What’s wrong with plain old monopoly. You might ask?

Nothing as far as I’m concerned. However which edition of monopoly would you choose for someone who was an avid Simpson’s fan?

You see the makers of monopoly have taken their product and created new niches from it.

Not only can they sell the niche edition for more money, they also they get to sell more games.

Instead of a family having one monopoly game they now have several, according to the taste of each of the members.

Not only can you get a Simpson’s monopoly but also a Simpson’s Clue (Cluedo) etc.

Can you see the power behind this idea?

A single product is turned into multiple products, but all based around a single central theme—Monopoly.

—-In essence that can be your model for making niche websites

You start with a broad central theme -monopoly, and split into smaller niches- Simpson’s, clue, lord of the rings etc – you then start and  build a site based around one of these i.e. a site dedicated to Simpson’s monopoly.

Once this site is established you then repeat the process with another niche (lord of the rings) until you have a cluster of niches all based around the theme monopoly.

Doing it this way it is easier to become successful for each small niche one at a time than to trying for the entire theme-monopoly. If you check Yahoo for the number of competing sites for each term this is what you get:

• “Simpson’s monopoly” – 40,700  competing sites
• “monopoly”-         7,710,000  competing sites

Which one do you think is the easiest to succeed with?

Remember take any niche and narrow it down by creating sub niches, until you feel that you can compete.

Starting with a very broad niche is difficult, and can quickly cause you to become disillusioned because you have difficulty getting noticed.

Although the question referred to Adsesne sites the discussion is relevant to any site regardless of how it is monetized.

Regardless of the size most seem to agree that sites must be topic specific.

I found the the post from Graig McPherson particularly good, especially the concept of 2 from specific which is a really nice way of targeting a niche without going to specific.

You can find the discussion here

It is about a landscape painter who made a niche out of painting golf courses.

It turned out as an excellent choice because golfers have money,  they are willing to spend it, and there probably isn’t really much competition from other artists.

Here’s what she said about the situation before she specialised

 ”I did a variety of things and found that doing a variety of things wasn’t getting me anywhere.”

Take a read of the article as I think it illustrates quite nicely the power of going niche.

Notice how by choosing this niche it make it easy to:

1. Find her market.
2. Find what to paint.

Her content practically picks itself and her customers are in the clubhouse when she’s finished.

To my way of thinking it demonstates clearly the advantages of going niche and represents a real win-win for the clients and the website site owners.

An older article about the niche dating site growth illustates this quite well-

http://techcrunch.com/2008/04/24/niche-dating-sites-grow-steadily-as-mainstream-ones-flail/

and  an article in the new york times confirms their popularity.

The example niche websites page has more examples

I just read a post over at passive income pursuits called niches to avoid when building a website and it remined me of some of my earlier attemps online when I chose niches that I had very little interest in,and so I found the sites difficult to maintain.

Although many sites focus on keyword research as the basis of building a niche website, I still believe that in the long run you should focus on your interests first, and keyword research second.

If you want to avoid going into a dead end niche then I recommend that before you get the domain name you sit down and map out the first 5 articles for the site and start writing them.

By doing that you will quickly discover if you really have any interest and you should also get more article ideas as you do it.

If you find it difficult and don’t get any new ideas then it probably isn’t going to be the niche for you.

If you have experienced similar problems with your chosen niches then pleas feel free to share them.

I can even choose whether I want to base my new Internet Empire on

• Porn
• Gambling
• Supplements
• etc

And some even want to give me multiple empires, all for the same price… What a bargain!

If It Sounds Too Good To be True..

You’re familiar I’m sure with the saying ..If It Sounds Too Good To be True..It probably is.

What usually on offer is a site template full of affiliate links and google adense code and all you need to do is buy it and the visitors will be there in droves buying stuff and clicking on the adsense ads making you rich.

Of course they fail to mention how you will get the visitors in the first place.

Are Ready Made Websites( Turnkey websites) Bad?

Ready made/Turnkey websites are in fact a very good idea and extremely useful.They  could form the basis of a profitable web based business/ business website.

You should remember that all website start with a website template. This website is based on a template developed by Chris Pearson. Chris in turn developed his template on the WordPress platform; which you could call a site template.

All I really needed to do with the site is to add content. So you could say it is 90% ready made.

There is nothing wrong with this type of site and that is how most of the websites on the internet are built.

Deciding Between Good and Bad

So how do you tell a good ready made site from a bad one?

Well as a general rule of thumb the more complete the site is then the more likely it is to be a scam.

By complete I mean does it include the site content as well as the site template? If so then I would keep clear of it.

After all if you had a website that made you $1000 a day for 10 minutes work would you..

• Sell it for $100?
• Sell it for $500?
• Keep your mouth shut and pocket the cash?

To get organic traffic you will need to get your pages listed high in the search engine results for your selected keywords. If you have done you research correctly then this should not be a problem as you will have choosen a niche market that you can compete in.

So for niche websites there shouldn’t really be a requirement to purchase traffic from the search engines using PPC (pay per click).

However you shouldn’t dismiss pay per click traffic out of hand. It is very useful for getting traffic:

• for testing a niche idea
• for getting traffic while your site is new and not ranked well
• for getting traffic for related keywords that are not possible to rank for.

PPC Traffic for Testing

Is your niche idea going to work? Well you don’t really know for sure until you’ve tried it. But getting organic traffic from the search engines can take many months, and require that you create a content heavy website; which in itself takes time.

However you can turn PPC traffic on and off in an instant, and send it to a small mini site which you can put together in days.

This sounds easy, but in practise it requires that you have experience in PPC, Website building and testing to make it work. For that reason it is really more suitable for experienced web masters looking to test a new idea, than beginners looking to start.

Getting Traffic For a New Website

Free organic traffic takes months, and sometimes years to build. For sites that sell a product or service, then it is well worth considering getting the initial site traffic by paying for it.

How much you can/should pay depends on many factors, but usually most site owners will want to see a positive return. Meaning that they will want to pay less for the traffic than they make from the traffic.

Getting Traffic for Related Keywords

You may have a site on computers, and have targeted the term computers for your keyword. You also have several pages of reviews on various computer models that are linked to affiliate programs, and convert very well.

You may find that you can create a PPC campaign to drive traffic to these pages with two main benefits:

• You make more affiliate sales
• You get more site visitors.. Just give them a reason to return

In summary PPC traffic isn’t for everyone, but it does have its uses, and should not be dismissed out of hand. It does however require mastering a new skill, and is not really for beginners. However for experienced web masters it is well worth considering.

Useful Resources:

• SEO and PPC Training and Consulting
• Google Adwords, Yahoo publisher, Microsoft Adcenter

Although Blogs can be difficult to define they are instantly recognizable as they all have a common form.

They consist of a web page with new content at the top ( ordered by date of entry latest on top) , and links to older content or other sites on the side.

They were originally intended as online journals which is why they are organised by date.

A traditional website is usually ordered by subject and not by date. In fact when you look at a web page on a standard website you have no idea of when it was created or by whom.

However a blog page uses the same underlying technology as a standard web page (HTML), and so in reality a blog page is also a web page and a blog is a website. I consider a blog to simply be a particular form of website.

In fact even before blogs, as we now know them, came into being many websites were being run as online journals, but the webmaster had to create the date based layout manually.

The term “weblog” was coined by Jorn Barger on 17 December 1997.

The short form, “blog,” was coined by Peter Merholz, who jokingly broke the word weblog into the phrase weblog in the sidebar of his Blog Peterme.com in April or May of 1999–

Source Wikipedia

The creation of tools to enable non technical users to create a blog, and free hosting service led to the rapid expansion of Blogs from 100 in 1997 to over 20 million in 2005.

Because of the success and flexibility of the blogging platforms like WordPress many webmasters are now starting to use the blogging plaforms as traditional websites by arranging the site content by subject and not by date.

So, in summary, a website can be used as a blog and a blog can be used as a website.

The term keyword and keyword phrases is used extensively on this site and Keyword research is fundamental to building a website.

Done properly it will identify good niches and help eliminate unprofitable ones.

Not only is keyword research done in finding a niche it is also used extensively when writing articles and planning website content.

What are Keywords?

But what exactly do we mean by the term “keyword” or “keyword phrase”

The term “Keyword” has two meanings depending on whether you are :

1. Searching for something or
2. Writing a webpage

For Example, if you were looking for a information about cruise holidays you would go to your favourite search engine and enter:

These are the keywords from the searchers’ perspective. You should note that the searcher usually enters more than one, 2-3 word searches are the most common, hence the term keyword
phrase.

From an Internet publishers perspective a keyword or keyword phrase is the topic or theme for a web page. For example if you were going to write an article Mediterranean cruises then the
page keywords would be Mediterranean cruises and the content would all be focused on that.

What is Keyword Research

Keyword research is about finding out what Internet surfers are actually searching for. Are they searching for:

You don’t want to make a website or write a web page on cheap Mediterranean cruises if no one, or very few people are searching for
them.

Keyword Research Tools

There are number of tools available, most are free, for conducting keyword research:

• Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool -This is probably the most commonly used tool for keyword research and it is entirely free. The tool is also used by many third party keyword
  research or suggestion tools such as Good Keywords and the brainstorming tool from Site Build-it.Overture is a pay per click search engine and the results returned by overture are the results of searches done on the overture search engine. Because the tool is research tool
  for pay per click marketing the results can tend or seem to be inflated to encourage you to buy those keywords.

  However the main disadvantage
  with this tool is that is doesn’t distinguish between singular an plural.

• Wordtracker -Wordtracker is commercial software but does offer a free limited trial version on the website. This software was developed specifically for keyword
  research and hence has no keyword bias in either direction. It also provides alternative keywords based on synonyms and keyword analysis and profitability reporting. It does
  differentiate between singular and plural.

Wordtracker and Overture Compared

Even though Wordtracker and the Overture keyword suggestion tool usually give slightly different results both tools are very worthwhile and usable. Overture and its derivatives are very
good for quick research, and Wordtracker for more detailed research and plural checking and brainstorming keyword variants.

Because Overture and most of its derivatives are free it remains the most popular choice.

Keyword Resources:

• Overture keyword suggestion tool
• Wordtracker
• Good Keywords – A free downloadable tool that uses overture but provides a nicer interface and remembers queries so
  that you don’t have to repeat a search. It also allows you to query other search engines like teoma and lycos.
• Digital point Wordtracker and Overture suggestion tool.-shows results from both tools on a single
  screen.