I was chatting with Ryan the other day and he told me he had discovered some new high value niches. This has sparked off new ideas that are going to be enthusiastically pursued. Ryan discovered these niches almost by sheer luck. It got me thinking if it was possible to try out a niche intentionally before plunging into it?
Domainers have long had the “domain tasting” technique where they register a domain, throw adsense on it and see if it earns before having to pay the bill. Only those that show promise get picked up. Could we do anything similar on blogs?
Adsense doesn’t care about the theme of your blog, just the theme of your page. While I don’t care for adsense as a monetization method it would serve as a proxy for the profitability of the niche that you find. If you adsense gets decent click prices you have scored.
Of course it is going to take effort, first selecting promising niches, and secondly driving traffic to the test page. I am guessing a linkbait would be in order. You might want to use an adsense tracking system also if you want to do this on a large scale.
What do you think? Idea?
8 thoughts on “Do You Do Niche Tasting?”
boy do i feel silly. I literally was half-awake when I wrote my original comment above. And I somehow missed the “niche” part, and upon seeing “tasting”, substituted “domain” in my mind. So ignore my comments
I used to think that I was nich tasting. I would buy or find some articles and create a small site and do some half assed promotion, get no results and then move on. Now I know a bit better.
If you have original quality content then it may be easy enough to do niche tasting. I would suggest that you have a recipe to do this. I have a 15 step process for finding a niche, this takes an hour or two. I have a WordPress process for doing the getting of the domain, creating the blog, configuring template and plugins and content, and then another process to start the promotion.
If you have a setup like this you can run quickly from idea to finished very easily but if not you can get mired in details that just distract you from the important parts of your new site and niche.
ah good point. But if you are using an existing website, do you really want to “taint” the site by diverging into another topic? I suppose if you have a generic domain name to begin with, you might not be adversely affected.
What I had in mind was pages not domains. I am glad to hear they are cutting out the incentive for domainers to taste domains. All I want is an indication that a niche has some potential, I can do more research then. Just a hint is enough when rounding down from 1000 potential niches to 3 for example
right – whatever way you can drive traffic to a tasted domain.
But using a page on your existing domains won’t work. The point of domain tasting, at least for some people, is to see if a certain domain name has any value. (I haven’t quite thought this through, though I know I’ve read it.) And the other aspect is that tasted domains are, I believe, sometimes set up with a parking service for free. The revenue does get shared, but there are thus no hosting costs with this method. So there are a few variations.
social media traffic isn’t going to give you a lot of ad clicks so CTR would be low, but you *could* get an idea of EPC if you get enough hits.
You don’t need domain tasting, setting up an page on your site would work (do some old-school seo and you’d be good).
ryan – it’s actually the laziest way I know of picking up niches – and your linkbait doesn’t even have to be any good, as long as it goes popular….
Chris: actually, last week, it was announced that Google was cracking down on domain tasters that use AdSense, even though it’s going to cost Google revenue loss. Any domain less than 5 days old won’t be able to use adsense – or so that’s the plan. Since AdSense is an incentive for some domain tasters, the idea is that they’ll stop taking advantage of registrars (heh heh) and AdSense advertisers.
Domain tasters register as much as a 1000 domains at a time and profit heavily. But that takes a custom piece of code to pull this off. So unless you’re already into domaining, this isn’t going to be very profitable. Especially once AdSense usage rules change.
This idea is for people with lots of energy…people who are not lazy…people who like to work for their money;-)
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