I have a foot in two niches, customer service provision and cataloguing vintage or rare stringed instruments.
Customer services was an obvious choice for both me and my clients. The emphasis is towards peer support were a forum provides the best answer so there's less reliance on telephone support.
The stringed instruments side of things focuses primarily on guitars and goes way beyond a passion. Obsession would be a better word for it! I maintain a couple of private forums for musicians that own rare guitars with a view to cataloging instruments primarily for insurance purposes. In addition if a guitar gets stolen we use the information logged to search for any attempt to resell the instrument.
When I choose a niche, I look for commercial value. When I built crypto niche forum, I chose crypto because I discovered that this niche had one of the highest CPC rates.
I love drumming. However, to be an authority in it you need playing ability and tons of cash to make huge social media pages/groups and communicate with them a lot. Now, as for a forum, you'd have to dig that out of social media because there the people are in social media.
I suppose you could go around social media (maybe with PPC ads) and get people to a forum. I think it would be tough, though.
My niche is crafting for Crafter Craze. I do all sorts of crafting and am willing to learn the things I don't know about. I've been doing embroidery since I was 4 years old, I learned to crochet when I was a pre-teen and then I learned to knit as a teenager. I did crafting because my mom made crafts and it was fun.
I think that is important for most cases, even for hobby because you'd at least want to make enough at some point to at least let the forum pay for itself.
My forum is for holistic & eco-friendly living. I've always been into nature & the environment so this niche was something that is close to my life. It's a hobby for me. Never planned on making any money off of it.
I think that is important for most cases, even for hobby because you'd at least want to make enough at some point to at least let the forum pay for itself.
Except for my personal blog and personal website, which were purely for passion, I have always built websites on commercial topics. I want my websites to be self-sustaining. I cannot spend my time and also continue to pay for the expenses from my pockey.
