I never pick niches I like. I find niches and determine if they’ll be profitable. Then, I educate myself on them and start writing and building. I run sites about topics that I don’t give a damn about. However, all of the information on them is written from the perspective of “is this truly useful to someone who is searching for this topic?”, and I never publish a site that looks like garbage, or has useless content

I don’t care if it’s boring to do all of that mindless research to write quality articles for a quality site – I want to make money and I’ll do anything possible to achieve success. Your success, or even that extra paycheck all comes down to if you’re willing to go that extra mile that 90% of the rest won’t do.

Even if I go as far as having my websites pay for their own domain name renewals, my mission is accomplished – it eliminates the expense of owning yet another domain name, lets me amass a bigger domain name portfolio…and that’s fine by me. Their rankings will only increase as the years go by. Otherwise, I’m enjoying an additional $50 to $100+ per year from a single 10 page mini-site with AdSense that took me in the upward of a week and a half to two weeks to create (multiply that by the dozens, and it really adds to your annual income!)

Tackling Topics You Don’t Care About for More Income

Imagine finding a micro-niche and domain name for a topic in personal injury, insurance or accounting. All three of these broad categories are notorious for having expensive keywords in virtually any PPC program. Of course, it would be rather newb-ish to attempt to rank for these exact terms.

However, you’re smarter than that – do some keyword research. Pick a few branches of these categories, then do keyword research on THOSE branches, and you just might find a long tail micro-niche with a .com that’s available, and little competition. Who cares if the term only gets 300 global searches per day – get yourself on page one of Google (or easier yet, Yahoo or Bing) and make sure your AdSense ads are in all of the hotspots seen in the heat map diagram.

The catch is that you know nothing about these topics. They’re dreadfully boring. Most people are not going to be willing to educate themselves on these topics for the sake of creating a mini-site. The sites that DO exist for them were probably created by lawyers and accountants – neither of which know a damn thing about SEO. Starting to see a light at the end of the tunnel?

It’s All About Motivation

You sat though years of doing boring book reports in high school and/or college…surely you can muster up the strength to do it again. This time around, the incentive is that you’ll get a residual income from it :)

While the “write about what you like” crowd is sticking only with niches they like and are interested in (and I’m sure those niches won’t be profitable), you’ll have your opportunity to take the bull by the horns and diversify your portfolio of income-generating sites, even though they’ll be in topics you know nothing about.

Besides, you might learn something new, and that’s never a bad thing!

For instance, if you have a blog that deals with one particular topic (such as electric cars), search the internet for “electric car forum” and read up on what people are posting about. What you’ll really want to look for are the questions people are asking, and the answers and opinions that come afterward. There’s your real content: popular questions that probably don’t have web pages dedicated to them, nor a great deal of search engine competition. From here, you can easily combine a bunch of Q&A sessions into your own personal content-rich article. There’s a smart way to come up with a topic and all of its content without having to toil over any of the basic stuff!

Still not enough? There’s also Yahoo Answers – a GREAT place to search for any keyword and see what common questions people are asking. Best yet, they have answers, and you can use all of this great stuff to write unique content!

Ripoff artists and the general uninspired population turn to places like ArticlesBase, eZine Articles, PRweb and any of the other major article submission sites. There’s a lot of shame in copying other people’s stuff, no doubt about it…although, it can prove to be helpful to get industry information in lieu of writing content for your affiliate sites. Need sites and references? Find more articles on Google News or Yahoo News.

As a last measure, there’s always Youtube…a place to watch tutorials, debates, demonstrations and everything in between. Type out what you see to create the text version (that is, the version that search engines can actually see!)

Wait, there actually is one completely LAST measure. You can simply create a mash-up of different articles by copying and pasting them into one big word document, then running them through a professional “spinner” like Magic Article Rewriter to turn them into unique content with the grace of an alchemist. Disclaimer: Requirements include no shame, little patience and the desire to do things the easy way.