Before building a new website it’s important to first choose a topic that will accomplish whatever your goal for the site may be. For most of us, that means we want to choose a topic that we can make money from. How you plan to make money from your website isn’t overly important, because choosing the topic and related keywords is just as critical for all online business models. Regardless of how you plan to make money online, if you cannot get enough targeted traffic to your website you will not be able to earn money from it.
Getting targeted traffic to a website starts with topic selection, and then quickly gets into the nitty gritty details of keyword selection. Topic selection is an important first step that many people dismiss or take for granted unfortunately. When you’re building a site to make money, choosing a topic such as raising Llamas in Timbuktu is not likely going to help you earn much – if any – money no matter how many keywords you come up with.
To make money, you must select a topic with profit potential. The more popular a topic is, the more potential earnings it usually has. In most cases the general topic is a bit too broad to compete well with though, so narrowing it down into subtopics is the next step. And that’s generally where keyword research and selection come into play.
Choosing a broad topic such as Health & Beauty is a good first step for example, but unless you plan to invest years plus tens of thousands of dollars to make the site profitable, you’ll likely narrow things down a bit. You may instinctively choose one or the other – Health or Beauty – or you may start researching each branch of that topic to see which has more profit potential.
Choosing the health branch is still quite broad though, because there’s fitness, exercise, dieting, diseases, and much more. Within each of those sub-topics there are even more potential topics that you can choose to create a website about.
Researching keywords is currently one of the best ways to guage the potential of a given topic or niche online, and this can be as simple or as complicated as you’d like to make it. There are many different paths of advice floating around the web where keyword research and selection are concerned, but the reality is you’ll still have a bit of trial and error. A specific formula which works for one person may not work as well for another.
One person may advise narrowing down your topic into keywords and phrases which are searched for at least 5000 time each month, but which only have 1000 actual websites optimized for the exact same term. And while this sounds like it should be doable – after all you have an exact formula to work with – it’s not always as simple or easy as it may first appear.
Not everyone can think of or find a keyword which has so many searches yet so few competing sites. And not everyone thinks 1000 sites is “a little” competition. Some people may need to take smaller steps, and try to find something with only 20 competiting sites. Other people may feel there’s not enough potential profit with just 5000 searches each month, etc. In other words: We’re each at different levels of experience and comfortability.
The general rule of thumb is valid though: Try to find a keyword or phrase related to your topic which gets an acceptable number of searches each month yet has few enough competitors online for you to feel comfortable with.
Finding keywords and phrases which meet these requirements is usually the most time consuming part of a website building project, but it can also be the most critical too. If you spend the time researching before you do anything else, you can save yourself the time and expense of building a website which will not earn as much money as you’d like.







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