The niche you choose is probably the most critical parts of your internet marketing success.

It needs to be a niche you’re interested in – you’ll be spending a lot of time in it.

And it needs to have enough components to be able to develop a full website.

Flimsy, one page or even 10 page sites have the odds stacked against them.

You’re competing against very big sites – Google reports 123 million pages from Wikipedia; over a million from Buzzfeed; 65 million from Reddit; etc.

YouTube has over 1.5 billion pages indexed.

That means you need a respectable number of pages – one person I follow suggests upwards of 200 pages.

Which means you can’t do that about an ultra-small niche.

If you’re not sure how far to drill down, go to the Dummies site.

There’s a good chance that if they’ve got a book about it, there’s a big enough niche to make it worth your while.

Personally, I much prefer evergreen niches.

Ones that are highly unlikely to ever go out of fashion.

• Health – that’s growing a lot as we’re getting ever-more conscious about it
• Wealth – the nice things in life often cost money, we’re living longer (health again) and it’s unlikely the state will provide for that because it can’t afford to
• Self help – everything from relationships to mindfulness and lots of places in-between

Pick one niche area.

You won’t be able to spend enough time to cover lots of niches and it’s unlikely you’ll be earning enough short to medium term to be able to employ anyone other than maybe a basic writer to help you.

The big sites are struggling to do that – just do some research into the profitability of some of the big sites and decide whether you could cover that kind of burn rate on your capital.

Don’t let that put you off – they’ve got a much bigger overhead than you.

That’s one of the biggest advantages small internet marketers have over the bigger sites – lower overhead.

We’re hopefully nimbler as well and can take advantage of trends.

I’ve gone through this introduction because I think it’s important that you do this kind of quick research first, before you buy a website or anything else.

Too many people chase the money first and – whilst you need a niche that spends money – if that’s the only reason for choosing a niche, you’re going to need a team (or at least one other person) to carry the project through.

Because you’re going to be bored to tears before the site even gets its first visitor.

If you’re interested in a niche and it’s got its own Dummies book, you’re almost ready to start.

If you’re still not totally convinced, do a bit more research.

There’s a site called KeywordTool.io that scrapes the suggestions from Google – it’s a lot quicker to use the site than it is to do it yourself.

Run it a few times along with the suggestions that show up near the end of the first page of search results.

Export the results and combine them into one file (if you do this in a spreadsheet like Excel you can sort and get rid of the duplicates)

That’s given you the basis for the topics for your site for the foreseeable future.

Then do one final sensibility check…

Do a quick search for your chosen niche and the word “affiliate”

Skim through the first page or two of the results, visiting the pages that show up and saving the pages so that you can find them again quickly.

A lot of these private affiliate programs will want to see your site before accepting you into their program but by doing this quick check you’ve confirmed that you can find products to promote in your niche that will pay you a commission.