Your first step is to head over to Quantcast.com. Quantcast has a great list of, basically, the most popular sites online. This is an awesome place to go when you’re in the brainstorming phase. Head over to Quantcast, scroll down, and click on the Browse Rankings link that’s right below the search field. What you want to do is, really, just look down the list and just see what is doing well online. Obviously, these are going to be a lot of household names, a lot of huge sites like Pinterest, Wikipedia, LinkedIn, and things like that. You’re not really trying to emulate these sites; you’re just looking at what people these sites tend to target.
When you’re in the Top 100, they’re going to be more general. Google and YouTube appeal to just about everybody. As you get further down the list, and especially when you get to the second or third page, you’ll notice that they become more and more a niche and they start appealing to certain groups. Fandango is about movies. E! Online is about entertainment. Poll Daddy is a place for polls. Drudge Report is about politics. As you go down the list, you can find more and more niche sites and that’s a place that you can go to get inspiration for your niche. Obviously like I said, you’re not going to copy these sites because these are massive multimillion dollar sites. What they help you do is come up with topic ideas.
The next place you want to look is Clickbank.com. You’re not actually going to try to find specific products to promote quite yet, but this is a great place to go to see whether or not the niche that you’ve found can be monetized with affiliate offers. Clickbank is just one way to monetize your site with affiliate offers, but it’s a good place to look because it’s very popular. Head over to Clickbank.com, then click on the Marketplace button at the top, and then you can search. You can either look at a category that fits under whatever niche you’re looking at. Travel actually has a category, so you click on that. If you don’t find a category in the sidebar that fits well with your niche, you can actually just search for it using a keyword at the top where it says Find Products. Then when you do that or you choose a category from the sidebar, you want to take a look at some of the offers and see how popular they are.
