To make money on the internet you need to focus on a subject with these properties:
- Reasonably high (user) interest, either now, or in the future (ideally both)
- As little competition as possible
- Related market(s) with high value
- You are willing and capable to write about it
If your site is going to make money, it will have to sell something. You can either sell something directly from your site, or you can make money from advertisements. Even if you hope to get donations, that is also a sale.
You may already know what you want your website to be about; if so then good for you, but assuming that you have specific goals in mind (like making money) then you need to think about it a bit before you proceed. Some subjects have more potential for earning than others, unfortunately in most cases those also have the most competition for the attention of readers.
It is probably possible to make some money blogging about almost any subject that you are interested in. There are 300 million Americans, and some of them are going to be interested in the same thing that you are. However, your site will only earn money if it can be used as a marketing tool. The more valuable that market is, the more earning potential your site will have.
There are two ways that a market can be valuable – one is to make a few cents per sale on many sales, and the other is to make a large amount per sale on fewer sales (and yes, everything in between). Both of these are of interest to an Internet publisher. You don’t want to be in a market where per sale value and sales volume are both low. You also probably don’t want to be in a market where sale value is high, but sales are too few and far between. That being said, it takes a lot of ten cent add clicks to equal one affiliate commission.
So, how do you tell if your chosen subject will give you access to a worthwhile market? That of course is the six-figure question.
You can get some idea of current interest on the Internet for a subject by using a keyword research tool like Wordtracker Keyword Research Tool free trial where you type in a search term and you get back data about how many searches are being done for that term. Wordtracker also returns information about other search terms that appear to be related. It also gives you an indication of how many other websites are targeting these terms, and therefore how competitive the market is for them. Note: I’m not really talking about “keyword research” yet; you are just trying to get an idea of market potential for a subject. There are also other tools besides Wordtracker.
Note: just because there is not much interest in a particular subject on the Internet right now doesn’t mean that there never will be. For example, if energy prices continue to rise, then energy efficiency may become a hot subject. As internet users age, then age related issues will probably become more popular subjects. Also, as more people get internet access, the audience in general gets bigger. There are real advantages to being one of the first presences in a market. Fortunes have been made by early adopters who weren’t even particularly good at what they did. So, don’t write off a subject that doesn’t seem to have an audience if you think that one might develop in the future. But be aware that this is a longer-term strategy.
So, now that you have some idea of the potential audience, how much money could this subject make? One way to find out is to use Google Adwords traffic estimator - This free tool will help you to get some idea of the potential revenue from Adsense clicks for your keywords. Some Adsense clicks are worth a dime and some are worth a dollar, this will help you discover which is which. Note: this tool tells you about how much an advertiser would have to pay for an ad click, the publisher (you) gets paid about 60% of the advertisers cost. Adsense isn’t the only way to make money from your website, and I’m not really even suggest that you use adwords, but this tool is a quick and easy indicator of relative potential. Again, there are other tools available.
Why are you still reading? Get to work…
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