Forum Moderators: martinibuster
As a beginning webmaster I have wasted alot of time fooling with site design but I am hoping to reap returns on this because my goal was to design sites that are quick and easy to keep updated and if necessary to even work on with a small team, a la webzine style.
Finally I have settled on using open-source CMS systems for this and have gone out and setup about half a dozen websites, all of which are only at about 10% completion or less (by completion I mean the quantity of content) and have not even begun link developement on any of them.
Obviously I need to focus, get one website working well and getting traffic. So I take my best two and I need to decide between them.
One is a topic that receives relatively few natural searches. Most websites that compete for these topics appear to need fewer than 100 backlinks in order to show up #1 on Google, Alexa rank over 2,000,000 and still on the first page. Would be a golden idea, but the problem is, of course that most keywords for this topic get searched less than 50 times/month, none of them are as high as 50/day. Also these keywords are worth only about .05-.10 to advertisers.
This topic is a passion of mine in an area I am uniquely knowlegeable in, but my misgivings are of course based on the low traffic.
Second idea is a review/support site targeting some very high demand widgets. Keywords are worth over 2 bucks (and up to five) in this topic, however the 5th page of google results are still listing only authority sites on this topic all with high quality backlinks in the thousands and many with Alexa rank under 100. I have both sold and supported these widgets for years and so it is something I know about, but so have many others.
Possibly I could find keywords to target that are slightly off the beaten path but this would certainly reduce the quality of the traffic.
So my question is, which project would be a better one to tackle as a newbie's first Adsense website?
It would be like having a site about Nascar and Salad Dressing together.
Paul Newman being the possible connection there I assume
My basic question is: When you have a topic that is easy to compete in but with really low traffic and cheap clicks is that better than a higher paying, higher traffic topic but that you would be lucky to be on page 5 for.
Does anybody get traffic from page five? Is page five less traffic or no traffic?
I'm not saying I'll make page five, at the moment that would be beyond my wildest expectations. But getting above that is clearly impossible.
it is less painful to learn lessons on SEO when working on a site that is very interesting to you personally.
once you have proof of your seo skills maybe think of moving into a more competitive market.
pisss ... the real trick is to find the underdeveloped niche markets were the level of competicion is reletively light in comparision to the potential earnings.
*editted typos...*
You wake up one day, you have something to write about Nascar. The other day, you read an interesting article about salads, and enrich it with your knowledge.
By diversifying, you can: 1) be less affected by shifts in SEs algos; 2) give some relief to your mind, as you will not have to write about an specific subject.
I am most likely moving back home in January so I suppose I could re-apply then.
