How do you test if a niche is too small to bother working it?
 

I have 3 niches in mind for a new site, 2 have lots of competition and 1 has almost no competition. How do I know which one will be the most profitable to work?

go for BBW! :thumbsup

lol

I would give my left nut to be an iBill cs rep and be able to see the numbers my competition generates. :evil-laug

No niche is too small :-)

But, you have to balance the expense that you put out to what you can take in. For example, I wouldnt suggest anyone do a bbw balloon site, there isnt a martket out there. However, its part of my site and my fetish, therefore i'll do it myself :-)

I know a friend that has a fetish site that no one else does, and she does really well with it. Its all a balance and numbers game.

When a niche seems "too small", remember that the internet is still growing quite rapidly, both in number of surfers and in time spent online. What is now a small niche, could make you a good living in a few years, especially if you've established yourself as one of the dominant players in that niche.

The best way to test a 'new' niche is to do what we did with http://www.dilf.com.

Send more general traffic to the site first then, once you have some figures from that traffic take complimentary niche traffic, in our case, mature gay traffic and send that to the site.

Then, once you have tested those types of traffic, send traffic to the site from an unrelated niche so again for Dilf we sent twink traffic to the site also.

This should give you a good idea of what type of traffic converts on the new niche as well as to how 'in demand' the niche is not only to the surfers but also to the webmasters who will be promoting the site.

Of course, you need to send in excess of 100k-500k of all types of traffic or more to get a realistic figure which will enable you to work with.

Another idea would be to build a semi-free site and get that in the SE's and see how well the targeted keywords do for you also.