Forum Moderators: martinibuster
Anyway, here is my question: If you were starting up a for-profit website from scratch, and if you have the ability to write about nearly any subject, what category would be the most profitable? Cancer? NASCAR? Brittney Spears?
How would you best evaluate different categories for profit potential?
But if you were doing it all over again, and if you had experience in, say, 10 categories rather than 2, how would you choose which one of the 10 to write about? (assuming that profit was a prime factor)
I'd write about all 10 for diversification purposes.
farmboy
If I'm going to launch a for-profit website (based on AdSense) I want to target a niche that has a decent chance of succeeding.
For what it's worth, I wouldn't do that. I would launch a for-profit website based on affiliate programs, my own fee-based content, AdSense ads and whatever other means of monetizing my site are available.
Building a site for AdSense is putting all your eggs in one basket.
No, check that. Google has problems brewing. Building a site for AdSense is putting all your eggs in one basket and the bottom of the basket may not be structurally sound.
And if you're planning to rely on search engines to send potential ad clickers to your AdSense based site, check it again. It's like putting all your eggs in one basket, the bottom of the basket may be be structurally sound and the basket handle may unravel at any time.
Now the next obvious question is how do you evaluate the best topic for a site with multiple means of monetizing the site? The answer may not be what you're seeking, but it takes me back to starting with what I know best. Why? Because it's easier and more enjoyable and I can get the content published fast.
Later, for diversification purposes, I move on to those topics I have to research and work harder to master.
farmboy
I'm sorry, but that's not an efficient way of going about things. It takes me several days to write a decent print article. It takes several months (if not years) to build a decent theme-based website. I don't think there are any shortcuts to producting good quality content and a solid site.
Using the "see what sticks" approach to vet out, say, a half-dozen themes could take the better part of a decade. Surely there are better ways to evaluate various niches for their profit potential.
As a quicker alternative to that, I've been doing a regular google search for a given keyword phrase and then clicking on the "More Sponsored Links" button on the bottom right side of the screen. This leads to a listing of competing advertisers. You can easily count them up to see how many companies are competing for AdWord positions for that keyword. Is this an accurate way to determine a keyword's profit potential? Why or why not?
Someone said, "Just write about a bunch of things and see what sticks."I'm sorry, but that's not an efficient way of going about things.
People have given you lot of free advice in this thread, people who are living the life you seem to aspire to, and you have rejected ot criticized much of it.
If what you thought was all completely correct, you would be answering questions in this thread instead of asking them.
Well said.
By the way, I HAVE written a few dozen articles for web publication, and they might have taken even a little extra time because I wanted to do solid keyword research and work the best keyword phrases into the articles. You never have to do that with print articles.
But you might be right to assume that web users don't want solid, well-researched content written by professional journalists. Maybe I DO need to up my game and learn how to spit out stuff more quickly.
And thank you for pointing out how web articles don't need to be perfect right out of the blocks. The ability to make adjustments at any time appears to be a real advantage over print publishing.
I would say a couple of years ago, what you are asking would have been easier to answer. We have 10 sites all just about things and hobbies we have done in our life and they were all doing well in Adsense. Now with smartpricing, only one is doing well. Which one? The review site.
I think nowadays if you have a review site, especially product reviews, you will do well. Pretty much everything else is being smartpriced.
So your articles should be reviews of something. That way after your visitor reads the review they will click to go buy the product. Tah dah - it converts and you don't get smartpriced.
Which product should you start with? Go to Google News and search for New Product for Christmas.
MrV. You remind me of the brokerage commercial where the guy won't say 'I do'... mulling over the cost/benefit too much.
I think you may do well doing business on the Internet... no people to abraid.
Yes, your advice sounds right on target. I think it makes sense to focus on a niche that has products to sell. And yes, anyone reading a review article is already primed to click on an ad.
Do you think the price of the product being reviewed matters? For example, BMWs cost $50,000. But a book only costs $19.95. Is this a significant factor when comparing various niches for their profit potential?
To me the perfect niche at this time of year would be a product a teenager just HAS TO HAVE! Do you know how hard it is to find presents for teenagers?
Have a great time Sailor!
But you might be right to assume that web users don't want solid, well-researched content written by professional journalists. Maybe I DO need to up my game and learn how to spit out stuff more quickly.
Don't be too quick to abandon your research and careful writing.
A lot of hastily produced 200-300 word articles are appearing on the net. But that's not because web users don't want solid, well-researched content. It's because search engines do a lousy job of differentiating between your well-researched & written article and my lousy article as long as we include the same keyword phrases. Thus the search engines are easily manipulated.
But people are likely to recommend your article to others, voluntarily link to it, etc. than to my lousy article.
farmboy
Don't frighten the children.:)
If I'm not mistaken, to use the preview tool you need to put together a page of content first (and then use the preview tool to evaluate it). Is this correct?
You can find an existing page with similar content and use the preview tool on that page.
farmboy
But you might be right to assume that web users don't want solid, well-researched content written by professional journalists.
Maybe I DO need to up my game and learn how to spit out stuff more quickly.
Take the following case study from earlier today:
Keyword phrase / # companies placing ads:
"water gardens" / 840 companies
"refrigerators / 280 companies
"bamboo" / 120 companies
"cancer" / 70 companies
NASCAR / 20 companies
1) Does this imply that "water gardens" might be a more profitable niche than "cancer research?"
2) According to WordTracker, "NASCAR" gets about 15,000 search queries each day. With that kind of traffic, why would there only be 20 companies trying to place ads?
What do you think? (not about these categories, but about the method)
why not target the niche that has the BEST chance of succeeding?
Might as well ask: why don't they drill holes where the oil is, instead of all those holes that don't produce much oil?
Using the "see what sticks" approach to vet out, say, a half-dozen themes could take the better part of a decade.
Only because you're thinking like a magazine writer. For example, you didn't ask how to go about building the content because you think you already know... but you probably don't. If you try to build it like a magazine, it probably doesn't matter much what category you pick -- the odds of success will be low.
I infer from your postings that you have too simplistic a model of how this all works. That leads you to think you can analyze what it is you need to build, and then just embark on it with high confidence of having picked the right direction. Sorry, it's more complicated than that. Here's some complications:
OK, so back to answering your question (and maybe one or two you didn't ask but should have).
First, use the Overture bid tool and an AdWords account to fish around for areas with relatively decent money and traffic. You also want to look for "volume under the curve". That is, besides the obvious, high-paying keywords, you want to be able to sit down and come up pretty quickly with at least 50 additional related search terms that are getting at least "some" traffic. Conceptually related keywords count too (e.g., if the "money" keyword is "bicycle tours", then "dehydration" can go on the list despite its indirect association). You'll need that list to get you started on "drilling holes". Sounds wasteful, but pick more than one topic area. I wouldn't start with less than 3.
Second, reserve domain names for all three topics, as well as a fourth domain name that is relatively generic (e.g., "my-thoughts-on-stuff dot com").
Third, begin to put content up on your 3 topics but only on your generic domain. Ignore your magazine instincts and write things that have value, but are highly specific and very focussed (e.g., "how to set the master/slave jumper on an IDE Klemdiddle scanner" -- yup, I'm talking really focussed). You aren't in a position to go after high-traffic, single-keyword search terms. Go after 3- and 4-word search terms, or even, entire question searches such as "How to set the Jumper on an IDE Klemdiddle".
This stage 3 is where you are drilling test holes. You want to be able to drill them damn fast because this is where you're going to get real data on the traffic possibilities and real data on the AdSense payout possibilities and real data on click-through rates and real data on your ability to rank well in the SERPs.
Fourth, there will almost certainly be a clear winner amongst your 3 candidates. That's going to be your first real bet on a topic area. Redirect the articles from that topic on your generic domain to appropriate URLs on the domain devoted to that topic. Start building it out.
As you build content, you want to create 2 distinctly different kinds of content (I'm keeping it simple here). One kind is the lovely, detailed, precisely researched article you previously imagined spending all your time on. The other is the same short and sweet 5-paragraph things you built on your generic site.
The short-and-sweet pages are new test holes you are drilling for oil; they are targetted for quite specific keywords. You are now in the business of going after the "long tail" of the enormous keyword space that your chosen topic area comprises. You cannot afford to invest days in a lengthy article that is not going to pay off.
Think of these little test holes as sensors that you are installing in the Internet to bring you valuable intelligence. Even the test holes that bring you absolutely no traffic have value -- you may find that they sit there for months silent, and then suddenly some new development in the world (a news item, a mention in a book, whatever) will make traffic start appearing and making your sensor ring (that ringing noise is you studying your log stats every day to see what search terms traffic arrived via). When that happens, now you know it's worth your time to build more elaborate content focussed on that keyword.
Your elaborate articles should be the minority of your time, initially (because you just won't be smart enough to know what to write about until you start getting some weblog data). You can think of these larger articles as serving two purposes. First, they are the result of your building out an area that a "test hole" indicates is profitable. Second, they are part of your effort to gain "authority" for your chosen topic area. Here's where your magazine article instincts are right-on, since good, well-researched articles make people more likely to link to you.
That's still pretty highly simplified (no mention of link-building, or maximizing AdSense income, or leveraging intelligence on your advertisers, or SEOing, or the thousand ways to mine your weblogs for intelligence, or...).
Good luck!
A couple of followup questions:
1) Which provides more accurate data, Overture's bid tool or an AdWords campaign?
2) How do you figure out what search terms the traffic came in on? Is that a tool that we should expect from a decent hosting service? Right now I know where the traffic is coming from, but I don't know what search queries were used.
3) You said the short sites were test holes and that one of them would eventually hit paydirt. Are you talking about traffic or are you already talking about ad income?
Ronbuck, Thanks for the time you put into your post. I don't expect you to waste any more of your time, but maybe someone else can answer those followup questions.
- McVicker
How do you figure out what search terms the traffic came in on?
Any decent log analysis tool will give you this information, broken down by search engine and search terms. Log analysis is vital!
Thanks
McVicker, Overture's bid tool and Adwords are very rough indicators. I wouldn't start using any one with a preconceived notion of how accurate it is or isn't. Wordtracker gives you a little more info on Overture's data but you really need to play around with it to get a feel for recognising what's reliable and what's not. For example: I did a search on "saving" and among the results was a "saving for college 529 Oregon" which is searched 2270 times a month (73 times a day) apparently. That looks whacky. Particularly when you notice that none of the other states figure in any of the searches. I suspect that one person searched once in the last 30 days and an extrapolation was made of how often it appears per month.
For figuring search terms I would use a good stats package. It's often stated that there's gold in dem logs. It's worth spending some time and money monitoring and studying your server stats.
Which provides more accurate data, Overture's bid tool or an AdWords campaign?
Stop thinking accurate. Instead, think "relative to other topics". If both sources agree that more money is being paid out to clicks on "red widget" than on "blue widget", then that relation is likely to hold on your own AdSense income.
Also, you don't have to run an actual AdWords campaign. You can just use the AdWords account to see what Google is claiming you would have to bid in order to put your ad on top. Again, if you try to use these actual numbers to predict your AdSense income, you will be disappointed. Use them to compare the relative value of two different terms.
How do you figure out what search terms the traffic came in on? Is that a tool that we should expect from a decent hosting service? Right now I know where the traffic is coming from, but I don't know what search queries were used.
Yes, that would sort of be a minimal feature of decent weblog analysis software. When people click on a Google search result, the search term is encoded into the "Referer" field of the resulting HTTP GET, and will (if their browser is not set to block the transmission of such info) show up in your search logs. Any decent weblog analyzer should be able to provide that info to you in human-readable form.
And this indirectly hits upon another complication of the business you're thinking of embarking on. You need some expertise in things like weblog analysis. You can either pay for someone else's expertise or gain that expertise yourself (entirely doable -- it's more tedious than truly complex). Either way, though, the cost of that expertise eats into your revenues (directly or indirectly). You really need to understand the basics of web logs when you're drilling for oil. Otherwise (for example), one anonymous spider can make you think things that aren't true about your traffic. The initial traffic will be small, anyway, so it's not a bad idea to be eyeballing the raw log data to confirm anything the fancy weblog analysis package is claiming to you. More pitfalls here...
You said the short sites were test holes and that one of them would eventually hit paydirt. Are you talking about traffic or are you already talking about ad income?
Example: I poke around Overture and AdWords and WordTracker (and study prospective competitors to see how many different advertisers they are getting) and I discover that a particular kind of cancer looks like a good bet. The problem is, can you make that bet pay off in 1 year, or will it require 10 years, or will it maybe never pay off?
View the act of making short pages on a generic site as market research. Again, I encourage you to give up the idea that you're going to get accurate predictions and instead look for relative predictions. If you "test" three different topics, you will at least get a good clue of how easy they will be to profit from relative to each other. Will the winner be "paydirt"? I don't know, but it's a good bet it will do better than the other two.
Things I'm looking for when I drill test holes:
Finally, I'll reiterate that I would make a little generic website that you can just throw stuff on (anything!) to test. And I would not make it beautiful. If you've really decided to be in this for the money, then you need to gain an appreciation for the fact that sometimes the most profit is in pretty low-quality content. You also need a visceral grasp of the fact that single small pages in isolation can get traffic and make money; people searching the web have different goals than people subscribing to a magazine. That crap site can redirect any pages that turn out to be good for the direction you ultimately choose to pursue, and it won't reflect poorly on the branding of your "good" site, since it won't have any particularly obvious connection.
This is really a pretty different business than the magazine biz. You might be happier if you assume you're going to take one run at it just to learn the ropes so you can take another run at it and do well. Of course, you also might get lucky right out of the gate with your first try.
Next, go to the Overture Bid Tool and search for the number of times those same keywords are used per month, and compare this with the number of high quality results on the Google SERPS. This should tell you how easy it will be to acquire traffic.
Here is the question again: What is a solid way to evaluate different categories for profit potential?
The difficulty with that question is that it is a complicated one. The relative strength of a category rests in a number of forms: how knowledgable you are about it, how much advertising money there is out there for it, how much demand there is out there for those services (which could impact smart pricing), and the inherent difficulties of comparing and contrasting those sometimes intangable elements within different categories.
The reason you hear many people say to "write about that which you are passionate about" is two-fold (if not more.)
First, you're more likely to have motivation to hang in there long-term with something that you're passionate about versus something you're not. With a site I launched this year, the income went from X in June (one month in) to 5X here in November. Had I been impatient, or lacked passion for it, it's entirely possible that I might have given up on it. But now it is the one and ONLY site on that particular niche on the internet. When I declined to put a link to one site about three months ago, citing that I felt it didn't fit the criteria of what the site was about (it's a genre of the radio industry), that person bought ad space on AdSense to get his site linked from my page. Those types of intangables are going to be next to impossible to determine going into a situation.
Second, you're likely to be knowledgable about something which you're passionate about. That, in turn, will help you to write more accurate, intelligent articles about the given topic.
If it takes you several days to write a single article, you might want to rethink your business plan. Are there shorter articles that you could write in the interim to give people a reason to make visiting your site on a daily basis worthwhile? You don't have to give up on the long articles necessarily, but short, frequent updates can give your site constant freshness and reason for people who have a passion or an interest in that topic to continue to visit.
Moreover, content is king, and while quality is important, quantity certainly plays an important role as well. Many people will discover your site for the first time by way of a web search (be it Google or Yahoo! or MSN or wherever), and the more articles you have, the better your shot at hitting the right combination to draw the reader into your realm. From there, if you have a large quantity of material (particularly if it's well indexed and easy to find) they may be inclined to look around a bit, and thus expose themselves to further advertisements -- ads that they might in turn choose to click.
Ronburk: you mentioned purchasing three solid domain names and a generic one to test ideas on. Why purchase the solid domain names at this point? Why not do the testing first, before grabbing those domain names? As you say, the testing might lead things in an unanticipated direction.
Ronburk: I've got three websites up right now and none of them offer the kind of statistical tool that can tell you what search term broght the traffic in the door. They tell me where the traffic came from (Google, ect.) but not what search term was used. Should I be changing hosting companies, or do I need to take those weblogs outside and run them through a third party service?
Osewa77: Thanks. I like your idea about checking how many companies are running ads for a given keyword phrase. That's something that can be easily measured and compared. Now, how important do you think that data is? For a solid keyword/niche, how many companies would indicate solid potential? 10? 100? 1000? What do you think?
Awstats
Awstats produces very pretty stats.
Webalizer
Webalizer is a more complex stats program that produces a nice variety of charts and graphs about who has visited your site. This is probably the most popular stats engine available today.
