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A Step-By-Step Guide To Building A Community Forum (Part III)
by Fernando Hal (cheatad.com)

As we have discussed, defining a niche is the first step in creating a forum website. I personally believe that choosing a right niche is the main reason for success of any websites. This is very true regardless of what websites you are building: blogs, forums, or e-commerce.

What is a niche website?
Simply put, niche is a specific, popular but not too general range of topics. A niche website is a website that focus on that specific subject interest, and build your audience around that topic. Depending on your resources, you can choose huge niche, for example technology. A little bit, there is niche for gadgets. In gadgets, there is an even smaller niche for notebooks. You can keep on going and find there is endless of topic depth and width that you can cover.

Why niche website?
It is virtually impossible for anyone to cover all topics and subjects of interests that exist. Probably the only company to have successfully do that, covering every topics in the Internet, is Yahoo.

For the rest of us, it’s wiser to choose a niche and concentrate on that. It will help grow your website in a number of ways. By focusing on specific niche, it signify your authority on that subject. Visitors looking for that topic will come to your website, and subsequent interaction with similar minded forum members will make them want to come back. Then there is search engine consideration; when your forum is recognised as authority in the topic/subject, naturally search engine will bring traffic to your sites. (Learn more about search engine optimization)

How to choose website niche?
While some suggest profitability as the main factor in choosing website niche, I think otherwise. I can even talk from the viewpoint of “been there, done that”. I had started a large number of websites with the sole intention of making money. Needless to say, none last too long, with an average age of 6 months.

Here are what you need to consider when choosing forum niche:

1. What are your personal interests?
   One of the most obvious but often overlooked factor in choosing your website niche is your personal interest. Understand that you need to have good knowledge of your niche to engage your community and build your authority. So the first step is to list down all your personal interest. Don’t filter out any of them, that will be for later part.
2. How popular is the topic?
   After listing down all your topic interest, you need to find out how popular is the topic. Your aim will be to choose from the interest list some topics that can get decent number of visitors. Personally I’d find topics that get about 100,000 to 1 million result in Google search. A very useful tool in this stage is Google Search Insight. You can get an estimate of traffic assuming you rank well for the chosen topic.
3. Is there enough advertiser for the niche?
   This is where money counts. Search for your chosen topic in Google and see if there is enough advertisers to fill the advertisement.
   
   Also check out your going-to-be-competitor, to see if there is enough of targeted advertisement in their site.
4. Is there any area for growth?
   Before you start your forum site/blog, also check to make sure is there is sufficient room for growth, in term of topics. If all about your chosen topics can be written in one week, you’ll have very little to offer site visitors. Growing niche is quite simple actually. You can cover wider topic, moving up a little bit more general. Or you can move down, discuss your sub-topics more in depth. You can also move sideways, look at related topics within same category. If you can’t do any of them, it is generally wise to abandon the niche.

Additional Readings
Choosing a Niche For Building Your Blog
Starting a Professional Blog – Choosing A Niche
How To Pick The Right Website Topic

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