Which website to launch next?
Looking for a new website idea? Interested in making some good money from your website?
There is no secret formula to be successful online, but we think if you follow these guidelines you are more likely to succeed! Here’s a few tips – take it or leave it! Your call 🙂
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1. You have to be passionate about the topic.
We think this is by far the most important factor to consider. Building a site is a big commitment, similar to a marriage! You need to like the topic of the content (a lot!) and feel comfortable with it, as you are going to be spending a ton of time both writing content and answering questions about the subject.
2. Is your topic #trending?
Are you choosing a subject that is growing in popularity or steadily declining in terms of the number of requests in search engines? There are many ways to check, but Google Trends is a good one.
You can also get an idea of the interest from users by using Google Keyword. If you don’t already have a Google Adwords account, you’ll need to open one to check the interest level of your keywords.
Google Adwords includes a ‘Search popularity’ feature, which shows the number of searches for a keyword that meet your criteria. Use it to get an idea of how much monthly traffic you can expect on average from a keyword if you add it to a campaign. Remember, you will get most of your traffic from SEO (I guess) but looking at the number of requests is a good trick to get a flavor of the demand from Google visitors.
3. What is your earning potential?
There are many factors that affect how much your site will earn from advertising, however you can get a general idea of what the going rate is for your space.
To get an idea, take a look at the CPC range for your keywords/space. Here is an example of categories where advertisers are paying high CPC. Remember, there are many other factors that determine how much you can earn (competition for the keyword, time of year, amount of traffic, click thru rate, etc.), but looking at the CPC will give you an idea of your potential earnings.
4. Look at the competition from a publisher’s perspective.
Type your main keywords into Google and look at the number of answers that come up for this request. This will give you an idea of the competition for that topic. Browse through the results from the first page of Google. Keep in mind that BIG content publishers (e.g about.com, ehow.com, yahoo.com, etc) will be a challenge to compete with, as these companies have lot of tools and big teams to produce content (and they dominate SEO tactics).
To make sure you don’t miss any good keywords for your topic when you run this quick analysis/benchmark, you can use websites like SEM Rush
5. We think a good niche site starts with a good URL!
Make sure to find a URL that has a few relevant keywords in it. Although this isn’t as important nowadays as it has been in the past for SEO, it may still carry some weight in major search engine algorithms. So, if you can, secure a relevant, keyword-friendly URL.
