What could be better than a ready made audience for your domain or website? As you know, I am always on the lookout for new inspiration for domain names and websites. Google Groups can provide that if you take the time to look around and even better, the group is already interested in the topic i.e. a ready made audience.
What are Google Groups?
Google Groups is actually a reincarnation of Usenet and consists of message boards built around common interests. I used to participate quite actively in Usenet back in the 80s and early 90s mostly in highly specialized groups. As time went by, Usenet became the Wild West with porn and ads flooding the message boards and making many unusable.
Google Groups tries to make Usenet more accessible and allows moderation or restricted memberships to be set up to control the quality of members and messages. Some of the groups have over 100,000 messages a month and membership over 1 million.
Using Google Groups to choose domains
I generally browse the lists of groups starting at the Google Groups directory. For example, I clicked on Home and then Recreation and then Home – Gardens. Below you will see a list of all the groups for that general topic and a brief description.Here are some examples:
StPaulBackyardChickens
St. Paul Backyard Chickens is a post-only mailing list which announces resources and events that assist residents in creating, sharing, and maintaining small-scale flocks in the city.
Language: English
62 members, restricted
Dallas Organic Garden Club – DOGC
Dallas Organic Garden Club was organized by local gardeners to share organic methods, techniques and to explore and apply the simple philosophy of organic gardening within our urban oasis. Go to www.dogc.org to learn more.
Language: English
46 members, restricted
Greenhouse Hydroponics
This group is to talk about your greenhouse and Hydroponics System. Indoor/Outdoor gardening with Hydroponics (soil less). This is for people who want to grow legal plants. (If you are looking to grow illegal things, look elsewhere, thank you kindly). Lets make this the best resource on the NET!
Language: English
273 members
Niche domaining using Google Groups
As you can see above in these examples, the number of members varies but you shouldn’t use that as your guide for whether to invest in that area or not. Niche websites mix information on the topic with bulletin boards to enable enthusiasts to share their passion for the subject.
Backyard chickens from the first example above doesn’t sound great at first but lets explore. First going to Adwords keyword tool and searching for “backyard chickens” shows that the average search volume for this is 8,100 and “backyard birds” is 12,100 and average advertiser competition. Not too bad to start for a niche.
BackyardChickens.com is taken and is a website exactly how I just described a niche website should look. It has on-target adsense ads on the homepage and seems to be quite active.
Organic Garden Club is the next example and “organic gardening” yields 74,000 searches a month and with very high advertiser competition in the Adwords tool. OrganicGardenClub.com is parked. This is a bit too long as a name but OrganicGardens.com is also parked. Niche opportunity? There are actually a number of parked domains in this category that are highly commercial which you can find if you look carefully.
The domaining bottom line
Just looking at two examples for about 20 minutes of my time, I think you can see that some opportunities are there. You can go to sections in Google Groups where you have more expertise if you want to develop content yourself.
What you should look for in a niche domain:
- Passionate people. You want people passionate about their niche who will actively participate and spread the word about your site.
- Commercial opportunity. There should be a reasonable means to turn your traffic into a profit either through ads or through specifically selling to these visitors. Memberships can sometimes work for niches.
- Scalable. Though not essential, a niche idea can sometimes be scalable. Take our chicken example above, why not also have backyard ducks, backyard cows, backyard goats and so on. A network of sites like these can overcome the drawback of being so niche that there isn’t sufficient profit.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
This is also very useful when you are targeting end users with domain names close to what they own or better!
Good point. You just have to be careful of the rules of the group if you plan to post to the group to market a domain. There is often a fine line between marketing and spam. Spending some time on the group being a productive member could help create the contacts you might need to market to that sector.