New niche website

[boysbach]

I am still at the planning stage here, making list etc but I thought it might be good to get some feedback at the early stages.

Yesterday (I did say early stage) I was reading and found the top niches predicted for 2006. One was learn Chinese. That fired my imagination because we live in China even though we are Brits. Here on business, and have travelled extensively. I checked with searchmarketing and find that in Jan 636965 searches were done for learn Chinese but then I thought what about travel and for travel China was even better at 982770.

I then got a good name which I purchased, and talked with DH. We have over 1000 photos 90% taken by DH and the other 10% by me. We can write about most major cities from personal experience, talk about being an independent traveller, things like the people, culture, food, toilets (you don't want to miss that one) etc. Most would need very little research as we have kept quite details diaries (on Word).

We are thinking with the Olympic coming people would want to travel and our suggestion is if you come this far go to some other countries like HK or Thailand again we have loads of personal stories from both places.

The site would mainly be information, but with a resources page for learning Chinese, travel agents, travel books and guides, maybe cookery and Chinese recipes.

What else would you like to see on a site about travel to and in China.

One typical story would be based on one day at the airport where the plane was delayed and finally they announced they didn't know when we would be leaving as they had lost the plane. Yep only in China could that happen.

Would love some feedback at this early stage. Maybe you have questions that we could use and answer in a FAQ.

Thanks

Bev

[richerbrat]

Hi there - I'm not sure which search software you used. I used web ceo and found the following searches per day: china travel 2753, competition - 338,000,000 pages. Travel to china 1340 searches - competition 134 million pages. There's other similar searches too - learn chinese has searches but several million pages of competition.

This is not to say that you couldn't compete - just wanted you to realise from the outset that this is not an uncrowded niche - but an extremely saturated one. It may still be worth it, if you could build an interesting enough site. A site I built recently had competition of 9 million pages on one search word and I got to number 4 on MSN within two weeks - so you never know. But, you will need to work hard. Travel sites need a great deal of content. If it were me - I would have a lot of details on travel in china and pics in the website. Maybe you could even add a message board there - a great way of getting people back to your site. For the some of the personal stories - as you have so many, I would consider writing these in a blog, and linking it to your site. If you need me to check competition for any more keywords - let me know.