When you first start looking at potential topics, like we did in the first part of Choosing A Topic For A Website, you are brainstorming and figuring out which topics will actually pay off. That’s the fun part – I honestly love coming up with new ideas and figuring out whether they can make money or not.

Money in a spread sheet is fun and all, but… what good does it do to pick a fancy smancy keyword if you can’t ever get into a position in Google and other search engines where you can get some traffic? I’ve found keywords before that have over 10,000,000 searches per month with super high CPCs. Unfortunately they’re useless because it would take a team of 150 of people to develop a top ranking for them.

Making sure that the competition isn’t too fierce is one of our biggest priorities when we choose a topic for a site. If I’m not 90% sure that I can rank for a keyword, I’m not going to waste my time.

For those of you that are starting out, you need to be especially careful to not choose keywords that are too difficult. I would start with simple niches, get some wins, and then move forward to slightly more difficult niches. Don’t try to play in the majors when you’ve never tried to play tee-ball.

Competitive Analysis

Here are the nuts and bolts of what I’m actually talking about. Step 1 is to do a search in Google for your keyword. Let’s analyze the keyword ‘cell phones’ just to see what we get. Here are the sites that come up on the first page:

What we need to do here is analyze how strong these pages are and make a decision about whether we can compete or not. A solid way to do this is by taking a look at Google’s own method for determining the relative strength of pages – PageRank.

PageRank is a scale (0-10) that can show us how good Google thinks each page online is. If a page is PageRank 10, Google is saying it’s one of the best and strongest pages online. On the other hand, if a page is PageRank 0, we know that Google thinks it’s a weak page.

You can find the PageRank of any page by installing the Google Toolbar for your internet browser and turning on the PageRank feature. The PageRank of each page you visit will then be displayed on the toolbar. You will see a little green bar at the top of your browser and if you hover over that bar it will tell you the PageRank of the page you’re looking at.

A way to short cut this process is to install the SEO For Firefox browser extension. This will help you to look up PageRank directly in Google’s results. If I do the same search with SEO For Firefox turned on, the results will look like this:

All of this extra jazz under each listing is being put there by SEO For Firefox. If we want to see the PR (PageRank) of each page, we click each of the little question marks by the PR under each listing. It will then look like this:

The little 7 next to the ‘PR:’ under the T-Mobile listing means that this particular page is a PR7 page. It would take a very serious campaign to compete with that page. The other pages in the top 4 are PR6, PR5, PR5, and PR4. That’s a boat-load of strength and I would recommend running for the hills. You don’t want to compete for keywords like this until after you have this whole process down.

PR5 pages are incredibly strong pages. PR4 pages are also pretty strong pages. We don’t even want to talk about PR6+.

If you’re starting out, you want to try to find keywords with competition that’s under PR3. I would prefer to see most of you find keywords that are even easier than that. If all you ever did was find keywords with <PR2 competition (they would of course have to have decent potential), you would be doing yourself a huge favor. You can beat PR3s and PR4s but it’s going to take a lot more work – sometimes too much work.

Guys I know that this is a floating scale and each of you has a different level of experience. Some of you have this down and will be able to take on PR4 pages. Others won’t be able to. All of you should start out choosing keywords that are fairly easy and move up the scale after you get some wins. I’m beating out quite a few PR7 pages now but that doesn’t mean it would have been a good idea 4 years ago. I would have lost my mind and would have probably quit.

If you really want to take this process to the next level you can read this lesson: How Many Links Does It Take To Get Ranked #1 In Google? I don’t feel like it’s necessary all of the time, but some of you will get some value out of it. The lesson today can teach you how to choose winners almost all of the time if you’ll just follow the concepts.

What you need to do now is go through the keywords in your spread sheet so you can analyze their competition. If I think I can rank for a keyword, I usually mark it green on my spread sheet. If I can’t rank for a keyword I mark it red. Do it and then you’ll know exactly which keywords to use.

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.