Browsing these forums a lot, I notice a lot of emphasis put on finding a niche with little to no competition, and capitalizing on it. I run my own blog/forum and it is not a niche at all. I just want to hear how many of you have been successful without a niche market vs. those who are successful with a niche market. In case you are wondering, my site is a gaming site that is focused mainly on providing cheap gaming deals to users. I chose this because gaming is my hobby, and I know quite a bit about it. This is my first site, and I plan to just use this as a stepping stool to other websites. So, I figured I should go with something that I enjoy, as it would make finding content much easier.
Niche doesn't necessarily mean low competition, highly searched. Those are GOOD niches. Niche just simply means a specific topic. Yes, you can still be successful without a "good" niche. If you enjoy it, the content will naturally be easier to create. The key is content. If you're talking about nicheless sites.. like general sites (such as about.com they cover serveral topics). It's not necessarily hard to market or become successful since the audience is quite broad compared to specific niches!
Yea, I guess that is what I meant. A GOOD niche. I think I would have better luck with something I know about. For the past few years, a lot of my free time has been spent on gaming forums talking about games, so I figure, why waste more of my time when I can potentially make some cash off of what I love to do.
If they's what you love to do, go for it. Not all niches are over saturated, the internet is always needing new fresh content for every niche.
In really depends what you call competition. For a noob 800.000 results for a keyword is huge. From what I belive you can make good money by working on niches which are already known but if you search and find a niche with very low competition but which is searched a lot...than you can become millionaire.
The term 'Successful' is very subjective. What is your benchmark for success ? Personally, I do niche marketing because I am a one-person business with limited knowledge and finances. That prevents me from trying to be the jack-of-all trade but I am sure there are innovative individuals who have the ability to juggle a bigger basket. And back to the issue, what do you determine as successful ? If you set your goals low then they would be achievable but if you set to rule the world like Google then well, it may be possible but relatively difficult.
Finding a niche is difficult and many people just opt to do what you do(find something they enjoy).As long as you are passionate about it you can be successful. Good luck.
I should've clarified. For me, success at this point would be having a site that is populated enough to be almost self sustaining (I'm thinking 20,000 members). I've noticed forums that are good and have about 20,000 active users get to the point where content, advertising, etc is pretty much given by the users themselves.
Yea, I figured if I did find a great niche, chances are, I wouldn't know much about it to support a site. Gaming is a big hobby of mine, and I am pretty up to date on news and such. Plus I can add my own insight onto gaming news. Even if it doesn't become a 'success', I wouldn't really mind, since this is doing what I like anyway.
to be successful you need to be something to somebody. If you have no target market aka your niche then you do not know who to market to.
i think it is possible, but having a niche and targeting niche keywords is often easier to get a good ranking on google, then having a business which is on a large variety of different services etc.