic at first?

Listen, I totally understand, some people won’t be able to afford to spend money on paid traffic.

Especially not for a website that’s brand new, or for offers that were never tested.

It can also look scary or difficult for people that have never done it before.

I know…

So that is why, if you can’t pay for traffic and also don’t have time to wait for Google, now is the time to start hustling and get free traffic to your site by any means necessary.

For example:

• Social media
• Forums
• Commenting on other blogs
• YouTube
• Offline (flyers, cards, etc)
• Guest posts

But I will be honest with you, this niche finding method works better if you can do paid advertising right away.

Because you can instantly earn money, and get motivated to write even more content, optimize your site, even more, find better offers and products to promote, scale up your paid advertising to multiple campaigns, networks, and types, etc.

In Conclusion

This whole thing can be summed up like so:

I want to find a profitable niche to create a website around, that can benefit from SEO, and that can also be able to earn me money right away through various monetizations like AdSense Arbitrage (oh yeah baby, that’s a thing), affiliate marketing, CPA offers, or even your own services and products.

I want my niche website to be able to do all those things.

RIGHT NOW…

If I can’t pay for traffic because my niche won’t earn any money back that means THE NICHE SUCKS. 

Any niche that you can’t send paid traffic to, ain’t worth investing time into. That’s my opinion at least.

Niches that are only profitable if they get free traffic from Google, are not my cup of tea.

Not when Google decides to rank my site up, or if they one day decide to completely erase my site from the face of the web.

Can your business or niche site survive if Google decides tomorrow that your site has not enough authority? I know my sites will, I know I won’t be devastated like millions of other marketers or site owners on the internet right now.

See, by doing it the regular way, of just searching for SEO stats and relying on free search engine traffic, you gimp yourself from earning more money in the future, or in the event Google doesn’t rank you high enough, or doesn’t rank you all together, or takes you out after an update.

You will also more than likely just wait for free traffic and monetize it with just 1 method, for example, AdSense, or a few banners from a product.

You will never think about adding affiliate offers or CPA into the mix, run them alongside AdSense, and then pay for advertising and send traffic to your blog pages.

Traffic that can then immediately click on an AdSense ad, making you some of your invested money back right away, or clicks on a banner or link and buy/sign-up for a product or offer. Sometimes you will see both of them working at the same time, and it’s a thing of beauty. Add into the mix that later you will also benefit from SEO if you’ve done it right, and it’s amazing.

You can do it all at once, and immediately. That’s the beauty of this.

I don’t have time to waste and wait for Google.

I also don’t know if my time invested in the site will ever pay off.

I can be writing articles like an idiot for 5-6 months in the hopes to rank up, but guess what, the first page is only filled with authority websites that have 90-100 domain authority, sites like Forbes, Entrepreneur, Health Magazine, etc.. You will never be able to compete with those sites easily, at least not at first.

You will need years and years of content and link building to be able to get near them. Google announces every year that Branding and Authority and Loyalty matter more and more to them.

So basically it’s a middle finger to the little guys just starting out, that nobody knows about.

With paid advertising, I can know right away if a niche is not good (usually this is never the case, almost any niche can make you money and right away) if the products or offers that I’m promoting suck, or if the AdSense clicks are too low.

Doing all of that also gives me the benefits of free SEO traffic (if you’ve also done on-site SEO correctly), but also puts me in control right from the beginning.

I don’t know what’s good for everybody else, but I know what it’s good for me, what I like and what I dislike.

I don’t like the “fear-inducing” SEO game, or the time I have to spend, just to see results next year.

My brain is weird, I need to see results right away in order to continue investing time and resources into something.

All the time waiting for Google updates and rankings, and wondering if my niche site is good, will produce too much stress and anxiety for me. This is especially hard for new marketers and beginners that are learning to make money online.

That is why for me, “How to find your niche” first starts with can I pay for traffic for that site and not rely on Google until they decide to rank me in the search engine?

I’m not against SEO…

I do it on every site, every time. Doing on-site SEO specifically for all your articles is great for your niche site.

EVEN if you pay for traffic, you still need to optimize your niche website for SEO. It will help you in the long run.

I’m just saying that SEO should not be the main goal and the end goal especially not for how to find your nice. It shouldn’t be your only holy grail.

You should have multiple holy grails.

Niche website doesn’t automatically mean just focusing on ranking in Google for low competition keywords or going after broad keywords right away.

I see too many articles on the internet on “how to find your niche” that are exactly and only like this:

Find something you like, search for keywords for that thing that you like, get a keyword and write content around that and other related keywords, and wait for Google. 

To me, a niche website means a website built around a topic, that can be monetized with whatever offer or product I have in mind, that I can send whatever traffic I want to it, and also be able to receive SEO benefits and free traffic.

Anyway… this has been another longer article from me and I’m sure you’re bored by now if you even made it so far.

But I’m curious, does my How To Find Your Niche method makes sense to you guys? Do you think it’s okay to just base all your niche website success on Google?

Let me know in the comments down below, your thoughts on the matter.

Cheers,

Stephen

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