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Picking a Topic
for Your Web Site
If you are selling
a product or service, you don't have to pick a topic for
your site as your site will be about whatever it is you
are trying to sell. However, if you are interested in making
a portal or content site with revenue from advertising or
subscriptions, you have to decide on a topic for your site.
Should it be on making cookies, elder care or hamsters?
The choices of potential topics are literally endless.
Here are some
tips to consider when deciding on a topic:
1. Are you
interested in the topic? Some people advocate picking
topics in areas that are the most lucrative, such as finance
related topics. Others will advocate that you should pick
a topic on something you are personally interested in. Personally
I think it helps to strike a balance. If I have no interest
in a topic, then I just can't get motivated to write about
it. Remember, if you are a work at home mom, the subject
of your site is something you are going to spend all of
your office time on so it had better be something you at
least have a passing interest in.
If you pick a
topic you enjoy, then it is not even like working. I used
to make web sites before I even realized a mom like me could
put ads on the sites and make money. I used to make web
site for fun and then for my career I was going back to
school to update my programming skills. I didn't really
enjoy the programming classes all that much. I would daydream
that my perfect job would be to have someone pay me to make
web sites on topics I wanted to write about anyway. Well,
once I found Adsense and affiliate marketing, my dream came
true!
2. Can you
make money from the topic?
If your interest
is in things like Russian literature, that's great. However,
it probably not something that is going to be easy to make
money from. There are not a lot of advertisers with big
budgets trying to sell Russian literature. So you may want
to try to find something you are interested in and
is more commercially oriented.
One way to gauge
how lucrative a topic is in terms of advertisers budgets
is to use the Overture (now Yahoo! Search Marketing) site.
You can enter your topic, in this case Russian
Literature in the search box. Then click on "view
advertisers max bids". At the time of this writing,
there were only a handful of advertisers with a maximum
bid of twelve cents. So if you made a site on Russian literature,
the odds of getting a lot of lucrative advertising possibilities
is pretty slim.
3. How competitive
is the topic? Site focusing on topics like debt consolidation
loans pay very well. As of this writing the maximum bid
on Overture for "debt consolidation loans" is
almost $10. Sounds great right? Maybe not. There are many,
many publishers making sites on this topic so the competition
is very stiff. If you are just starting out making web sites,
it will be very difficult for you to get a site ranked in
the top twenty positions for competitive terms such as this.
Additionally, sites with very competitive terms may require
much more upkeep to maintain their search engine rankings,
so I'm not so sure that after you factor in hours of your
time to create and maintain sites that the most lucrative
topics on Overture are always necessarily the most lucrative
topics overall.
My best pages
in terms of making money are on niche topics where there
is little competition from other webmasters.
4. Does anyone
search for keywords related to your topic? - You can
have a great site on a topic, such as Mexican-Asian fusion
cooking, but there probably are not a lot of people interested
in something this much of a niche. If no one searches for
keywords related to the topic, you won't get any traffic,
even if you can rank number one in all of the search engines
for your chosen keywords. And without any traffic it is
usually hard to make money or get motivated to work on a
site that few people are reading.
Web Site Topic
Tips Summary
The best topics
for me in terms of making web sites are those that:
1. I find interesting
and enjoy researching and writing about.
2. Have the possibility
of getting well paying advertisements.
3. Are not in
overly competitive areas.
4. A reasonable
amount of other people would be expected to have an interest
in and search for related terms on a regular basis.
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