What does an untapped niche look like?

Chianti

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Apr 24, 2010
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I just stumbled across a search term that has 40,000 exact match searches per month. It's an emotionally charged issue, mostly female, is something that drags on for months, and is a problem that is becoming more abundant. I'm fairly sure I could build an ever-changing community around this traffic and find lots of ways to try to monetise it across several different verticals.

However, I'm confused because it isn't already being monetised by anyone who knows what they're doing. The first page of SERP is absolute crap (just a few short articles on the subject) and the 'competition' field in Adwords is totally blank all the way down the keyword list - I've never seen that happen before.

There's one site on page two of the SERP that has started tapping the traffic in the way that I would myself (except I'd own them in terms of scale and ideas), and I know that this small site is making low $xxxx per month right now (they outed themselves to me when I asked).

Does this sound like a good, untapped demographic to build an authority site around, bearing in mind I'm a noob at this and need to start off quite small? I'd be ecstatic if my first attempt at an authority site was eventually able to make 1000-2000$ a month.

One issue is, I need to find what percentage of the traffic is over eighteen (ie. can own a credit card/paypal). I think nearly all of it is, but I'd like to be sure. Any ideas how to do that sort of thing?

Cheers.
 


Too long? Cliff notes:

· 40,000 exact matches per month
· emotional female demographic seeking reassurance/advice/community
· I think I can sell them a variety of related stuff across several verticals + ebook
· I know of one small noob site making 1000$ per month profit from a fair attempt.
· No-one else is trying to monetise this traffic directly.
· Competition field in Adwords is mostly blank virtually all the way down the page.

Questions:
· Does this look like a nice untapped niche? Or does it look too good to be true?
· Would you bother building an authority site around it, given what I've said?
· Any way to determine the age range of the searchers?

Cheers
 
PM me the details. I'll build a network and let you know if it makes any money.
 
[that means "yes" btw, go for it because it sounds like low-hanging fruit even if it doesn't bank hard]
 
Hey thanks.
Yeah, in the end I will just need to build something out and see how far it can be taken.

I was just surprised to happen upon this thing, and so now I'm fishing around for how unusual it is to find this kind of unharnessed traffic. If it's very unusual, then I'm probably overlooking something important.

If I feel it could be worth building quite an elaborate site for, I'll use Drupal instead of Wordpress to give me more scope for expansion. But this would take a few dozen more hours to set-up and theme, so I want to be a bit cautious about about how good this traffic might be in case I waste my time.

Cheers.
 
I would go for it.

I currently am doing a site on a niche in real estate with only 1 adwords competitor and no sites really ranking for the kw. So I would throw up a wordpress site and depending on how you monentize it then go foward with it.
 
> I currently am doing a site on a niche in real estate with only 1 adwords
> competitor and no sites really ranking for the kw

That's good to know.
Do you mind saying how many exact match searches there are per month for your kw?
More or less than 40,000?
 
Don't bother, just pm me the niche and I'll make bank. In all seriousness bro, there's lots of routes you could choose so go for it. The amount of searches per month isn't necessarily as important as the value of those visitors. Hell for my new site I've been building, I targeted two keywords with only 1,200 exact searches a month but out of 1,100 visitors this month so far from those keywords I've gotten 29 sales which is = $1,400.
 
Sounds promising

Check out Bing to see if anyone is advertising there. There are at least a few KWs I know of with decent G volume, and no paid search competition in Google, but plenty of ads in Bing.

Also, what about testing paid traffic to a simple site on the subject before building out an authority site? Should probably give you answers faster, albeit at some cost.

On the age question - you could set up a quick survey form. Probably don't need to worry about until later. btw - I thought a lot of teenagers have credit cards these days?
 
> I currently am doing a site on a niche in real estate with only 1 adwords
> competitor and no sites really ranking for the kw

That's good to know.
Do you mind saying how many exact match searches there are per month for your kw?
More or less than 40,000?

Exact Match is about 15k. Broad is like 30k so I am working on this to see what happens exactly.

For the untapped niche honestly just go for it, you never know when it could become "discovered" by some one else and now you have legitimate competition...
 
An untapped niche reminds me of an untapped girl. You'll never know for sure until you get in there.