Brainstorming a subject in a non-competitive niche

I love creating forums, but I don't even try unless I'm sure there is "room" for my forum on the Internet. In other words, I would never create a gaming forum or a movie forum, because there are already more then enough of them.

The problem I encounter is the difficulty of coming up with a topic that is popular enough, but doesn't already have a discussion forum, or at least too many discussion forums in that niche. It seems like everybody and their mother has a forum nowadays, so just about every niche is saturated.

How do you come up with unique ideas that haven't been explored, and how do you gauge their success before even making an attempt?

 

A good thing I would do if starting a forum is research the keywords it would come under say BlackLake Fishing Forums, I would see what it would be able to rank for which would obviously be black lake or fishing forums and check if that is searched using webconfs keyword playground, if fishing forums had less than around 4k searches a month and I wanted this to be a good project I wouldnt bother as it would take time optimising and promoting to never really see a good flow of traffic even in the future if ranked high.

These days I would also research the forums in the same niche to make sure I could advertise on them in a signature because without that any forum feels doomed to promote, at least to me.

Of course theres thousands of forums that havent been done before but there is reasons and usually it is because they just arent searched enough or at all and there would be no real gain in starting one, for example a one armed coats forum, it wouldnt get visitors naturally and even if optimised it would still get nothing or very little as no one cares enough for such things.

 

That's a tough one to be sure. I've wanted to start a couple different forums myself, but gave up on the idea after seeing so many others in the same niche. If there aren't any real good forums for a particular niche then you would still have to know enough about that niche to make a good forum. To me unless it's a niche I'm really interested in, it isn't worth the trouble to do the research to learn about it just to create the forum. The most successful forums were created when there was a demand for it and they were created by someone very involved in that niche.

Sheesh, that's a lot of niches in one paragraph. :lol:

 

I honestly don't know of any niche that doesn't have 100 forums already dedicated to it. The only forums I ever started were for gaming clans and my own personal site. A grand total of 3.

 

I'm sure there are plenty. Thinking of them is the issue.

For example, my Lineolated Parakeet forum was the first one to be created. Sure, there were Yahoo Groups and such, but they aren't exactly competitors. As far as I know, only one more Lineolated Parakeet forum has risen since mine has and that is the "official" forum of the Lineolated Parakeet Society. But they're far behind, and all of the knowledge currently lies with my community.

 

Is it about the thing you asked me about?

I always like drawing a tree map out and having specific niches within the main focus of what I want to do. I then do research on those minor niches and see if they've been done. If not, I try my best to exploit them. It isn't rocket science, it's just that it's very natural for humans to stop doing something or put mental barricades in front of themselves when there isn't a single thing obstructing your path to success.

 

Nah, the creation of this thread is not related to that idea. That idea was something that would be possible, but would take a lot of work. Just like AA -- there is plenty of competition in AA's niche, but with hard work, we've done well.

I'm not saying that every niche is closed to new forums; I believe any forum can be successful if you follow some basic principles, one of them being that you've got to be different and somehow stand out. It's possible, but very difficult depending on the niche.


I feel like I've tried to say too much in too few words and that it doesn't make sense.