Treasure Hunting Niche

Ah, treasure hunting – you might think this is a tiny niche, or not even a niche at all, but there’s actually a lot of content and decent products in this niche. Let’s take a look at this goldmine of a niche (sorry, could not resist that pun).

Why Treasure Hunting?

I first started this niche off as metal detecting, and it quickly expanded into several other niches, all of which could be called “treasure hunting” in a broad sense.

Here are some sub-niches that treasure hunting includes:

• Metal detecting
• Gold prospecting
• Numismatics (coin collecting)
• Bullion collecting
• Rock, mineral, and fossil collecting
• Magnetic fishing
• Geocaching
• Letterboxing
• Antiques
• Historical artifacts

All of these could be niches on their own, which means there will be lots of content and more products to promote.

Metal Detecting

Metal detecting is the niche I would probably focus on first, and then start to expand into other niches. I would keep the name of the site generic enough to allow for expansion, something like “treasurefinding.com” (buy it on namecheap).

Products include:

• Metal detectors
• Accessories (pinpointers, headphones, shovels, brushes)
• Personal gear like boots, gloves, hats…
• Coin collection sets
• Magnifying glasses and microscopes
• Reference books
• Flashlights
• Cameras

And content ideas:

• Product reviews and comparisons
• Metal detecting in various terrain (beaches, water, parks, forest)
• Places to go metal detecting (specific locations)
• Metal detecting laws
• How to use gear

There are enough content and products here to create a good base site, which then could be expanded to include other niches.

Seasonality and Trends

Very interestingly, Google Trends shows “metal detecting” with a spike in December/January, which is not at all what we would expect from an outdoor niche. And the top 2 US locations are from Vermont and Maine, places that get bombarded with snow every year.

Perhaps people are holiday shopping, or there is some type of event causing the spike. Let’s take a look at some popular metal detecting sites and see when they are getting traffic:

metaldetector.com (authority site):

metaldetectingforum.com (forum):

garrett.com (manufacture):

I’m not really sure what we can conclude from this. Various Google updates may affect sites, but there are some similarities between the sites, like the downward trend from March to May.

Images

There isn’t a whole lot of free images I found, but there are a ton on DepositPhotos that are really good shots.

If I were to go into this niche, I would find clubs and meetup groups in my area about metal detecting. I’d bring my camera along and take a ton of pictures to use for my website.

Communities

There’s a strong community in this niche for research and networking. Lots of forums like metaldetectingforum.com, treasurenet.com, and a sub reddit with 30k members. Lots of facebook groups too.

A Niche to Geek Out On

If you enjoy learning about this niche or are in interested in picking it up as a hobby, there is some opportunity here. There are a lot of fun Youtube videos to watch on the topic which make it tempting to get into myself.