Niche Blogs

As time ticks down to the start of the Experiment (if you are reading this after the 1st of August 2011, it has already started...) I am frantically trying to get together a list of possible cash generating ideas so that I am ready to go on D-Day (or maybe E-Day?).

One of the first ideas that I had is to start a few niche blogs on various subjects and monetise them with affiliate links or Google Adsense (or both). This is, I think, a good idea for several reasons:

1. Niche blogs cost nothing to set up (if using blogger, etc).
2. Niche blogs are easy to maintain. I only have a few hours a week to spend on this remember...
3. Niche blogs, in theory, can earn money day after day, week after week, for the whole of the experiment.
4. Niche blogs can be sold fairly easily (flipped) to provide a lump sum into the pot.

Now I completely understand that not every blog, niche or otherwise, is guaranteed to make money. In fact the majority probably don't make more than a few Dollars a month. If I don't want to waste my time on blogs that offer no return, I need to make sure that I do everything possible to help them succeed (no, really?).

Niche 
For those that don't know, niche blogs or websites are those that target a single, very specific, subject in the hope that they can pick up traffic that gets missed by other, more generic websites. So rather than having a blog about Handbags, a niche blog might target Blue Leather Handbags. There certainly won't be as many searches made for Blue Leather Handbags, but the chances are good that there will also be much less competition.

Ideally I would rather set up some self-hosted blogs rather than blogger hosted ones. I think www.bluewidgets.com looks far more professional than www.bluewidgets.blogspot.com, but hosting and domains cost money and at this point I only have £10. That isn't to say that blogger hosted blogs can't do very well (check out the list at BloggerBuster to see some hugely popular blogger blogs), and besides, it's all i've got to work with at the moment.

Subject Matter
My first problem is finding the subject matter for these niche blogs. Obviously I want to find something which is hugely popular, that gets a lot a of searches and only has minimal competition from other blogs and websites (the holy grail?). This is unlikely to happen unless I am a) very lucky or b) have a lot of time to research subjects. Neither of these things are true... As I see it, I have a couple of options:

A) I find something massively popular and try to pick up a small part of the monthly traffic for that subject.
B) I find something less popular (and therefore less competitive) and go for a bigger chunk of a smaller pie.

The problem I see with A is that going after highly competitive search terms is that, although getting high positions in the serps (search engine results pages) is possible, it would take more time and expertise than I have. So it looks like B is the route to go down...

The next thing I have to do? Keyword Research!