Look at the existing websites for the topic you want to focus on and ask yourself what they are lacking. Can users contribute to the site? Does the site answer the most common questions people have? What would you do better?

You probably realize that some of the niches you picked are already overcrowded or have some excellent websites that really address everything you can think of. This doesn’t mean you can forget about the niche it just means you have to make your niche narrower.

Try to find directories, forums and online communities that deal with the topic you are interested in. You can start by using the Google queries you saw before or try some of these:

yourtopic + forum
yourtopic + commnity
yourtopic + directory

Some other very popular forum software:
“Powered By IP.Board” + yourtopic
“Powered By SMF” + yourtopic
“Powered By phpBB” + yourtopic

Read the topics posted in those forums and look for questions that are asked over and over again. Can you answer them? Could you answer them with a little bit of research? Forums and online communities are a great place to do market research and see what people are really looking for while directories give you an idea what other sites already exist.

The most important lesson you will learn in this guide!

Ok here it comes. This is really the single most important factor that will either result in your ultimate success or failure in making money online. Whatever your website will offer, it has got to have at least one (or ideally, even more than one) unique selling points. If you are just trying to be another news blog about a certain topic, while another blog that does pretty much the same has already been doing it a couple of months, forget it! Unless you are able to give it a real new twist.

A unique selling point doesn’t mean your design is new and very rarely means the technical features of your site. Those things will only give you a short term advantage because they can easily be replicated. You won’t be able to compete solely on features. In your approach to general marketing and branding you have to focus on intangible values. For websites that means the angle how you approach the topic should be different to others and you keep this difference consistent. If you are the blog that always has the most hilarious write ups on recent news about your topic with a good chunk of humor then stick to it.

An example:

There are hundreds of news sites about new technical toys (also called gadgets). A lot of them just focus on bringing the latest and hottest news. If you would like to get into this area and succeed you need to do something different. Here are some ideas how to approach this topic:

Research:

1. You realize the field is too broad and narrow the topic down to mobile phones and make it even more narrow and focus on smart phones (phones that have their own operating system and can have software installed on them)
2. You realize a lot of people have a strong opinion about their favorite operating system for smart phones (for example Windows Mobile versus Symbian)
3. Strong opinions lead to passionate discussions and you will see people fighting it out in the comments on general mobile phone blogs

Conclusion:

Give them a place to really fight it out. For example you could start a blog that compares two similar phones with the same technical specifications but different operating systems. Another idea would be to focus on the operating systems themselves and to compare the feature sets and offer your expert advice on it. A lot of blogs just focus on one system for example, and are dedicated solely to either Symbian or Windows Mobile.