estimating a niche worth?

I plan to start a website focusing on the niche of optics (binoculars, microscopes and camera lenses)... (I am an optical technician and have vast knowledge of this subject). I plan to invest $10-15k in this website to make it unique, functional, appealing and high in traffic.

These all have very high search results, 2.4m for microscope, 1.2m for binos etc etc...

If I can rank well and pull in just 20% of this potential traffic... how much can I expect to make from it?

There are 4,400 binoculars on amazon alone... varying from $20 to $1500 in price...

What would you be focusing on? Reviews? Sales? Deals? All of it?

Regardless, best of luck with it, and if your going to invest $10-15k into it, might as well keep $5k more on the side as backup cash, don't want to invest THAT much then get to a point and end up saying screw this. $15k is a decent amount of money to invest in one site alone.

Make sure your careful with your backlinks, I would say let them build naturally vs using tools to get them. Wouldn't want to get a lot of backlinks, invest a few thousand then end up getting sandboxed and having all of your work pretty much go down the drain. Quality over quantity

If your serious about it, profit won't come overnight, but it will come in due time.

Well, let's see - I have been a full timer for the past 10 years, so here are my 2c:
- online businness is very frgaile - what works today might not work tomorrow
- top keywords would take you a year, two, or more to rank well (there are exceptions, but not too many)
- invest only what you can afford to lose
- targetting long tail keywords could be just as profitable as long as you have a high profit margin. For instance, instead of selling 100 microscopes at $100 and getting 4% from amazon, you could sell two "long pink microscopes," priced at $999 each and make the same profit

Good luck!

The worth of the niche depends on how well your site performs. I agree with hpv222 about going after long tail keywords instead of aiming to rank for "binoculars" and "microscopes." If you rank for keywords like "long pink binoculars" it will give your site more authority and allow you to rank for more keywords so don't just aim for the root keyword.

A great tool that I think you would get a lot out of is the keywordstrategy.org tool. It will pull a bunch of keywords for you to create pages for. It tells you where you rank and what other keywords your site could easily rank for. If you are building a large white hat site, it is a great tool to have.

What I will say is if you've got that kind of a budget for creating this site, hire some good writers to create some good content for you in addition to adding your own articles based on your experience. Since you're an optical technician you're probably in an ideal position to write some knowledgeable reviews too on the various brands, etc. And get a designer to create a professional clean looking site for you. There's no reason to pay a ton for a good landing page either.

Just don't go & blow a bunch of your budget on one of those firms that guarantee your ads on the 1st page of Google. My old boss jumped in & did that for his website without really taking the time to really research good "buying" keywords so it did nothing for his ROI. Don't be paying for ads unless you've got a way to monetize that traffic and always make sure to start small budget wise & only scale up once you've spotted the winners & cut out the losing keywords.

Thanks for all the advice.

To clarify, what I plan to do is not only write reviews, but reviews for the higher priced items and to justify why spending the extra money does get you a lot more for it and is the cheaper choice in the long run.

My budget goes a little something like this, it is very rough though and any guidance on it would be appreciated!

Website design and SEO - $5k and roughly $100 per month for ongoing improvements and maintenance.

Marketing - $3-5k and again about $100-200 a month.

This is a long term project. I do not plan to make money from it for the first year at all. Any money I do make in the first year will be put in to improving the website and getting more traffic.

I plan to keep this project completely white hat. Possibly a teeny bit of grey hat in some areas...