Picking a topic for website
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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.