Picking a topic for website

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Things to keep in mind when selecting content

When building up content, there are a few things to keep in mind. First of all, it should be something you really do know about and preferably something you are passionate about and/or are really good at. Otherwise it will be another useless redundant article on the net, which are already present in abundance. Those too can generate some random income but I personally like the feeling of getting paid for something useful I did. The idea is to really create something of value to your visitors. Writing about topics which represent real interest to you proves to be more efficient, effective and you have more fun time doing it.

Considering value of online content for advertisers

So now we know that we should create content on topics that are of value to our visitors and of interest to us. Next we should decide on what particular topic to concentrate (I assume most of the readers have more than one area of interest). And yes, it does matter in terms of making money what topic to concentrate.

Visitors who are attracted to your website should represent value to potential advertisers. In other words, content on your website should be valuable to advertisers as well. You have to think about it this way – what type of advertisers would be interested in the type of visitors who would be interested in your content? What could they be selling to them? How much does that something cost and how much competition is there?

If you have a website about basket weaving you are sure to attract some enthusiasts, but what could your potential advertisers be? …and how many of those advertisers would be trying to advertise on the Internet (your earnings do to some degree depend also on the number of advertisers targeting your audience). In simple terms, the higher the number of potential advertisers the higher the competition for your advertising space, they higher your advertising rates, the higher your revenue.

Now think about a cooking website. I would imagine a much broader potential audience and a much larger selection of potential advertisers – food companies, kitchen electronics manufacturers, kitchen supplies manufacturers, cooking book publishers etc.

So in order to make money you need to create content that is valuable to your advertiser. This, of course, does not apply to sites where you sell a service or product directly to your visitors but this site concentrates more on creating an informational content.

Estimating competition

Once you have selected a topic that is of interest to you and you think has a good potential for advertisers, you have done preliminary prep work. Next you should try to identify a niche that has higher paying keywords and less competition (competition in this case means competition among publishers to attract relative traffic. Usually they are directly related and the higher the earnings from advertisers the higher the competition for traffic as you are not the only one looking for such niche.

To "hit the gold mine", you want to try to target a topic that is widely popular and attracts lots of visitors, these visitors are interesting to a large number of advertisers, therefore advertisers have to compete for advertising space on your website and finally, a topic that meets all of the above but is not sufficiently covered on the Internet.

In other words, you want to try to build your website around a topic that: A) Has large number of potential readers and B) Has large number of potential advertisers.

Once you have identified several possibilities (which are basically your assumptions at this point) you should check whether your assumptions are correct. So you need to check how much advertisers are willing to pay for advertising on your site and how many publishers are going to be competing for relative traffic with you.

Roughly estimating competition is fairly easy – make searches on search engines and see the number of relative results. If there are over a million results returned for your search, you are likely to be required to put some extra effort in promoting your site (luckily you can learn quite a bit from this site). If there is already 20 million websites competing for this traffic, your chances are getting slimmer and besides using main techniques you should be prepared spending a lot of time actively promoting your site. To learn about making more in-depth research, read selecting keywords in SEO section.

Estimating how much advertisers are willing to pay

Different types of advertisers are willing to pay different amounts of money for different types of content. Therefore you should spend some time researching to find a topic where you have higher paying advertisers. Just recently I came accross a blog, where the author was discussing his Adsense earnings. He was earning about 20 times less from his blog with 3 times more traffic than myself from one of my sites - that is 60 times less earnings from each visitor! Content type is not the only factor determining your earnings, but one of the main.

For estimating how much advertisers are willing to pay for ads on your site there are a number of ways. The most obvious, if you have some potential advertisers in mind, you can contact them (although they are not likely to discuss anything with you until you already have a site with established traffic). You can check what banner networks are paying.

If you decide to concentrate on pay-per-click programs, which have been working out the best for me, there are some tools you can use to figure out per click earnings that these programs are offering to publishers. If we take Google's Adwords program (the Adsense counterpart) as example, you can open an advertisers's account, which offers advertisers various tools to estimate the amount of money an advertiser should expect to pay for a click and a total amount of clicks that can be expected. The Adwords traffic estimator tool in particular can help figure out a rough idea about average click cost for a certain keyword. As a publisher you should expect to get a portion of that cost. You won't get exact amount but you can estimate relative 'popularity' of a keyword.

Keep in mind that the above step is quite important and you should spend some time researching and experimenting as it will play a key role in how much income you will be able to generate.

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