Picking niches to make money online

The bad weather being experienced around North America and Europe right now, with people snowed in, torrential rains in the mediterranean causing flooding are all reasons to have decent insurance cover, and this is an opportunity for people who want to make a little extra money.

How? Well, not by walking from door to door asking for work as people clean up. Nope, instead this is an opportunity to remind people of the benefits of insurance, and while we're at it we can make money online.

As I mentioned in my post "Make Money Online with AdSense", insurance is a very competitive niche and one that you shouldn't take on unless you're really committed for the long haul. Most people who start making money online with websites give up after a few months because they don't actually make money.

Sadly this is because the majority of them target niches that are so competitive they can never expect to get very far. Instead they should choose niches that are less competitive, and where it is easy to get to the front page of Google with a couple months effort. The majority see only the dollars, and don't see the work and effort involved.

Let's revisit insurance; a typical insurance search on Google will yield over 30 million results, hugely competitive, and you'll need a decent sized website to compete on your own, or a really decent number of relevant backlinks to compete with a smaller niche site. But can you make money online with insurance?

So, let's start a case study about hitting the insurance niche. First of all, it's a huge niche with dozens of subniches and to simply start a website about insurance would take forever to populate with articles, but some niches like movie production insurance, or cat insurance might be much easier to write for, a dozen articles and a bunch of backlinks might be all that is needed to start getting good traffic and AdSense income.

The CPC isn't too fantastic for anything but the biggest insurance niches, only $3-$6 per click for many of the keywords, with a lot more hovering around 5c. Of course this means the AdSense publisher gets a lot less, but on the other hand this is still more than a lot of niches that might only have a CPC of 50c.

Is it worth targeting? Well if you're just starting in AdSense then no, you'll have to work too hard to make a go of it, and frankly the results won't start to come in until at least 3-6 months after starting and even then only a trickle. Other niches like webhosting whilst very competitive will probably pay sooner because it is so easy to find people who want hosting. You only need to join Entrecard and they'll visit you.