How to come up with Niche ideas?
How to come up with Niche ideas must be one of those top questions most Affiliate newbies want answering.
Many people will have different ways to find or think about new niche ideas, some will go very targeted and some more generic and work on building on it over time. I guess it boils down to a few things;
Can you make a quick buck from a very targetted popular niche with less time and effort involved?
This comes with its own challenges if you are hoping to rank in google, you will need to do your research here which could take more time than putting the site together. If the niche is too small or you don’t have an interest will it ever rank well if you cannot do the content for the site. Also are the domains for your chosen keywords going to be available.
Can you find a niche that is up and coming such as a pre-release or coming out soon.
1 example I found today was http://www.avatardvd.co.uk, no 1 in google for avatar DVD and has made record sales in the US already selling over 6.7 Million copies so far in only 4 days. I suspect most of these will have been online and pre-orders. Being ahead of the game could make that affiliate site a nice little earner.
Or do you go big and work at a Bigger Site but you may not make you money straight away?
Think you can beat the competition, the big players. Do you have something unique to offer or are you just going to throw up as much content as possible so it ranks and hope you get those clicks through to the merchants.
We here at Affiliate Project are always having meetings and the top topic of discussion is which direction do we take. We’ve only been doing this for over 14 months and have only worked on niche websites. We have learned lots along our journey and brought some good and bad domains, quite a few of our domains are undeveloped because of some of reasons above such as having no interest, too generic, too competitive, not enough time. Try and think outside the box, do your research and try and do something you have an interest in.
Niche sites, are they harder to rank now?
We have setup a couple of quick niches recently. The reason for doing this was we spotted an area where we may be able to rank quickly and also keyword domains were available. Now I know people don’t like giving away their domains but we like to be honest here and therefore would like to make a couple of points we have noticed about them. The sites are for Batman Fancy Dress and Plus Size Swimwear. Now what we have noticed is that these sites have been hard to rank. We looked at the competition and thought we should be able to rank quite easily on Google on the keywords for these domains however after launching them it appears this isn’t the case. So has google changed something or are we seeing that actually thinner sites are going to be even harder to rank for these days.
It also highlights the need to be able to make sites in which you have an interest or can write content about easily as this is one of the key’s to ranking well. We know that content makes for good sites we are just surprised about these sites not ranking when there are sites ranking higher with less content. Oh well keep plugging away. These were just two small domains we knocked out in a day each to see if there was some potential with them. We know niches aren’t the whole way to go and are busy developing a mixture of sites.
Another Niche Project Site Launched Womens Fancy Dress Site
We have launched yet another clothes related niche site called womensfancydress.org.uk a product feed driven site which lists all womens fancy dress themed costumes with easy to use categories such as search by decade, tv and film, sexy and seasonal outfits and we’ll be adding much more as and when we get more merchants products.
Hopefully we’ll get the site ranking soon in time for those Christmas parties. Womens Fancy Dress on google gets approx 49,500 exact searches per month, the competition shouldn’t be too much as the top site doesn’t have Womens Fancy Dress in the domain name of the description meta tag. Additionally this site only has 7 backlinks. We can also try and target women’s fancy dress with the ‘ in the keyword, which also gets 18,100 exact searches. This volume may go down as its quite popular for this time of the year.
So if any female affiliates out there are going to a Fancy Dress party and need some Fancy Dress Ideas, please visit out site. We also welcome any feedback you may have.
New niche site launching – www.maternityunderwear.org.uk
We’ve done quite well for maternity swimwear so we thought as we had the design template and knew the market a bit should we maybe do some more niches in this area. We had a look and have decided to try a site for maternity underwear. We have been busy designing it and while we haven’t applied to all the merchants yet the site is shaping up nicely. It is pretty much ready to launch and we will add more merchants as we apply to them and they reply.
This new site is offering more challenges as we are re-working the way we use datafeeds and pull information out of different tables. More learning for us but that is what we enjoy.
It’s been quite good to have a theme and template there already although it has actually required quite a lot of tweaking to fit the new site. Have a look and let us know what you think. We’ll keep you updated on our progress.
Niche site dropped from #1 position on Google overnight
Today we noticed that one of our niche sites had dropped from Google for the keyword search terms maternity swimwear. We have started to analyze the site to try and figure out what could have made this suddenly drop 
A quick look at Google Webmaster Tools and we noticed our Robots.txt file had several disallows for most of the main pages, but not the home page. We are not sure why this happened. The only recent change that we are aware of was that we updated the product feeds and had accidentally dropped the table in phpmyadmin. We had quickly re-created the table to update the product feeds, but for about 3-4 hours our site was not showing the products. We think this was because of the wp-cache plugin which has been causing us lots of problems recently. We had disabled this ages ago but it still seems to be caching. We knew the code in our php file hadn’t changed and that the sql statement was working ok, so must have been the caching problem.
Our site has been in top 3 position for almost 1 month now, soon after the launch of the site, so we are really confused why this would suddenly disappear.
We have also posted a question on Google Webmasters Forum, but some comments we got were not very constructive. We know the site needs some improving and will make some changes over the next coming weeks to help with this, but why would our site just drop.
A site:maternityswimwear.org.uk shows our site is also still indexed, so it doesn’t appear to have been penalised. Google Search for www.maternityswimwear.org.uk is still there.
Our only conclusion is that Google bots had tried to crawl our site when there was no content effectively so because of this our site has dropped to page 9 instead of page 1, position 1.
We will wait a few days to see if Google bot puts our site back where it belongs, at the top 
Has anyone else experienced this problem, or can provide us with some advice, we’d like to hear your comments.
Relaunch of niche site after facing problems with potential domain Trademark Infringement
Recently we had received legal notice about one of our niche sites from the prominent company, stating that we needed to relinquish the use and rights to the web site domain because the domain name and the use of the domain keywords was similar to the prominent company.
We didn’t realise that we had done anything wrong as we had checked the trademark and it wasn’t registered as a trademark for the domain name we were using. However we decided it was best to de-register the domain name as we now understand the problem. Our domain name could have been seen to be confusing to the public into thinking the trademark holder is somehow affiliated with our web site.
So rather than forget about the niche site altogether and loose out on any earnings, we’ve decided to re-launch the site but this time using a domain name that doesn’t Infringe on any trademark. Our new site is called UK Vibration Plates or www.ukvibrationplates.co.uk. The previous site was using domain keywords Powerplates which had become quite a generic term when searching for vibration fitness machines.
The funny thing was that we weren’t selling any of the Power Plate products, possibly due to the price as most of our sales were coming from the lower priced models such as the Body Sculpture BM1500 for just over £130, and the Horizon Treo V109 and Horizon Treo V209 slightly more expensive but still a bargin and all very popular machines according to Amazon’s sales ranks.
We hope that this site will do better for us now we have a more commonly used keywords in our domain name, although the competition may be stronger. The challenge is on
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