Jason posted a comment asking, "What if your niche doesnt have any relevant offers available that are related? What if the offers that are available suck?" Well Jason, I have two tips for you. One I don't think you're going to like, and the other might help you generate some revenue for your niche.

1. Pick the right niche. I realize that if you've already invested time and money into ranking in the top 3 for your keywords, it's hard to abandon ship and move to a more profitable niche. If this is you, you need to learn how to pick a niche before jumping in with both feet. This problem can easily be avoided by doing your niche research before starting to build your site.

There are many tools that show you how much you can expect per click, but the most important thing is to search for your keyword (or key phrase) and look for Adwords advertisers. Do you see 5 or more? If not, this might not be a niche with a product or market. If your search reveals 3 or less advertisers, you need to strongly consider a new niche. This particular market might not have the products to support it as a profitable market. If this is the case, ranking #1 might bring you a lot of traffic (3k uniques per month in Jason's case), but if you can't get them to buy anything, that's just junk traffic.

2. Swing to other trees. Imagine you're a monkey, you get hungry and eat all of the bananas in your tree. After the bananas are all gone from your tree, is it easier to get down on the ground and walk a mile to find a new tree, or is it easier to swing to the tree right next to you? Of course, jumping to the tree next door is much quicker and easier. I admit, my analogy skills are sub-par.

So in the case of the monkey, it's easier for you to move into a related niche since some of the work you've done can still relate. Blogs and parasite pages (wordpress.com, blogger, WPMU sites, etc) can still be used for your new niche. Relationships with other webmasters can still be utilized and the content you've written can be repurposed.

How do I pick a related niche?

If you don't know how to pick a related niche, there are generally two ways.

1. Keyword (contextual) based related niche. This method will have you finding other keywords that use your existing keyword. Here's an example.

Current key phrase with no product: Lawn Mowing Service in Arkansas
Other possible niches to break into: Lawn mower reviews, Arkansas Lawn Mowers, Yard Service

This are strong related possibilities because they are using one or more of your existing keywords.

2. Latent Semantic Indexing. This method will have you finding your keywords based on related words that people would normally associate together, for example, bird/parrot/Cockatiel/cage/seed.

Current key phrase with no product: Lawn Mowing Service in Arkansas
Other possible niches to break into: Bermuda grass seed, Arkansas sod companies, gardening gloves, wheelbarrow wheels

Now What?

So you found a related (either contextual or LSI) niche that you're ready to jump into? Here is a quick rundown of what you should do next.

1. Domain. Unless your domain is an exact keyword match, I would suggest trying to adapt it to fit your new niche.

2. Links. If possible, change your best links to use a new anchor text. Once you've done that, start grabbing some new links on strong domains that are indexed well. Web directories are great for this.

3. Content. Keep all of your old content on the site and start adding new content related to your new niche.

4. On site SEO. Make sure you change your meta tags, alt tags, title tags, etc. You don't want to confuse the Google bot that comes to check out your new site.

So if you find yourself where Jason is currently, I hope these ideas can help you make some money!

Brandon Hopkins offers Fresno website design as well as many SEO services including high performance linkbuilding. You can contact him at brandonchopkins@gmail.com

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Scott recently wrote about saturated niches. If you missed that post, make sure and read it, especially the last paragraph. Niche marketing is without a doubt the way of the foreseeable future. Google makes that perfectly apparent. Gone are the "Wal-Mart" days of sites like Buy.com that stock everything but specialize in nothing. Here to stay are the small sites that sell a few of the best products at good prices, so how do you break into those niches?

Here are a few pieces of advice from someone who has successfully broken into niches with no budget and competed against companies that spend thousands per day.

1. Start with something you know. The easiest way to build a presence in a niche is through expertise. While you may not be an expert in the niche you've chosen, it's easy to fake if you know something about that niche. You may not have ever purchased office furniture, but if you've sat in it and used it for the last five years, you know something about different chairs, desks, layout, filing systems and more. Start with something you know and writing for and promoting in that niche is much easier.
2. Build a strong base before showing your colors. It is a common war tactic to try to lure the enemy into a trap. With your niche, your website is your trap, it's what wins the war (generating you a profit). So before you try to get those visitors to your website, have something to show them. If you're starting with an empty website and paying for customers, they'll leave without giving you a chance. I always have 5-10 pages of the website ready and waiting before doing any kind of marketing. This gives new customers something to look at and gives you a professional presence.
3. Never stop writing. While 5-10 pages of good content can get you a long way in your niche, you can never outgrow any niche. You might disagree, but I have been writing in one niche for 4 years. To date I have nearly 400 articles on a niche that is pretty small. Most of them are long tail keywords but just about all of them brought in a few visitors, and that is what you want.

In niche marketing you may never have the advertising budget of a Fortune 500, but that doesn't mean you can't compete with them and steal some of their customers!

Brandon Hopkins has websites dedicated to over 100 different niches and is currently working on a free website hosting project called 22 Gigs.

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