Subject, topic, market or niche?
The first thing you’ll need to do is decide what to write about. You should choose a subject for your content site. That’s not to say you can’t write about anything you want to, but it makes sense to focus your content on a particular topic. If you try to appeal to everybody, you’ll most likely end up appealing to nobody.
Think about the things that interest you, or which have interested you in the past. Your hobbies, the clubs you’ve been a member of, the magazines you read, the books you read, the subjects you enjoyed most at school, the parts of your job that satisfy you most - any of these could be a good subject for your site. Write down a list of ten or more possible subjects. They should be topics you could envisage yourself writing a short article about every day.
Once you have your list, and assuming that you want to make money with your website, you’ll need to see if a market exists for the information you’ll be putting on your site. A market is much like a subject or a topic, but it suggests that people are buying and selling something. You might have an encyclopedic knowledge of the history of French crochet work of the 19th century, but if no-one shares your interest, there’s no market.
There are two somewhat conflicting approaches to markets. One is that you should aim at the largest possible market - for instance, golfers. Golfers spend a fortune on their sport - golf clubs, golf balls, clothing, tools, green fees, magazines, videos. But it’s an incredibly competitive market - as I write this, Google lists 318,000,000 sites which contain the word “golf”. It would be very difficult to get into the top 10 sites on Google. And most people don’t bother to click through to the next page on Google - if your site is number 318,000,001, there’s a good chance no-one will ever see it. At least not by looking it up on Google.
The second approach is to target “niche” markets. A niche is a small segment of a market. “Golf balls” might qualify - there are “only” 2,980,000 pages for “golf balls” without the quote marks, and 1,370,000 for “golf balls” with the quote marks.
A quick aside - not many people would be typing “golf balls” into Google and surrounding the words with quote marks. But without the quote marks, Google looks for the two words anywhere on the page. They could be separated by a sentence or a paragraph, like this: “His dad used to play golf every Wednesday afternoon. Terence had the red balls poised over the pockets as he…”. Putting in the quote marks makes Google look for the specific phrase “golf balls”.
So now we know what the competition is for our particular market. How do we find out what people are actually looking for?
There are a number of free tools which show the demand for any keyword phrase, as well as offering suggestions for related keyword phrases. Here are some of them:
Nichebot Classic
Wordtracker
Keyword Discovery
Google Adwords External Keyword Tool
SEOBook Keyword Tool
All of these tools use different databases, which results in dramatically different results for any specific keyword or key phrase. However, the specifics are not that important. What we’re looking for is just an indication that people are actually searching for our topic.
We also need to make sure that people are paying money for items in our market. A sure-fire way to check this is by looking at the Google Adwords ads. If people are paying Google to advertise for your keyword phrase, then there must be customers willing to pay for whatever products they’re selling.
Go to Google.com and type in the keyword phrase. Adwords ads appear down the right hand side of the page, and sometimes above the results as well. The more Adwords ads there are, the more likely it is that there’s money to be made in the market.
