What is Alexa?
Alexa is a web information company where you can find out useful information about websites. Alexa tracks the popularity of many sites. It is very useful when analyzing the competition. Alexa has a Top Sites section that displays the top sites on the web and can even be organized by country and category. You can even pull detailed information about a websites. You can find a sites traffic rank, average time on site, backlinks, and how long they’ve been on line.
How does Alexa get their data?
Alexa pulls their data from their Alexa Toolbar. I highly suggest you download this and install it on your computer right away. You can download it here. Think of it as a nielsen rating system but for the internet. They gather traffic data from their toolbar and estimate the popularity of sites. It is not a 100% accurate but it is pretty close and is considered the authority.
Finding a profitable niche
Alexa has a Hot Urls section which displays the hottest pages on the web updated every 5 minutes. Alexa is different from Google Trends because Alexa gives you the actual most visited sites. not the most searches. You can use Hot URLs to find out whats going viral. Using the screenshot below you could create multiple niches.
#1 is Google Adsense and the link containing system_down.html tells me that Google Adsense has gone down. Adsense is the most popular ppc advertiser and them going down is a pain point for webmasters. For this item I would come up with a niche for webmasters who do pay per click(ppc) advertising. I could put up a quick blog and create a post with “Alternatives to Google Adsense” or “Adsense Down Again Try These PPC Networks”. Now the next time Adsense goes down I could get a lot of traffic and make money having webmasters sign up for alternative ppc networks.
#2 is Americas Best College on Shine. Colleges are a very profitable niche. You could setup a quick blog about finding the right college for you or finding scholarships. There are a lot of college related advertisers. Just do a little research and you could come up with multiple blog posts.
As you can see I have already found 2 profittable niches and I now that there are people actually visiting these type of sites. Alexa.com should be one of your first stops when researching your niche. They are the authority and help you keep in touch with what is going on with the internet.
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