If you can find profitable niches with low competition, you’re in luck! There’s many bloggers and niche website builders looking for these little gems! An evergreen niche, for example, is one which is profitable all year round. These tend to be profitable niches but with high competition. These are blogs or niche websites which cover topics such as health, fitness, wealth and romance.
It’s not easy to get your content ranked on Google for anything in any of these areas; there’s simply too much competition. You’ll need to dig a little deeper.
Conversely, you can look at topics which are pretty obscure: scrapbooking, needlecraft, Oboe lessons etc. Obscure topics tend to have far less competition than most of the evergreen niches. But these kinds of topics can be hard to monetise. When there’s less demand, there’s less demand for products too. So building an obscure site can take your time without being successful. See my article Profitable Blog Niches.
Profitable Niches With Low Competition – Obscure Sites
Obscure sites offer the best in terms of low competition; you can rank your site on Google more easily and get traffic. But that traffic doesn’t necessarily equate to an income unless you can monetise your site with affiliate products which sell. Low competition often means low traffic too, otherwise, other affiliates might have found their way there by now! Adsense is another option of course and you can place adverts on any site, no matter what kinds of affiliate products are available for the topic.
Ideally of course you would have a passion or interest to build a site around which is obscure. You can then create your own products.
Profitable Niches With Low Competition – Case Studies
Mushroom Harvesting
I built a site around the subject of mushroom harvesting after finding a low competition keyword (when to harvest mushrooms). I worked on it for a good few months. The site did rank at the top of Google, but fell away after I stopped working on it. I simply wasn’t passionate about my topic, so I couldn’t continue working on it. Plus, this was a tough niche to monetise because there are few products I could find in this area.
Building niche sites like these used to be the way to go 10-15 years ago. You could get a tonne of traffic. But now, Google values sites which are constantly updating themselves and adding new content. Small niche sites don’t rank for long unless they are updated regularly or if there’s very little competition.
Autopilot Software
Another keyword I found recently was “autopilot money making software“. You can see the site which is now ranking on Google (2.5.19). However, it could have dropped off by the time you’re reading this! Plus, the site gets a small amount of traffic so far because I’m ranking only for a couple of main keywords. I’ll keep working on this site and building back links, but eventually, I’ll lose interest and leave it!
This is a good topic to target because you can monetise with affiliate programs which pay ongoing commissions. Recurring affiliate commissions can make small niche website like these quite lucrative just with a few sales. With more obscure topics, it’s more difficult because you need to use either low value affiliate products or Google Adsense. Ideally, start with the high value affiliate products (see highest paying affiliate programs list) and then work backwards to find profitable niches with low competition.
Profitable Niches With Low Competition – Sub-Sub-Niches
A sub-niche is a niche within a niche. Take affiliate marketing for example. This is a niche within the niche of money making online. If you can then find a sub-niche within affiliate marketing, you can find the less competitive areas but still use lucrative affiliate products to earn more from less traffic.
This isn’t an easy area to rank a niche website in. However, you only need a small ‘slice of the pie’ to become lucrative. Affiliate marketing is a hugely competitive area to attempt to rank a site in. But if you narrow it down, you can find some uncompetitive ‘gems’ to rank for. You can also target the kinds of people who would be looking for affiliate marketing but don’t know it yet! Think about the kinds of searches success oriented people look for: self help books, free downloads, mind development books and guides etc.
High Traffic Low Competition Keywords
Unfortunately, many of the high traffic, low competition keywords are already being used by affiliates, vendors or bloggers! You can find the odd one or two, but you should also be thinking about the search intent of your traffic. Unless you get this right, you could spend a long time building a niche website, only to have all your traffic leave without buying anything. You don’t want to spend 6-12 months building a niche website only to find you’ve targeted the wrong kinds of visitors.
I built a site around a keyword I found many years ago : tedsshed.net. This was probably over 15 years ago now. I found the keyword “Teds Sheds” on Google Keyword Planner. It had a high number of monthly searches. A quick look now shows around 3600 monthly searches.
Search Intent
I built a site and got traffic. I even made a few sales of an affiliate product I found on Clickbank (See clickbank autopilot money making software). I sold shed plans so my site was kind of in line with the “Teds Sheds” theme! However, on closer inspection, Tedssheds is a shed building service based in the UK. It’s for people who want to buy a prefabricated shed, not build their own from scratch. This small difference in search intent can make all the difference. At the time, it was a success because I hadn’t managed to get any traffic to any of my other sites. And like I said, I made a few sales. But, I’m kind of using it as an example of what not to do here – for the reasons stated!
If I had kept it going for all these years however, it could still be making me sales today! Alas, it wasn’t making enough money to sustain itself, so it had to go!