How to Find Profitable Niches that Attract Hungry Buyers

Not all niches are created the same. If you have multiple websites already, you've probably noticed how the earnings for each of your sites vary. I personally have one affiliate site that makes as much money in affiliate sales as my Adsense account - and my Adsense account is spread across all 13 of my sites combined.

Some niches can be about as good as a dead stick in the water. Other niches can be literal internet goldmines.

The best advice I can give you, is choose wisely.

You won't really be able to get a good idea for how profitable your niche is until you drive a good amount of traffic to it, which takes time and effort.

Find Trends with EBay Pulse

Ebay Pulse is one of my favorite places to find new niches for websites. This little site from Ebay gives you the most popular items that are selling on ebay. You can track trends and keywords so it should give you some good ideas for new sites. If you're going to be apart of the Ebay Affiliate Program (which I highly recommend), give this website a good search.

If you're looking to market internationally, Ebay Pulse UK has results for Ebay UK, as well as all their other international Ebay sites.

Back Engineering Profits with Google Adwords Traffic Estimator

In order to see a ballpark range for what advertisers are spending on certain keywords, I use the Google AdWords Traffic Estimator. The more advertisers are willing to spend on keywords, then it's a safe bet that the more profitable that niche is.

To use this tool just enter in your selected keywords and then Add "All Countries and Territories" then click "Continue". Don't bother choosing a budget, leave it blank.

On the next page it will display the average cost per click that it will cost an advertiser to market via Adwords with these keywords.

Check out the results I get for these keywords:

California Lawyer: $10.18 - $15.27
Iphone: $2.00 - $2.51
Murad: $5.08 - $6.36
Myspace: $.30 - $.42
Webkinz: $.15 - $.23

This tells me that having an acne site about the Murad acne solution might be a good idea. Upon further research I find they also have a solid affiliate program which I can send visitors to, along with Murad Ebay listings and also a healthy click value for Adsense.

This tool is also a good gauge for what kind of earnings you can expect with Google adsense. Don't expect to receive these amounts per click, but the higher the number the better.

Good Ol' Keyword Research

Of course finding the demand for websurfers is also a good way to judge popularity. The free keyword research tool at SEO Book works nicely for the top 100 most popular keywords in your niche. If you want to go further than that I recommend Wordtracker.

More Google Tools - Google Trends and Google Sets

If you want to find out if your niche is on the upswing or quickly losing popularity, check out Google Trends. Notice the trends for popular products during the Christmas season - if you're making your sites around that time it might be a good idea to really push your promotion for extra sales.

If you want to find related keywords within your niche check out Google Sets. This might help you find keywords and/or products worth promoting you never would have thought about before.

The Top 5 Poorest Niches You Can Make A Website On

While I can't give you the best niches, I can give you the absolute worst.

Proxy - Way oversaturated, advertising is completely untargeted and you won't see much earnings unless you actively promote on other Proxy sites... I never really understood this niche.

Making Money Online - Unless you're a real expert on making money online then I would advoid this niche. Far too often I see webmasters opening sites trying to make money online by teaching other people how to make money online - does this make sense to anyone?

Arcades - A fun website to run but unprofitable, oversaturated.

Image Hosting - Although these kinds of sites have a functional purpose, don't expect to earn too much money from them. They will also suck up your bandwidth.

Warez - I wouldn't touch this theme with a ten foot pole.