Forum Moderators: mack
I've seen all this talk about how high quality content is the key to have lasting visitors, credibility and even more visitors that come through search engines (If your content happens to be a niche.), all of which should help when using adsense.
To make a long story short, I've had the idea of doing a website for a while now, the big problem is that I don't know what the subject of that site would be. I've had some topics come up, but no unexplored niches. All I really know is that I want to use adsense or something equivalent.
After my shortage of ideas I got a little philosophical and thought, well regardless of the topic, if you do it right it could be successful anyway. So now the question turned to "how to do it?" instead of "what to do?".
Then I read this: [webmasterworld.com...]
After reading that, the list of possible contents in my mind was: reviews, news, and articles. And no personal, bloggish articles.
Then, I remembered that my budget is pretty low (I don't really expect huge income from this adsense thing. This whole idea is just to have some extra money, I'm a student and don't really need a "full sized" paycheck every month), so the reviews idea went down the toilet. I *could* write reviews without owning/using the products I review but that wouldn't really make me comfortable so I rather not do it altogether.
My contents list was shorter now: articles, news.
Then I wondered into the copyright forum here and found out that news can't be quoted completely.That would make not-so-high-quality content.
So now my only idea for content is articles. These articles have to be such that they are somehow related to the reader clicking on an ad from adsense. They can't really be reviews, or news. Now I'm really confused. I'm supposed to write about XYZ, but not really reviewing it, maybe just a little opinion about it, and I can't write quoted news about when the new version of XYZ will hit the market. That is quality?
hmm. I don't know what to think. Maybe I'm just thinking along the wrong lines? I've tried to look for "templates" of what good content is, but all the information I've found about quality content is very vague. Fair enough, I understand that people don't want to give their successful ideas away (I wouldn't either.).
Basically I'm looking for your opinion. Do you think I'm looking at the problem from the right angle? Should I just focus on finding a niche, and then the concept of high quality content will just come along easily?
I'm just looking for a little guidance here, I'm disoriented, and don't know what to brainstorm anymore.
Well now that I'm done, I remembered, I actually have an idea for a topic in which you can actually write non-blog, non-review and non-news articles, and make them high quality, but it's a very exploited subject. There are pretty big sites that a virtually hosted site would never be able to compete with.
One of the big temptations with this lack of a subject is to just create some sort of a portal that covers a bit of everything, with a forum. But is a portal really a portal without news and reviews? not quite. Even if I could add news and reviews, specialized sites are much better for anything.
Should I do a "portal" covering various topics, with "irrelevant" articles, no news or reviews and a forum? Should I just go into a non-niche and try to fight a giant by just specializing on a certain sub-topic? Just keep looking for a niche? What would you do?
Any comments are aprreciated :D And sorry for the long post, it ended up being some sort of neverending rant.
How to write quality articles is really hard to describe. What you deem as quality may be terrible to someone else. Quality articles need to be informative and creative. They should be quick and easy to read. When writing articles avoid putting your opinion in it, make it where the readers can decide for their self. Use your imagination when writing and it will all come together for you.
I wouldn't go create a portal that covers a little bit of everything, there are already to many of them as it is. Focus on one niche, a niche that you know a lot about and enjoy. People prefer web sites that specialized on one subject because they are the ones where you'll find the most and best information. Also you don't want to start a forum, you said yourself that you don't have much money that you could use to advertise and with it being new you'll find hard to get it going.
I guess I'll just keep on looking for a niche and forget about the portal and forum idea.
What is/are the few things that you yourself are really interested in?
Some particular sport maybe? Browse around and see what is NOT published about that sport.
Ditto for music, travel, faraway places that nobody wrote about ..
Find something that really interests you, and the content will almost create itself.
Browse that field or niche. Small bits of other peoples' stuff can be used,
IF credited and preferably with an honest link back.
Those links can prevent some real trouble later on.
Paraphrase if need be to avoid duplicate content issues, but don't scrape.
If you really like a topic, and are willing to research it, there's no need to scrape. -Larry
