Well it's day 1 and if we are to cover this in 90 days we don't have a second to lose. Now, yes I do have a day job and writing this blog is not it, as I am sure most first timers do. Now you can do this and a day job, no problem, but the first week or so is a lot of work so be prepare for some after hours work or take a weekend and lock yourself in your study to get through the first steps as quickly as you can.
The common answer not always the best
Now we are here to make a profitable website so you need have a bit of flexibility on the topic. It is true what people say that the hobbies you are interested in are the easiest to write about. Easiest does not always equate to profitable, but it does equate to you being more interested into follow through on the project. so take it into account when following the rest of this.
Other than that people always tell you to find a niche. This one I agree on. Don't try to take cover every bit of information that ever existed. Find on small section of it and get good at it.
What are we searching for?
We are looking for the magic combination of
The common answer not always the best
Now we are here to make a profitable website so you need have a bit of flexibility on the topic. It is true what people say that the hobbies you are interested in are the easiest to write about. Easiest does not always equate to profitable, but it does equate to you being more interested into follow through on the project. so take it into account when following the rest of this.
Other than that people always tell you to find a niche. This one I agree on. Don't try to take cover every bit of information that ever existed. Find on small section of it and get good at it.
What are we searching for?
We are looking for the magic combination of
Return
Dollars people pay to advertise on that topic
(higher the better)
Competition
How much competition is there
(lower the better)
Market
Number of people that are looking for these websites
(more the better)
It makes sense when it's put in front of you but we have to be clinical about this.
First, a list of possibilities (30 mins +)
Now we are going to be running these lists through some tools, so don't skimp on the list. I started this one buy grabing a few web pages:
Our list so far - List-of-Topics.csv
Return - How to find it out? (15 mins)
Now you don't want to rely on only one source of income but Google advertising has always made me more money than any other source so I tend to look here to find out how much a topic is worth. In case you didn't know, people pay to put their adds up via adwords and people are paid to put others advertisements on their site via adsense. Now we are going to get paid by adsense. But adsense doesn't give you any hints on how much you would get for topics. You can, however, find out how much you would pay to advertise on that topic and that gives you an idea of what topic would earn you more. So sign up to google adwords and get your list from above and run it through AdWords.
this should get you a dollar range for all your potential topics listed in the tool as estimated avg CPC. Add these price ranges next to each topic in excel for the next steps.
Market - How to find it out? (10 mins)
The added benefit of checking the return in AdWords is it also gives you a field called Estimated Clicks/Day which is basically a easy view of how many people search for that topic per day. No how many people search for a topic per day isn't a perfect measure of how much traffic you'll get but it is about as good as you get for comparison purposes.
List with AdWords Data - List-of-Topics-02.csv
Competition - How to find it out? (30 mins)
Now this one tends to be a pain it you do it properly. Basically you want to search for each term in say google and record how many sites your competing against to get to number one. You'll see it in the top right eg "Personalized Results 1 - 10 of about 3,090,000 for ...", you need to be better than 3,090,000 other pages to get to number 1. Now in AdWords you can do upto 2000 at once so it's pretty fast. This one takes longer so to start with it's good to do a little culling at this point. Sort the list by the CCP and Clicks/Day and remove any without any data and if you want to those with lowest values too. Removing the ones without values dropped the list from about 3500 to about 1500. Now the from this and for some speed I also dropped off anything with a CCP of less than a dollar and less than 2000 searches per day. That left me with 91 to look up how competitive they were.
Playing With the Data (10 mins +)
Now that you have the data you need to manipulate it decide on the best site topics. Basically you want to decide what is more important, the return, the market or the competition. I like to rank each one from the lowest at 0 and the highest at 1 (middle at 0.5) etc and add them up so they rank equally. This is the top 20 results from this:
Picking one? (1 min +)
Now most of these are ok to use. I would browse down the list from the top until you see one you want to write about. I like a few on the list looking down but I'll leave some for you guys and I'm going to pick lighting, about half way down the list at position 48. So create your own list or nick a few off mine. This is what your website is going to be about.
The next step will come along very shortly.
Dollars people pay to advertise on that topic
(higher the better)
Competition
How much competition is there
(lower the better)
Market
Number of people that are looking for these websites
(more the better)
It makes sense when it's put in front of you but we have to be clinical about this.
First, a list of possibilities (30 mins +)
Now we are going to be running these lists through some tools, so don't skimp on the list. I started this one buy grabing a few web pages:
- categories from yellow pages/ phone directories or online directories
- wikipedia - list of hobbies
- the Dewey Decimal Classification System - a great list of topics
- google "table of contents" particularly for encyclopedias etc
- dictionary - list of nouns
Our list so far - List-of-Topics.csv
Return - How to find it out? (15 mins)
Now you don't want to rely on only one source of income but Google advertising has always made me more money than any other source so I tend to look here to find out how much a topic is worth. In case you didn't know, people pay to put their adds up via adwords and people are paid to put others advertisements on their site via adsense. Now we are going to get paid by adsense. But adsense doesn't give you any hints on how much you would get for topics. You can, however, find out how much you would pay to advertise on that topic and that gives you an idea of what topic would earn you more. So sign up to google adwords and get your list from above and run it through AdWords.
this should get you a dollar range for all your potential topics listed in the tool as estimated avg CPC. Add these price ranges next to each topic in excel for the next steps.
Market - How to find it out? (10 mins)
The added benefit of checking the return in AdWords is it also gives you a field called Estimated Clicks/Day which is basically a easy view of how many people search for that topic per day. No how many people search for a topic per day isn't a perfect measure of how much traffic you'll get but it is about as good as you get for comparison purposes.
List with AdWords Data - List-of-Topics-02.csv
Competition - How to find it out? (30 mins)
Now this one tends to be a pain it you do it properly. Basically you want to search for each term in say google and record how many sites your competing against to get to number one. You'll see it in the top right eg "Personalized Results 1 - 10 of about 3,090,000 for ...", you need to be better than 3,090,000 other pages to get to number 1. Now in AdWords you can do upto 2000 at once so it's pretty fast. This one takes longer so to start with it's good to do a little culling at this point. Sort the list by the CCP and Clicks/Day and remove any without any data and if you want to those with lowest values too. Removing the ones without values dropped the list from about 3500 to about 1500. Now the from this and for some speed I also dropped off anything with a CCP of less than a dollar and less than 2000 searches per day. That left me with 91 to look up how competitive they were.
Playing With the Data (10 mins +)
Now that you have the data you need to manipulate it decide on the best site topics. Basically you want to decide what is more important, the return, the market or the competition. I like to rank each one from the lowest at 0 and the highest at 1 (middle at 0.5) etc and add them up so they rank equally. This is the top 20 results from this:
- Furniture Stores
- Party Supplies
- Iron
- Paintball
- Sunglasses
- Bars
- Airports
- Sporting Goods
- Fishing
- Rock
- Manufacturers
- Organizations
- forms
- Police
- Posters
- Sudoku
- Collectibles
- Ultimate
- Pizza
- Automobiles
Picking one? (1 min +)
Now most of these are ok to use. I would browse down the list from the top until you see one you want to write about. I like a few on the list looking down but I'll leave some for you guys and I'm going to pick lighting, about half way down the list at position 48. So create your own list or nick a few off mine. This is what your website is going to be about.
The next step will come along very shortly.
posted by john at
11:49 PM
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