One of the biggest obstacles that gets in the way of people making money online is knowing what type of site to create. When I first got started, I honestly didn’t have a clue. I assumed that I would have to sell something to make money, so it was hard to wrap my mind around what was possible with the internet.
Before you can choose a good topic for a website, you first need to be able to see different ways that money can be made. Once you’re able to understand a few simple concepts, you’ll truly start to see how many possibilities there are.
Here are the two main types of sites I like to own:
- Review Sites – Review sites are great because all you have to do is review different products and/or services. You can review anything and still make money. You could review cell phones, credit cards, insurance companies, digital cameras, baby products, home and/or garden products, office supplies, books, movies, bedding, clothes, food, or virtually anything else that someone would have an opinion on.
- Informational Article Sites – To understand what kind of site this is, you’re going to want to take a look at Wikipedia. They provide basic information about basically every topic. What you would do is provide basic, encyclopedic information about topics, except your article site would be more specialized. You would pick a single topic instead of trying to cover everything under the sun. You can create a site like this about almost anything: finance, loans, stocks, kids, parenting, cars, money, marketing, plumbing, DIY, homes, ants, dogs, or anything else.
These ideas might not seem super exciting now, but trust me they rule. The alternative is creating a site that sells products and that’s the last thing you want. That would mean you would have to fulfill orders, ship products, and a bunch of other junk that you don’t want to do (I think I just got sick to my stomach).
The type of site you want is one that can grab passive traffic from search engines, and then flip that traffic for a profit. With Google Adsense, you can do this with a site about any topic that has value to an advertiser. I can make money every night when I’m asleep – I can make money if I’m asleep for that matter. I made money while I was at lunch today and I made money while I was at the gym.
My First Website
The first site I ever had was a review site about cell phones. The site took forever to build because I had to learn HTML and build each page from scratch. No I know that it’s much easier than that, but at the time that’s what I had to do.
The site was very simple. I had a homepage, and then I had a page about each phone that I wanted to review. I would basically just tell about the different features of each phone and would then talk about other similar phones that had better or worse features. After a few weeks of writing about phones I got a knack for what features phones should have. Before I started the site I didn’t exactly know a ton about phones so I would research in order to write about them.
This site was an online piece of garbage. Honestly I didn’t know the first thing about web design and it looked terrible. Even though this site was ridiculously bad, it still made money.
People look online for reviews of almost every product and after a few months I was able to get my site to come up in Google for cell phone review related keywords. After a while I was able to get some traffic from people looking for the phones themselves.
Making money with the site was very simple. All I had to do was place a Google Adsense unit on each page. A certain percentage of the traffic clicked on the ad and I made money from that. After a while I tried Yahoo’s version of Adsense and it paid a little better (it doesn’t anymore) so I stuck with that. My best month on that site produced over $3500 in revenue. Most of you would never believe it if you saw that site but it’s the honest truth. I don’t have the site anymore or I’d invite you to take a look at how bad I am at web design.
The point here is that you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to make money with the internet. YOU can create a simple site that reviews products and/or services and you’ll be able to grab some traffic that has value.
I would probably start by thinking about products that you like because those will be the easiest to review. I would then do a little research to find out if there’s money to be made.
Market Research for Topic Selection
To find out if you can make money with a given topic, you need to take a look at keywords related to your topic. To do this I would use the Google Adwords Keyword Tool. It not only allows you to find out what keywords are being searched for in Google, it also allows you to find out if advertisers are willing to pay to buy your traffic. For researching a market, this tool is as good as gold.
What you have to do is simply start typing in words and phrases that relate to your possible topic. For example, if I was going to start another site that reviewed cell phones, I would probably start by typing in some of the following terms:
- cell phones
- cell phones
- motorola phones
- motorola cell phones
- samsung phones
- samsung cell phones
- nokia phones
- iphone
- cell phone reviews
- motorola razr
- motorola krzr
- iphones
- and lots of other cell phone terms i could find
So basically what I’m doing here is taking a look at different phones and phrases that I think people might be searching for. I don’t really have to guess whether a keyword is searched for or not, because the tool will show me whether it is or isn’t:
As you can see, the keyword I typed in (samsung cell phones) appears at the top of the left column, and then the approximate average search volume appears in the right hand column. The search volume is monthly so the 40,500 is the amount of times ’samsung cell phones’ is searched for per month on Google. Google is by far the biggest search engine but you could still expect to get some traffic from Yahoo and MSN.
If you’re going to use this tool, you need to make sure to change the match type to exact. Otherwise, you won’t be getting the correct search data. I also clicked the ‘choose columns to display’ drop-down box and selected ’show estimated avg cpc’. This is what shows me what advertisers are willing to pay to buy traffic right now. The $1.90 found at the top of the left column teaches us that there are advertisers that will pay $1.90 to buy one click from Google. This is good because Google will allow you to ‘borrow’ their relationship with this advertiser. You can place Google’s ad on your site and when Google makes their $1.90 for a click, they will cut you a share. On average you can expect to get somewhere in the neighborhood of 25% of the CPC for your commission. Sometimes this will be more and sometimes it will be less, but we need to be able to get an idea of what we’re going to get paid and 25% is good enough to suit our purpose.
What’s interesting about this tool is that no matter what we type in, Google will come up with a list of keywords that are related to our original topic. In this case, we have a big list of keywords that are related to samsung cell phones. This helps us a lot because these keywords are extra keywords that we could probably get traffic from eventually. Some of the smaller terms on this list will be a lot easier to get ranked for than samsung cell phones will be, so after we decide on our topic we will usually make a list of all potential keywords that are related to our topic.
Exercise:
What you need to do now is type all kinds of different things into the Adwords tool. If you’re struggling for ideas, you should check out this article: 5 Places You Can Look For New Keywords. There are literally tens of thousands of profitable things you could choose.
When I’m using this tool, I usually opt for words and phrases that have CPCs higher than $1. This isn’t a hard rule and I don’t always stick to it but as a general rule it’s useful. I also tend to try to find keywords that have 3,000 searches or more per month but again, this isn’t something that I always stick to. Sometimes 10 hits per day is worth a lot if you get clicks that are worth $5. On the other hand, clicks that are worth $0.10 can really add up if you can get thousands of visitors per day.
If you can find keywords that have over 3,000 searches per day with CPCs over $1, you can probably make some money with them. Save them on a spreadsheet so that you can analyze their competition later. Update: Find out how to analyze your competition here: Choosing A Topic For A Website Part 2 – Analyzing Competition.
Tags: choosing topics, Keyword Research
Court,
I just got done reading somewhere that google is getting ready to or has already started cracking down on “review” sites. Have you noticed this yet on your sites and do you think this will be an across the board crackdown or if you have legit content do you think you should be okay.
Also, if you don’t mind me asking, are you referring to the “howtomobile” site? I remember the series from your IM blog. Do you still own that one?
I’m not referring to that site Medic, this was way before that. Medic you’re going to have to tell me where you read that because first of all that wouldn’t make any sense at all and secondly no this hasn’t affected me at all. Frankly I get tired of people speculating about what Google is going to do.
Medic I would never say this to sound harsh so please don’t take it harshly – I don’t care what other people write and you would probably do well to stop reading most people’s advice.
Great information! The one thing I am wondering is that on some of your sites you would put a link in each article/post with the anchored text that you are targeting pointing back to the home page.
Is this still a good method to use? If so, is it ok to vary the text as long as the main keyword is in it? Also, what settings do you recommend to use with the All In One SEO plugin? I’m curious about that too.
Thanks guys, your information is just reaffirming and giving me more knowledge and I’m slowly seeing results each day with my sites!
Hey Elliot! There’s not really anything wrong with linking back because sometimes you get some links from people that steal your content. I don’t really link back with every post because I’ve found that it isn’t necessary.
With the All-In-One SEO pack all I want to do is rewrite my titles and autogenerate descriptions.
Thanks Court, that’s what I have been doing. Are you leaving the noindex checked for the archives and category/date section? I think that’s what they are as I’m at work and can’t access my sites to verify.
No I don’t see any reason to noindex those pages Elliott. I do, however, have those pages set to display only excerpts instead of full posts.
@Medic
I read about that too on M@tt C@tt’s blog. It initially seems Matt is concerned with review sites that bring back empty pages.
Often times these blank review pages are ranked in the #1,2 or 3 spot in the SERPS.
Also, several people have commented on his blog that they also want to see duplicate review content which appear on numerous blogs into consideration for getting the axe.
As long as your review page actually has some content and it’s unique content , it maybe safe for now.
Sunshine Matt was talking about all of the thin affiliate sites that aren’t review sites at all. If you’re offering a legit review you don’t have anything to worry about. You’re always safe if you’re providing legit content.
I read the same article by Matt. For those who have the idea he is ‘down’ on review sites, I’d suggest a re-read of what Matt actually said. He’s cautioning about sites that promise, say, reviews of Nokia cell phones and then when you try to find a review ir comes up empty. If you provide what your site says it will provide, all should be well.
Review sites are a backbone of ecommerce, Google’s not going after the honest ones, it would not make sense for them to do so.
thanks for the info sunshine.
Court, did you really mean 10,000 searches per day (300,000 monthly) or did you mean 10,000 searches per month?
10,000 per month Nate but it’s all relative. Obviously I would prefer to be ranked for a larger keyword but smaller ones add up and often it’s smarter to go after multiple, smaller keywords.
Court, when you’re saying that you go for these 10,000 searches per month keywords are you still counting them to be for Exact Match?
The reason I ask is that after doing a fair deal of KW research I still that the there are very few 3 word phrases that has this amount of traffic.
Secondly from your PDF report I see that you have created “green” keywords with only a few thousand searches so I’m a bit confused.
Would you be kind to clarify? Thanks.
I like to just go and search freshdrop for a good site topic. I find something that’s got decent age and look for a topic I think I could talk about, then compare it to google. It works well for me.
I was having a hard time coming up with a good list of possible websites I could create, this really helped me to narrow it down. At first I was just putting down ideas about websites but now I see that I should focus on things that people would actually click on ads for. Thanks!
Glad to hear it Matt!
Court,
I don’t take it harshly. I mostly just read you and grizz. I’m too busy to read all day
I do think you and sunshine both make a good point that if your site is legit, you have no worries. Google will always try to figure out ways to stop the scammers and that’s a good thing.
Sounds good Medic.
Hi Court,
I was wondering if you would be willing to work with me on the price of your video student series. If so, then feel free to email me and I would be glad to learn from the best.
One little extra that has made me money using basiclaly this same technique with the Google keyword Tool.
After you follow the steps in this article and then check for excessive competions, drop the URL’s (one at a time) for the top 4 or 5 competitors into the other side of the Google Ketword Tool, where it checks what keywords a site is about. It isn’t only PR that you are fighting for in competition. This will show you what Google thinks those sites are targeting. This should give you some excellent ideas about what keywords you should be targeting as well.
Hi
Does people here have a touch about where Economic crisis is ending?
Dave,
I remember doing that a few times with checking the competitions keywords using the adwords tool. Good idea. Thanks for the reminder.
@Court thanks, this is a great little piece, very easy to understand and a welcome change from ‘blog-standing’ that you get on a lot of other sites
Hi, I am not seeing the actual CPC on the google site, all I see is the advertiser competition and the search volume. Do I have to have an adwords account in order to view the CPC hard numbers?
Thanks!
Hi Court
I just finished signing up and reading The Keyword Crash Course. Great solid information for all levels of internet marketing!
I have a few questions for you…
1.In the E-Book it says to find keywords that are above 10,000 to 15,000 searches a month on the “exact” setting, but in this post above it says to find keywords that are over 3,000 searches a month. Which one should we follow?
2.What amount of competition in the google search for the keyword in ” ” quotation marks do you consider to be too much competition to tackle that particular keyword?
Thanks Court
Best Regards
Barb
Hi Court,
I’ve been lurking here for a while and reading a lot…
Sorry if this is a question that has been answered elsewhere…
Are you suggesting that you can start a site, put 5 or 6 articles of content on is, optimize it well for the search engines, and then move on and start another, never bothering to write any new articles for that site?
I’ve always got the idea from other sites that constantly creating new content is necessary to keep these sites earning money…
Thanx.
That’s exactly what I’m saying Allan. It’s actually very easy to do that.
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Is there someone on here that can give me some insight or know of anyone that coud give me insight on how I can get my local website on the front
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I thank you and my hungry over-eating children thank you.
thanks,
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