Find Your Passion, Building Your Niche, and Monetizing
Author: Ben Welch-Bolen
I browse a lot of webmaster and marketing forums on a daily basis and the most common question asked is what is the most profitable topic so they can build their web site around that. This is the wrong approach and produces content that fails to interest readers and creates mediocre web sites.
For a while everyone was building sites around the term “Mesothelioma” because asbestos cancer lawyers were rumored to be paying up to $80 per click. Did this produce original awesome content? Did people enjoy doing creating sites around asbestos cancer? Probably not. Online poker created a rush of poker related sites with everyone trying to get some of the huge affiliate payments they offer. The sites that succeeded were founded by people who had a passion for poker and who built a real community around the subject. These are the type of sites that will stay active and that the search engines will continue to reward in the long term.
Passion First, Monetizing Your Site Second…
The secret to building a great web site is to write it about something you are passionate about! Ask yourself these questions to try to find a topic that you will enjoy building a site around:
What do I enjoy doing in my free time?
What am I passionate about?
What am I knowledgeable about?
I am passionate about online marketing and SEO marketing. I am also knowledgeable about the hosting industry. So I combined those and created a website that attempts to help hosting companies better market themselves (ResellerGuide.com). Another example is I love console gaming systems, N64, PlayStation, etc… I started a site on emulation in high school that covered a brand new N64 emulator called UltraHLE and from there I just kept making the site bigger and bigger and within a year it became one of the biggest general emulation sites on the net.
Making Money Off Your Site
If you are looking to run a web site full time you need to think about how to make money off it and if your niche audience will be big enough. This doesn’t mean you ignore your passion but rather think about the different options and blend in your passion. Here are some questions you need to ask if you are seeking to make a living off your web site:
How many people are in this niche and what kind of traffic might I get?
What kind of monetization can I do with this topic?
Try to estimate how big your niche is and make sure your topic is wide enough to fit in with your plans. Lets say you have a passion for Walt Whitman’s poetry, that is a very small niche but on the Internet there are a lot of people who are interested in him. If you wanted to scale that back a little you could do a site on his decade of poets or American poets or just on poetry (huge and not very focused). Just remember you can always start small and get bigger. So how would you monetize a site on Walt Whitman and his poetry? AdSense is a great choice as a lot of essay sales sites seem to advertise on those subjects. You could also sell his books using an Amazon affiliate account. Those options probably require a fair bit of traffic to make decent money so lets come up with some more original ideas for lower traffic and small niche sites. Walt Whitman’s works are free to use so that allows us to do some things that you normally couldn’t do without the author’s permission or a partnership. How about recording your favorite poems by Whitman and selling them online on a CD or by MP3. You could easily record all his poems separately and even build a section that let people choose each poem they wanted and charge them 25 cents per poem downloaded. You could also skip Amazon and print your own books cheaply and sell them for a larger profit. Maybe focus on people who really love Walt and create expensive leather bound books and hand write in old style ink his poems and charge $300 dollars or more per book (Some people really love Whitman). Now just apply that type of thought process to your passion and create a website!
November 28th, 2006 at 4:38 pm
This is great! Thanks Ben and welcome to the BlogSTARz ;)
December 2nd, 2006 at 8:37 am
Finding a niche requires some research, but there are tools that are available on and offline to help you in the process. A niche market helps you to have a more targeted audience and targeted market. You can become a reseller in a niche market if you find creating a product from scratch is too much for you. I find a lot of niche reseller programs online lately that allow you to keep 100% of the profits especially for information products. Everyone loves information. It can be about ebay, online dating, real estate, web marketing, blogging, and a any other topics that my interest you. You can go to the search engines and type in your keywords, which will give you a good idea of where to start.
December 13th, 2006 at 7:53 pm
[...] Just after posting the previous article, I ran across this well articulated post from Lunarpages Webhosting, and I think the author nails it spot-on… “Passion first, then monetize your website…” [...]
February 2nd, 2007 at 4:08 am
It should also be mentioned that creating a niche is much more than just posting a heap of private label articles on a given subject onto a blog and calling yourself an expert.
People can see right through it
If you aren’t genuinely ‘passionate’ about a topic…. It’s NOT your Niche!