What’s wrong with plain old monopoly. You might ask?

Nothing as far as I’m concerned. However which edition of monopoly would you choose for someone who was an avid Simpson’s fan?

You see the makers of monopoly have taken their product and created new niches from it.

Not only can they sell the niche edition for more money, they also they get to sell more games.

Instead of a family having one monopoly game they now have several, according to the taste of each of the members.

Not only can you get a Simpson’s monopoly but also a Simpson’s Clue (Cluedo) etc.

Can you see the power behind this idea?

A single product is turned into multiple products, but all based around a single central theme—Monopoly.

—-In essence that can be your model for making niche websites

You start with a broad central theme -monopoly, and split into smaller niches- Simpson’s, clue, lord of the rings etc – you then start and  build a site based around one of these i.e. a site dedicated to Simpson’s monopoly.

Once this site is established you then repeat the process with another niche (lord of the rings) until you have a cluster of niches all based around the theme monopoly.

Doing it this way it is easier to become successful for each small niche one at a time than to trying for the entire theme-monopoly. If you check Yahoo for the number of competing sites for each term this is what you get:

• “Simpson’s monopoly” – 40,700  competing sites
• “monopoly”-         7,710,000  competing sites

Which one do you think is the easiest to succeed with?

Remember take any niche and narrow it down by creating sub niches, until you feel that you can compete.

Starting with a very broad niche is difficult, and can quickly cause you to become disillusioned because you have difficulty getting noticed.

To my way of thinking it demonstates clearly the advantages of going niche and represents a real win-win for the clients and the website site owners.

An older article about the niche dating site growth illustates this quite well-

http://techcrunch.com/2008/04/24/niche-dating-sites-grow-steadily-as-mainstream-ones-flail/

and  an article in the new york times confirms their popularity.

The example niche websites page has more examples

I just read a post over at passive income pursuits called niches to avoid when building a website and it remined me of some of my earlier attemps online when I chose niches that I had very little interest in,and so I found the sites difficult to maintain.

Although many sites focus on keyword research as the basis of building a niche website, I still believe that in the long run you should focus on your interests first, and keyword research second.

If you want to avoid going into a dead end niche then I recommend that before you get the domain name you sit down and map out the first 5 articles for the site and start writing them.

By doing that you will quickly discover if you really have any interest and you should also get more article ideas as you do it.

If you find it difficult and don’t get any new ideas then it probably isn’t going to be the niche for you.

If you have experienced similar problems with your chosen niches then pleas feel free to share them.