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The topic or niche of your website is the most essential part of your business foundation, especially when it comes to making money online.
Because it's the only way you're going to be able to devote the kind of time and effort to create a meaningful web site, build up the right traffic, generate worthwhile income, and enjoy what you're doing.
When choosing your website niche, you will want to focus on a few specific factors- the most important is of course deciding on a topic that you are passionate about. 99% of the time, this is the easiest and most promising route to making money online. Not only because you will be knowledgeable of the subject, but you will WANT to devote the time and effort required to be successful. And of course, because you will enjoy, hopefully love, what you are doing- while making money doing it.
Choose something you know have a great deal of knowledge and experience with or at the very least, a long-term interest in that you can devote yourself to. Take into consideration your skills, hobbies and past-times, or subjects you are overly familiar with. This will make designing your website, significantly more simple since you will be able to create and manage your content with less effort.
Now you will want to define your niche market by performing a little research. Familiarize yourself with your niche market by understanding the demand on both sides of the fence.
Understand the demand for your topic. Ideally, you will want to choose a niche that is not too broad and will stand out among the competition. However, ideally, you may want to leave space for expansion... just in case.
For example, a weight loss website. Rather than design a site that was for weight loss in general, I targeted a specific rapid weight loss protocol that had several thousand queries a day, but not a single solely devoted website. This obviously resulted in one very successful site- anyone who searches for that diet is lead to my website. In addition, I've left several options for expansion throughout the site, including fitness and nutrition in relation to the protocol.
If you can answer yes to these questions, you have found your niche:
Would you love to promote your niche? Would you be proud to promote your site's subject?
Could you see yourself as an expert in this topic? (if you're not already.)
Could you talk, write, and think about your topic for hours on end?
If you had a few million ($ cha-ching) in the bank, would you still have this as your topic?
Tactics for determining your website niche:
Take a poll- if you know others who may hold an opinion on your niche, ask them. Otherwise, you can also ask in chatrooms, message boards, yahoo groups has been great for me in the past. Offline, hit up groups, individuals, or communities in your niche. Ask what their opinion is on the subject, their level of interest, have they had difficulties searching for information on this, who their current sources on the subject have been (helps to locate your competition and determine who is most popular) and whatever else is suitable to your subject.
Study the competition- study them all, but focus on the best. What are they doing that makes them the best? What are they lacking? What can you offer in addition to what they are offering? Is there a specific angle they aren't covering or focusing on that is high in demand?
Once you have a niche in mind, it pays to do a little keyword research. Learn New-Loong's "Keywords First in your website planning ". This will completely shape where you go from here. You will quickly learn that one word, one phrase difference, can mean 10,000 more visitors to your website. Essential knowledge that will help you to shape your strategy from the tagline to subjects covered in your site. |
