Friday, September 5, 2008

More on Selecting a Good Topic

Once you have narrowed your list of prospective topics and possible ways to monetize your website, then you need to do some research. You need to find out if there are people searching for the topic(s) on the Internet. There are many ways to do this and I will discuss a few in this post.

Amazon.com is a good place to start. Open up your web browser to Amazon.com and then do a search for your topic. You may be surprised by how many books there are written on the topic you have selected. See how many books are listed and also how much they are being sold for. This may give you an idea of how much competition there is already and may also give you an idea for how much to charge for your product. You may also want to do a search on a general term that is related to your topic, because this will show other related products that you may be able to promote as an affiliate. You may want to reconsider any topic that does not have any results from the search, because this indicates that there is not much of a market for that topic.

Do a Google search for your topic and see how many results are listed on Google. Look at the related websites and products. Keep a list of the related websites that may not be a direct competition, because you may be able to get links from their website, or even promote their products through an affiliate program. You can also do a Google search for forums and discussion groups that relate to your topic. Use this format for your search "topic + forum" and use the quotation marks. This will narrow your search to just forums, and you could do the same for discussion or for directory. These sites are great for links back to your website, so keep a record of these for later use. You can also post in the forums or discussion groups to see how receptive your topic is with the people that frequent the site.

eBay is another good place to check for demand of a certain product. Start in the What's Hot Section of eBay to see what is currently selling the most on eBay. Digital information products are sold on eBay, so do not overlook this venue for selling your digital products. Another place to look for potential products to market is Want It Now, this section of eBay is often overlooked, but can be very useful to find people that want your product(s).

How can you select a good keyword or key phrase for your webpages?

There are free tools to help you, I use SEO Tools and find their tools very useful. This is similar to using a search engine search. Enter a keyword or key phrase in the box and then click on Submit. You will be shown a list of related keywords and key phrases as well as some useful statistics to help you decide on the best to use for your webpage. You want to select a keyword or key phrase that gets searched between 200 and 1000 times a day, because it will be easier to get a higher ranking on a less searched keyword or key phrase.

If you get 10 visitors to your webpage and you have 10 webpages on your website, that will mean that your website had 100 visitors. If you increase the visitors to each page or if you increase the number of webpages, then you can get thousands of visitors each day to your website. So do not look down on the lower searched keywords, because even the small numbers from the search will add up when you have many webpages on your website.

The greatest tip that I can give about keyword selection is to make sure that the keyword you select is related with the main topic of your website and that your webpage gives good information about the keyword or key phrase. Luring people to your website with a bogus search will just result in a high bounce rate for your website, because people will see that your website does not relate to their search and they will leave. Give people what they want and they will come back and they may also tell others about your website too.

Jim Van Dyke is The King of Scripts and would like to help you become a King of Scripts too! I offer free information on my Blog that will help you design and create your own website that will help you make money. I also offer a membership area that has digital products that you can download and use yourself. There are complete website packages that you can use to create your own website. There are information products and some have Resell Rights, so you can sell them for 100% profits.

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