A Mogul To Be

Picking topics for niche sites

September 5th, 2007 by Robert

In this third installment of building a niche site empire, I am going to cover picking topics for your sites. This can be the single most difficult aspect of the whole process unless you know a whole lot about a whole lot of subjects. So how do you go about picking topics?

Stick to what you know

To start with you could stick to subjects that you know. At the very least this will make the content portion of your site easy to fulfill. Just make sure that you have enough content to fill a few pages and you are good to go. Don’t forget to incorporate photos if applicable as well. They are great content fillers and people are naturally visually oriented anyway.

Pick a hot topic

This is great for short term sites, but can work for long term sites with the right topic. Finding the topic could be as simple as watching the news and seeing what is current or coming up. Examples here would be something like the Apple iPhone, video games, a new vehicle model coming out (Chevy’s new Camaro for example), coal mines (given the recent collapse in Utah), alternative energy, etc.

I have a topic, now what?

Now you need to see if anyone is searching for that topic. Remember, Google is your friend and unless you plan on doing some serious marketing you will rely mostly on organic searches for your traffic.

Analyze your keywords

To see if anyone is searching on your topic, there are two sites you can visit. The first is Google trends and the second is the Overture keyword tool. Google trends will show you relative search trends for your keywords. It won’t show you exact numbers however. The Overture keyword tool will show you search numbers, but it is many months behind. That isn’t such a bad thing unless you have a time sensitive topic. The Overture site will also show you related search terms and combinations. You don’t want a search term that is too general and that has a too many searches. Stick to search terms in the 1000-4000 range as they won’t be too competitive.

Another tool you can use is Google AdWords. You need a GMail account (free), and while AdWords is primarily used for advertisers, it is very helpful for you to see what advertisers are paying for your keywords. Log into your AdWords account and go to the Tools section. You will see the Keyword Tool as shown below:

This tool can provide you will all kinds of useful information. For example, let us say that we are going to do a site for foam mattresses. So looking at the overture tool we see this:

Looking at this list I’m going to select foam mattress topper. It has good search volume and is fairly specific. Now we take that keyword and plug it into AdWords Keyword tool and get this (click for full image):

Looking at that we see that there is good search volume and really good advertiser competition. Advertiser competition can mean higher payouts. To see how high, we select the Cost and Ad Position Estimates from the drop down, put in $10 in the CPC field and we see:

This shows us that for our primary keyword select, the max Cost Per Click (CPC) is $4.83. Not too shabby! We also see that “memory foam mattress toppers” comes out to $5.72, even better. This does not necessarily mean that every click will generate these amounts, but it shows that some advertisers are paying this amount, which is good for you. Of course these figures will apply if you are using Google AdWords to monetize your site. However it does mean that since there is competition, you can use other ad networks like Yahoo’s, Microsofts or even Commission Junction.

Oh, why the $10 in the search criteria? No particular reason other than it is high enough that it should show me the highest payouts, which is all you are really interested in anyway. If you find that your keywords are pushing the $8-$9 range, then up the criteria to say $15 or so. Oh, and if you are finding that level of CPC, build that site in a hurry and cash in!

To Summarize

Use a combination of tools to find your topics and see if there is any search volume to justify spending your time to build the site. The beauty of these tools is that you can also just pull things out of thin air and see what comes up, so if you don’t have a particular topic in mind you can use these to brainstorm. This is exactly what I did for a couple of my sites, which by the way I have no real knowledge in

Have fun researching and in our next installment of this series I’ll cover the tools that I use to build my site.

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